DFI Session 9 - Thursday 2nd July 2020

What a great way to complete our last DFI session with a successful result with the exam and some great fun new apps and programs to use. I definitely learnt a few things through the exam that I didn't quite know off the top of my head but it was great to put my new skills to the test and finally finish! The openness and collaborative way this experience has been, has given me lots of confidence to continue this journey of being digitally fluent and helping my students to achieve their goals. I will definitely have fun exploring and learning more!

Some main points from today: 

Ubiquitous Learning

• Knowing that children can learn from anywhere at any time from anyone. 
• Learning is rewindable and students always have access to repeat the learning if needed. 
• Students who are well off are exposed to 30,000,000 more words than those who are not. 
• Digital technology has the power to remove barriers to learning. 

DFI Demo Slam: 

• Body Synth - Dancing
• Brush Ninja - Creating GIFs through drawing - using paint tools to draw different pictures
• Semi-Conductor - conduct an orchestra through your browser
• Google Earth - Exploring and creating projects they can share with others
• Auto Draw - good for those not good at drawing. Predicts what you are going to draw and gives suggestions
• Music Lab - Turning Art into Music. Choosing different instruments and creating different sounds. 
• Trusted contacts - Google app for mobile. Allows to share with trusted people where you are for safety reasons. 
• Smart commenting - Sentence starters for making good comments 
• Meet Extensions - Google meet enhancement suite, Google Meet push to talk, Meet virtual background. Meet party Button, Meet attendance. 
• Google Trends - Dynamic, changes and shows what's being searched all around the world. 
• Read and Write for Google Chrome - for learners who need support. Accessibility functions. Paid versions has more functions. The website can be read to you, remove ads. 
• Flubaroo - Grade and analyse Google sheets. Can mark for you. Highlights areas of need.
• Sing like Freddy/Freddy Meter - Karaoke on Steroids?! Analyses your voice to see how well you are in tune. 
• Getting Minecraft characters using Google Sheets. 
• Rapid Doc Creation 
• Google Arts and Culture - Accessible from laptop. Engaged with Arts and culture experiment. Tour art museums. Art Camera - See details of art work. Download app - take selfies and can match your face to a portrait that looks more like you. 
• DFI fun and games 
• Tangrams using google drawings - Create and complete Tangrams
• Phet University - Maths science interactive simulations and can add to a blog. 
• Okay Go Sandbox - Highly recommended - great for STEM. Takes aspects of all topics. 
• Kupu - Appstore. Take a photo of an object and it comes up for the maori word for it. 

DFI Session 8 - Thursday 25 June 2020

Coding and Computational Thinking

Great session! Exploring different ways of using coding was fun and interesting! I think this would be a great way to get students engaged and understand how things work and sequencing of codes. Also a lot of problem-solving would be involved when things don't work and find out how to solve it and what to use. Students would also be able to understand different symbols and their meanings. I can also see different aspects of Coding can be used in Maths. This will be great to trial. 

Some main points from today 

Deep Dive - Future of Tech 

• Being a contributor to technology
• Robotics being developed to help with medicine, rescues etc
• Having the ability to be creative

Digital Technologies Curriculum 

• A digitally capable person can create their own digital technologies solution.
• A fluent person can decide when and why to use specific digital technologies to achieve a specific task or solve problems
• Teachers learn how digital technologies used effectively can have a significant impact on accelerating achievement outcome. 
• It's important that students have opportunities to be innovative designers and creators of digital solutions     
• 3 Strands - Technology practice/knowledge and nature of technology

DFI Session 7 - Thursday 18 June 2020

I found this session very engaging. It was really cool to learn more about Hapara and the purpose of the different features and how visible everything is from the different folders to blogs and emails.
I also had more of an insight to the Manaiakalani Journey and its alignment with Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I understood how important the partnership was between Manaiakalani and whanau, commercial businesses and developers. It was great to know that whanau are at the centre and part of all the decision making as this is all for our students/their children. I think I would like to try to add some videos of myself onto my site as I currently don't have any. I'll also use the smart surfing plan with my students to help them search and filter through their searches a bit better.


Hapara Hot tips

• Making a new folder for students stops visibility
• Removing browser tabs are available but talking to students would be best

Explain Everything 

• Quite easy to use. I was able to explore the features and photos options which was handy. I guess I could use this programme as a way for students to explain and show their learning using the voice feature also. 
• 

Digital Dig

• Learning new shortcuts and tricks to navigate through Chromebooks was super helpful. 

Screencastify 

Using Screencastify for the first time today was great. I think I'll give this a go some time for explaining tasks. 

