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.