ANZAC Biscuits

Today I was baking ANZAC biscuits using my Great-Nanny's recipe

I enjoyed making the biscuits and eating them when they had cooled down.

I found it challenging to measure all of the ingredients accurately.

Next time I would change the recipe to double the amounts so that we had more biscuits.

Session 5 - Digital Fluency Intensive

First thing, we had a Google Meet with Gerhard to look at the Share component of the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa.  It gave us a overview of sharing over time and how sharing has evolved with the introduction of social media.




We then looked at how sharing since time began (with one another, the class, the school, the community) can now go beyond that - to the world (global) in the digital age.  Blogger is Manaiakalani's choice for this global sharing platform and by using it people who access our learners' blogs are choosing to listen to them.  Gerhard also talked about the model that is used for commenting on blogs.  Comments should be positive, thoughtful and helpful and if we are giving our learners this scaffold, then we are helping to eliminate negative posts and bullying.

And I am sharing this seriously cringey video clip, which is a parody of One Direction's 'You don't know you're beautiful', because it does have great messages and I think the kids actually might be into it!!!!

Next up, we had a look at some class sites.  This was great and just what I had wanted to do when I gave feedback last week.  I found this so useful and have heaps of ideas of what I want to try and how I want things to look.  Themes, links, introduction about the class, image carousels and buttons, lots of buttons!!!!  Unfortunately I will have to wait for next year when I start a new site to implement it all, but for now I will use some of this on our current site.

Anyway, back to buttons...

I am in love with creating buttons!!!!  It is so much fun!  I have added some of these on my own personal site.  I am keen to teach Lynne how to make these too and add these to our class site.

The remainder of the day was improving and changing our current class sites after getting some feedback from fellow DFI'ers.  I made a couple of image carousels which was great, they take up far less space.  I changed some access settings so that anyone with the link can view and of course I made some buttons.

Great day!  Back off to school to see if we beat Ubby's Riverdale rugby team haha!  Looking forward to next week.

Session 3 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today's session focused on supporting visible teaching and learning through building collaborative, multimodal Google Sites.

Firstly, in our Google Hangout with Dorothy Burt, we looked at the Create component more closely. It is all about the hook - creative ways of engaging your learners. There were some links to video clips that I want to go back and look at, so will do when I get a spare moment, hopefully before next week's session.

Looking into the multimodal learning sites highlighted the importance of being creative for me. Some of the examples I thought were quite bland, so can imagine that the children would think so too! So with that in mind, when it came to picking a theme and then resources from the Multitext Data Base to make into a Google Site, I wanted to make it attractive and easy to use for the learners. I picked up some tips for making a site to add to my knowledge from Maria's tutorial too and was pleased that it is not just me who gets frustrated with changing the size on images! As well as the links provided, I added 2 youtube clips on how to make a Manu Tukutuku and a paper kite and also a STEM Challenge slide using the Learn, Create, Share model as the scaffold for this learning. I'm looking forward to using this site in the future - perhaps during Te Reo Maori language week.

Here is the link to the site...

I have started a Google Site on speeches as well, so will try and get this finished as these are fast approaching! It would be great to have it set up to support them in their speech writing.

Another enjoyable day, looking forward to next Friday already.

Session 2 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today was our second session in Digital Fluency - Workflow. I feel that my laptop is a whole lot more organised after this session!

Looking at Google Keep was useful. I have used this in the past to save art ideas and I can see I will use this in the future for reminders and lists of things to do. I am amazed by the function that allows you to take the text out of an uploaded photo!

My tabs are better organised now. I changed the naming of all of the ones on my favourites bar so that they all fit on it. I pinned my regularly used sites so that I don't have to worry about opening new tabs for them.

I have made tweaks and changes to both my Gmail account and Calendar. I have added a signature to my emails and have personalised the appearance of my account. Being able to unsend a message was a light bulb moment for me and I changed the timing of this from 5 seconds to 30 seconds! That will stop me sending messages with forgotten attachments, as I often realise as soon as I've sent it! It was good to colour code my Calendar dates so that I could see clearly School dates from personal dates. I also changed the date to New Zealand format.

The big learning today for me was Google Hangouts. It was great to have a turn at this and I feel that I will need to have a couple more hangout sessions to really cement it - especially sharing screens so that the other members of the group can see what I'm looking at. Using Quicktime was new to me as well, but I managed to download and share it with my group members on my own. It would be beneficial for me to have another go at Hangouts and then feel confident to use it with my learners.

I look forward to next week's session.

Session 1 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today was my first session in Digital Fluency.  While I am reasonably new to Manaiakalani, I feel I have a good grasp on Google and what it offers, so I was excited to see what new tricks, tips and programmes I could learn to become more of a tech expert!

The first part of the session focussed on Manaiakalani itself.  It was great to have more of an insight about how it started out and where it came from.

I enjoyed learning all the little tips and trick Dorothy showed us using Google Docs.  I was pleasantly surprised at what I could do with Google Docs to make a poster as Google Slides is usually my go-to for this.  Using tables and making the lines the same colour is a clever way of ordering the space.  I will take this learning back to my class, which will give them another option for publishing their work.  Check out what I created below...

Another first, was finding out about the Add-Ons in Google Docs.  I can see that quite a few of them will be useful in our classroom - Draftback, Word Cloud and Doc to Form especially.  We already use Speak to Text in our classroom, but I'm really keen to use it for my less able readers as a tool for reading.

Overall, I have learned a lot of useful things that I can use in my classroom.  I'm looking forward to our next session!

Nau mai, haere mai ki tēnei taonga

Welcome to my professional learning blog.

This is a place where I can reflect on my Teaching as Inquiry goals

and how they link to the Education Council's

Standards for the Teaching Profession