DFI Session 6 - Thursday 11 June 2020

This session was great I think I'm going to continue to work on developing my site and converting my plans to slides and taskboards for my students (and give accessibility ha) so that everything is visible on my site.  I also want to utilise Hapara Dashboard more with my students share how visible everything is and possibly have a go at organising our work together. Also, I'm wanting to blog more frequently with my students and give more opportunity for my students to blog their work and navigate through their blogs. I guess one of the main points for me today is accessibility and visibility.

Some Main Points from today

• Connected 
• Ubiquitous
• Empowered 
• Visible

Leading Learning using Google Sites 

• What is the foundation of what we are doing 
• Learning site needs to be the one-stop hub for everything
• Things on your wall (timetables etc.) should be on class Site 
• Consistency across all sites and year levels 
• effective engagement 
• Pick 2 or 3 colours that work across my site 
• How is the layout going to make it easy for students to navigate through
• How well does it function and promote learning to the learning task
• How is learning from previous weeks archived without it being mess

DFI Session 5 Thursday 4th June 2020

It was a great session today, despite my brain felt a little overloaded this week. It was great to learn more and explore google sites and learn about visibility and creating folders for access and sharing. I love the idea of collaboration and visibility and having all of the learning community involved and having access to the students learning. It makes learning so much more authentic with a real audience and you tend to put more effort into it when you know someone is going to read it. In terms of Google sites, I think I'm going to try and change the layout of my class site to make it more consistent and clean across all the pages. Also, I'll set up my pages with hooks and images to engage my students into their learning and take into consideration the Multi-Modal designs when doing this. Hopefully, when this is set up I'll feel more organised on my site and I can get a routine going of regularly updating it.

Some main points from today 

Collaboration - Visibility 

• Hapara has parent visibility to their student drives 
• Communicating with a real audience and purpose in mind 
• Technology is a game-changer so that teaching and learning is visible

Multi-Modal

• Keeping the site up to date 
• Making it attractive and engaging (like a shop window) 
• Hooking students in 
• Videos of yourself on the sites are engaging for students
• All resources in class site helps (all in one place) 
• Multi-modal design for behavioural engagement 
• Multi-textural design for cognitive engagement
• Using recognisable images to engage students
• Reduce text-heavy style sites

Dashboard/Hapara and Blogger 

• Visibility to blogger 
• Hovering over allows you to see a preview 
• The comments section is showing the comments on student' blog 
• Red comments = anonymous user 

Google Sites 
Google Sites Environment Day Design 

• You can create folders for your site - you can share permissions for this folder (Visible) 
• Using google drawing/post-it notes to plan your site for pages and subpages 
• You can choose templates/Themes 
• You can create new pages and sub pages 

Design a website - 13-15 Years

• Design a site
• Smart Media 
• Tki - range of resources to reuse - journals + Audio 
• Looking at information is it real or fake? 
• Digo extension for highlighting in websites 
• Context Tasks - How do we know information is valid? 
• Do we take everything as true?

Blogger

• In layout - Configure blog post you can add a "reaction" to click on as a response to a comment

DFI Session 4 Thursday 28th May 2020

Great session this week. Found out lots of new features in Spreadsheets that would be great for students and my personal use for planning and organising data. Loads of new skills in the following areas: 

Hapara Hot Tips: 
(How to manage view and navigate viewing students work)

• Use the search to locate anything within students drives 
• Creating new groups and filtering to see specific groups
• Adjusting how many documents you see in view
• Need to reset to show recent changes 
• Reordering students in your view (who do you want to see) 

This will make it super easier for me to view and comment on students work quicker. 

Forms: 

• Suggestions to start with a blank form
• Selecting different question and answer types 
• Using different features including images, instructions, videos, created videos. 
• Sections = A new page 
• Customise your own Theme
• Settings to lock individuals in (no searching) 
• Access to public 
• Record confirmation/thank you message
• Option to export responses to a spreadsheet
• Sending form via email/link 

Lockdown Survey Form

This would be great for collecting student voice/data 

Google My Maps: 

• Mymaps.google.com
• Drive - Create from here
• Set default view - so people go to a particular place
• Add Marker - Adds a place
• Students not to add their house number
• Add location/image/title 
• Add layer/import information
• Measuring distance from one place to another 

Google My maps was a little confusing, I will need to explore this a little further and get use to the features.  I would need to find more ways that I could utilise this in my classroom or class site. 

