Digital Fluency Intensive- Session 7 - Devices

This week our connecting to Maniakalani learning was all about being cybersmart.

I had previously thought of being cybersmart being about learning making safe choices online, however today I learnt that it is more than that. It is about empowering students to be active participants online, being confident to share their learning. I liked the point of teaching students to have healthy interactions in their digital world, it's not about limiting them to keep them safe, but more about teaching them how they interact with their online world and a safe and respectful way. 

Next we had a deep dive into Hapara. Hapara is an aplication that allows us to see students learning. We can see the learning they have in their drives, their blog posts, comments on their blogs, monitor their emails, see what they are currently doing on their devices.

Useful new learning on hapara:

• You can move students around in dashboard to see kids you need to see the most at the top. 
• allow time for students to tidy drives - fun to reward tidy drives.

The main idea of the day was devices.

Chromebooks

We did a digital dig about the chromebook. It was great to refresh my knowledge and I also learnt some helpful shortcuts along the way.

Here is the digital dig I completed. It has lots of tips and tricks. 

iPads

It was great to have a chance to explore explain everything by creating and also by looking at tasks teachers have created for students. It is amazing what you can do with it when you start playing with different features. It had been quite a while since I had used explain everything and it had changed a lot. I really enjoyed how creative you could be when using the iPad, so much so that I got a bit distracted...oops! I can see how it would be very useful in a junior classroom with iPads as it is simpler and works more effectively on the iPads..

Create

Our create session today was linked to our cybersmart learning this morning. We looked at some cybersmart lessons, I focused on keyword searches. It was great to think about how simple it can be to slip the cybersmart ideas into other learning. We created screencastify videos to explain the lesson we were looking into and how we might use them. 
The video below explains a lesson plan for keyword searches. 

Thanks for reading my blog.

until next time,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive Session 6

Our Kaupapa focus today was about the connected aspect. 

We heard how being connected sits closely with visibility, which we learnt about last week. Dorothy explain the the ideas of Learn, Create, Share is what helps us to connect as a network of schools. The connections that we have also allow students to have connections with other students through the use of their blogs.  By sharing their learning and being able to see what students at other schools have being learning allows them to connect with the wider world. As a city girl who has worked in a couple of country schools in the past I loved Dorothy's example of the student blogging about possum shooting, something that is a regular for them but students in city schools are being exposed to a new experiences or ideas.


It was good to hear about the twitter page to be able to see the blog posts from around the cluster. This makes it feel so much more manageable to view the blogs from around the cluster, I have finally given in and signed up to twitter.

Next we moved onto the main focus which was enabling access to learning. We had a look at different learning sites, including our own. The main points I took away from this were:

• Keeping it simple and uncluttered
• Photos of students made people feel engaged with the site
• the use of sites in consistent for a student from year 1 to 13 
• Questions to ask:
• Is the site visually appealing? Does it hook in the user?
• Is the site functional for users?
• Is there connection to the blogs?
• 3 click rule - only three clicks to the learning.

We got feedback on our sites from others which was really useful and gave me ideas I had't thought of. We were then given time to make changes to our sites. It was so great to have this time because often the focus is on getting the content on the site and functionality/appeal get a little lost. 

I hope my site is more user friendly for my students and visitors, it will be something I continue focusing on as the site changes and develops. If you want to check it out click here for the link.

Until next time,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive- Session 5

Todays focus has been 'collaborate - sites'

We started off they day learning about visible learning. With our current learning journey we are going on with learning at home it has become essential to ensure that the leaning is visible to students and families.  Making the process of teaching and learning visible gives learners, who may find learning difficult,  a clear understanding of what they need to do prior to them beginning their learning.  I guess I hadn't considered the impact that the visibility can actually have for some learners.

We did a deep dive into multi-modal learning. It is an area I haven't explore a lot yet. In my reading slides I have added the audio texts and linked videos. Kerry used the hook to explain how we need to be engaging students both behaviourally and cognitively.
Multi-modal learning requires us to give students opportunities to access information in different ways through different text types and at different levels. I thought that the idea of including different perspectives and credibility/reliability was really useful to extend the students thinking.

