DFI - Session 9

Wow! What a roller coaster ride! Thoroughly enjoyed coming to DFI on Friday's and learning about all the things. It is refreshing to break routine and get out of the school. I learnt a lot more than I thought I would and am more confident with the G-Suite and my use of Chromebooks in lessons. Today we did the Google Level 1 test and I thought it went really well. I felt I got most of the multi-choice questions right. In the 2nd section I thought I nailed it! I flew through! Thought it was quite easy. I checked that everything was completed and submitted and failed… So I am quite confused. We were given three weaknesses to work on before we resit. One of my apparent weaknesses is Google Classrooms… having used google classrooms since 2014, I am fairly confident that I did this section correctly. I feel quite lost as to where I went wrong. I will not be able to join the others with making the google badge permanent at the tattoo studio on Gladstone Road this afternoon. Looking back, I did not check the sharing rights of files that I shared with students, so perhaps there is more that I skimmed over as I followed the instructions to the letter. I was unsure about whether the pages I made on sites had to be sub-pages to the Title Page or their own separate entities, the question did not specify. Not sure if I will sit this again as I am confident with the application of the G-Suite in the classroom. DFI has changed the way that I operate. I can’t see myself walking round with a USB anymore. I have stopped using word processor and our department Chromebooks are being used more than once a week and we are seeking more. In a conversation yesterday our Principal said he would be keen for the school to get a drone! If that isn’t progress I don’t know what is. I don’t think a drone would help with our level 3 integration standard, but we should definitely get a drone!

Also, I smashed it:

Thanks Maria, Cheryl, Matt, Steph, Dorothy and all of Cohort 2 for the good times!

Signing off.

DFI - Session 8

Today we met Matt from Auckland. Really glad that he showed us You Tube stuff, as it included a playlist of videos of what to be familiar with for the assessment. 11 episodes roughly 42 minutes long. That is a solid Netflix season right there, I got this! Having spent time doing some work at Matt’s school and knowing some of his colleagues it was quite cool to see the videos of Point England School. I found some of the editing stuff a bit more tricky as it was unfamiliar to me. The polyline was new and I can see the benefits of using it.

I created a ‘pick a path’ story on slides. I used lego man images that didn’t have a background. Matt had suggested the white crisp look to sites so I applied that look to these slides and it looked great! Creating those ‘pick a path’ scenarios with either forms or slides takes a ridiculous amount of time, fortunately it is easy to link the slides.

Here is an update from last week where we used a timeline graph to track our blog views. Josie is enjoying Fiji while we are here working so she will need to update me with her data later on.



This week i changed my maths site. I am trying to create a departmental site that all teachers can use. I think the easiest way to have all staff contribute is to have shared Google drive folders where resources can be added for each topic and achievement standard. I have started embedding these folders to each page and have created banners for navigation in google drawings. Why I think a department site would work better than each teacher doing their own thing is that I can’t see anyone other than myself in our department putting in the effort to create an effective site that students use. Perhaps I can meet them halfway. Speaking with senior management, a suggestion was made that once the folders have been populated with student resources, by all teachers, we can link the site in the schools student and parent portals.

We had a discussion at lunchtime about compensation for the work that we may be asked to do with sites and Hapara going into next year. Hopefully I have not bitten off more than I can chew.

DFI Session 7

Dorothy Bert spoke with us again this morning and mentioned a course that we can take. I think that could be good for a lot of our staff back at school who are struggling to incorporate chromebooks into their lessons and/ or are not using them effectively. There are a lot of online tools but the google tools offer something unique with their compatibility. This week I played around with Canva. The templates are quite eye catching and easy to edit. Unfortunately, with it not being a google app, adding hyperlinks and editing after the image has been downloaded and embedded creates a bit of faffing around. These courses will hopefully keep us teachers up to date with the tools that are available.

Today we created forms which is something that GBHS teachers have had workshops on. I am planning on using forms for my inquiry to collect student voice and have used forms to embed into sites. I learnt today how to create a form with a loop in it. By creating segments, if an answer was wrong, the participant would be sent back to the beginning. This would be great for a warm up activity with students that need repetition. It was also fun to see Robbie's frustration!

Using forms we collected data on where our cohort wants to go on holiday. We used this data on something called MyMaps and we created a layer to show those locations. See:


I enjoy using excel and have spent quite a bit of time using it. Having done some google searching on debates about google sheets vs excel, I think Excel is superior. But, for what the likes of me will be using it for, it is fine. We had a play with the graphing features and analysed the blog views of some students. I decided to make a graph and analyse the page views of some of our cohorts blogs. See:



I can be better, I will be better!

I keep going back to thinking about Google Sites and the structure of it. I think for next year I need to setup the site and then in a shared drive set up folders for each year level and standard, have my department populate the folders with student resources and make them accessible on the site. I can keep editing the pages as the year goes on but this should help the students of teachers who are all ‘chalk and talk’. It is great for us to be learning these tools but we need to make change on a school level, not just in our own classes.