Google Sheets: 

• Well thought out and well-designed spreadsheets are easier to use 
• Freeze columns in place when scrolling: View>freeze>columns & rows
• Highlight and change text direction for larger texts 
• Calculating the average 
• Using Autofill by highlighting and dragging - first 3 numbers in sequence 
• Data validation - list of items in a dropdown box 
• Inserting checkboxes - highlighting and add

Sheets on Speed:

• Find average: Formula goes into the "Average" Cell 
• Drag the cell from the first found average to the last (to find average of all)
•  To Rank scores: Click into the cell and organise from a-z 
• "Interesting charts" create the easiest chart. Can go to "Explore" drag and drop ontop of the data. Dont mess with it, its machine marking :D 
• Move to own sheet "Click and choose "move to own sheet"

Spread Sheets/Analysing Data and Using Charts: 

• Blogging > Stats > Overview 
• Protecting cells and giving edit permissions to specific students 
• Looking at the amount of views 
• Audience - Where are the viewers coming from?
• Look at Blog Archives on the left hand side to explore 

DFI Session 3 Thursday 21st May 2020

This session was great. Lots of new tips and tricks to use in the classroom and for myself personally. Google slides would be great when planning out weekly activities/tasks and sites for students. I found using Google slides for more than just presenting information was awesome and I was able to use this in the classroom this week. Students were engaged and enjoyed the activity where they explored making animations. I found that there were so many options on google slides that they were able to be creative.

New Tips I learnt: 

• Google slides - use consistent formatting, use blank slides and embrace your own swag. 
• Let the slides be supporting the cast of your talk. 
• Plan slides to present. 
• Use sticky notes to plan your slides. 
• Use slides to enable access for learners e.g the slide on our Class Site. 
• You can just change the slide instead of going to change your site. Put the most recent slide to the top of the presentation for students to see first. 

• Slides - to create
• Comic strip to create dialogue
• Maths pick apart for place value

Youtube: 

I hadn't used much of Youtube in the past so Youtube Playlist is great as it sets up students with all the videos needed instead of having students roaming Youtube. I was able to add a new playlist to my class site under "Art" and will use this as an extension or early finishers activity for when sketching.  Youtube live stream is interesting - a little bit risky but could be great for watching things in real-time. Some ideas for live streaming could be virtual field trips or science experiments. Youtube playlists are great for saving videos into different categories for either me or students to share at a later date. I'm able to collect videos for different topics/learning areas and it would be easy for me to refer back to instead of searching and filtering through the videos all the time.



Google Drawing:

Using Google drawings to create buttons is great. I can see myself using this a lot and being very creative with it making the buttons interactive and spicing up my class site. I learnt that there is a whole lot more to Google drawing than what I know and it's going to be great exploring this platform further.

DFI Session 2 - Thursday 14th May 2020

Our session today was great. I was able to understand more about the power of Learn Create Share, specifically "Share" and how important it is in empowering students. The Google meets activity was a great task to show how students feel when given an instruction and then sharing it by recording. When discussing this with my chosen partner we mentioned how nerve-racking it can be & how we could feel quite anxious when sharing our learning. This is exactly how students feel and at times I feel that as a teacher, I forget those feelings some learners go through and wonder how it could be hard for some who lack the confidence to do a task like this. This made me realise that I need to continue to soften my approach and give more encouragement to those who need it. We also realised that when the task was done, we felt like we had achieved something and that feeling of relief, accomplishment and empowerment soon followed after.

   

New tips and trick 

I learnt some great tricks in using google meets. There are many ways I could use this for my own personal and professional use. Keeping informational notes about students, reminders throughout the day or even a shopping list would be handy. The text grab option from an image is great and I'll probably use that extract text from books, magazines etc. My Chrome windows and email inbox is looking more organised. I've learnt how to turn bookmarks into Icons without the extra writing. I've organised my emails into different folders/labels and things are starting to feel much better to navigate through. 

DFI Session 1 Thursday 7th May 2020

The first Digital Fluency Learning session was a great insight into Manaiakalani, their model and purpose. The online community gives students an amazingly authentic and real-life audience. It's great to see a community of schools come together with a future-focused goal for our learners. I managed to pick up some great tips and tricks today that I could use to make online learning navigation easier and more efficient. Some things I learnt during the session:

• Copy and paste without formatting gets rid of underlying codes 

• Underling words in google docs is actually a showing it's a hyperlink 

• Voice typing

• Creating a table of contents tool to navigate through a document 

• remove.bg - removing the background of an image 

These tips I could share with my students to make learning a bit more clearer and easier. For example having many ESOL students in my class I feel that voice typing would help greatly to encourage speaking aloud, this is one tool I will try once we get back into the classroom. I have also learned that it is important that teachers and students learn the same skills and use learning as we go and continue to keep up and build on the knowledge that I already have. I need to provide more opportunities for students to use these skills on a regular basis and not just a one-off session. 


We created a poster using google docs and a table. Using a table makes everything align neatly and prevents images and text from moving around this will be useful to me when creating docs for my students. I have also found colour coding and ordering my folders in google docs has been great for me personally to organise my work.