Next we learnt about creating sites from scratch. It was useful to to have a go from the beginning.
I really enjoyed learning how to create buttons as it makes the site more interesting. Here are a couple of buttons that created:

The rest of the day we were able to put of skills to use by creating our own multi-modal site. It was lot's of fun and a great way to show some creativity. I am excited to try it for my reading groups as I have quite a wide spread of abilities so I feel that it will be great to support those reading at slightly lower levels and extending the thinking of the more capable readers.

 Click here for a link to my multi-modal site.

Take ways from today:

• Creating pretty buttons is a great way to make your site look more appealing (think about the shop window)
• The MutliText database is a fantastic resource to use and I need to remember to utilise it. 
• Creating a multi-modal site isn't as hard as you would think and is a great place to put all sorts of texts types for students to easily access which also promotes visibility. 
• Make learning visible

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog.

Until next time

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive - Session 4 - Forms and Sheets

We were back at it for our fourth session this week.

It was really great to hear more about the purpose of blogging and the impact of quality sharing on a student learning.  It really cemented the reasons we teach blogging in the classroom and the importance of encouraging students to make meaningful connections with the wider world by commenting on others blogs in order for them to build/engage an audience.
We had a look at google forms. I found this very useful and timely as I had just volunteered to create the form for our hubs time pre-test. The most useful part for was learning more about managing the responses. I have linked the responses to a google sheet. When creating the quiz I add the question "whose maths class are you in?" and on the sheet I have added a filter so that the teachers in the hub should be able to easily filter the responses from the students in their maths class.

We also had a deep dive into Mymaps. It was really fun to have a play with. I am going to explore more how I can create opportunities to use this with students, but I think I need more sandpit time first.

The blue markers show all the dream holiday spots of the members of the DFI.
The orange line shows the distance from Christchurch, NZ to Barcelona, Spain (my dream holiday spot).

When it comes to google apps, sheets is probably one of the areas I am least confident in. After today a feel pretty confident in navigating around some of the tools such as, fixing columns and rows in place, using the different functions efficiently and creating charts with the data I have in the sheet. We Also learnt how to insert a chart we created in sheets into a drawing. Below you can see my break down of a students blog use between 2018 and now.

Well, I am am definitely looking forward to getting the responses back to my google form and having a play with the data in google sheets. It will be great to put what I have learnt into practice.

Until next time team,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive - Session 3 Media

Todays session was bit different to the last two. Because of the lockdown currently happening we put our google hangout skills (from the last session) to the test and completed our learning online. It was really awesome to be in the learners seat and see/feel how our students might feel in a hangout.  It was a very tiring day. Normally we would have people next to us that we can talk to in person but today everything was done on the screen.  I really enjoyed when we were able to make choices by choosing the topics we wanted to learn more about and joining a seperate meeting with a facilitator and small group for those.

The main idea of today learning was Media. Our focus was on the Create aspect of Learn, Create, Share. Things we learnt:

Live streaming

We learnt about live streaming and different tools we can use to live stream.  I had never considered how drones etc could be used in the school context, it was really interesting.

Youtube playlists

In the past I had only shared/ added one video at a time on our learning site or blogs. It was brilliant to learn how to embed a whole playlist. It means that the videos will play one after the other, you can add more videos to the playlist as you need to and it frees up space on your learning site or blog rather than having multiple videos dotted on your page.  Here is an example of a playlist I have embedded.

Google Drawing

We used google drawing to create an About me Button for the sidebar of our blog. You should be able to see mine there soon.

Pick-a-path

Probably my favourite thing that we did today was the pick a path. I didn't know what it was so I was very intrigued.

You can see the maths quiz I have created below but basically you give the person options to click on (in mine it is answers to a question) and depending what they click on it will lead to a different slide.

I feel like the pick a path could be a fun learning activity that I will try for the students during lockdown. Maybe for maths, vocab work or reading.

Until next time,

Sarah