DFI Session 6

Huge improvement of venue this week, overlooking the marina with the standard cloudless sky is a great way to end the week! We started the day with Dave delivering a talk on visible learning. Last year I worked closely with a teacher who had a COL unit to increase visual learning in the classrooms. I don’t think he ever looked at the digital side to it.

The main thing that Dave said that stuck with me was that some parents are now feeling disconnected as they can’t as easily look through students school books to see their work. I am aware of ‘Parent Portal’ and Dave spoke of Hapara’s parent access but I am sure there would be many schools in NZ who have not considered how to give access to parents.

We had a go at writing some code to park our machine on the other side of a dinosaur minefield. I was wondering what this had to do with anything until we had a go at driving a Makeblock. Makeblock was as far as I can see an alternative to RobotiX. A tool to teach students to write coding to control machinery. Loved Litebot! Unfortunately it was delivered on an ipad but I am sure we can get it on android. I think these tasks that lead into programming are great for building young people’s logic and reasoning.

Unfortunately, I needed to leave early so missed the afternoon. Hope it was as successful as the morning! Great venue!

DFI - Session 5

Last week we spent some time learning about cybersafety. So on Wednesday night at our GBHS open evening at school, I had a unique opportunity to teach one of our community members a valuable lesson. While Willie was outside getting a sausage, I noticed his laptop and email was left open and unguarded. This was of concern to me as there were several teachers and students milling around the area. Willie had left himself exposed. My concern for his cyber safety was so great that I thought this was an ideal opportunity to give him a hard lesson that could change his practice for the better.

I sent a whole staff email on Willie’s email asking for all staff to reply with an email stating their phone numbers as he had got a new sim card. What played out was a three day onslaught of zombie like emails piling into his inbox. Listening to Willie’s confessions this morning, I heard that he has now taken on board the importance of being cybersmart. My job here is done... You’re welcome.

This morning we spoke with Gerhard about sharing. He had an in depth view of platforms used and backed up the validity for Maniakalani’s use of Blogger. The tracking side of blogger I had previously looked at and found it interesting that people in the states were reading my blog.

We looked at other teachers Google sites. I liked the idea of incorporating my planning on the site and also including more images of the learners. My site is fairly plain but compared to some of the ones I looked at I am glad with how easy my site is to navigate. My theme is consistent but it is currently fairly dull. At some point I’d like to get on top of using workspace and embedding it into my google site. I won’t reinvent the whole wheel, but rather search what other math teachers have created for their units. Buttons! I have spent some time today on google draw (with the aid of Robbie) to redo homepage and ‘funk up’ my site! Tried to appeal to the local Gisbornites. I really like the idea of creating images and embedding the links in the images. This allows us to breakaway from the standard templates of Google Sites. See below:

We had a look at other people's sites in our DFI cohort. Raquel is winning with her site. The colourful hands and photos were really eye catching and brought interest to the site.

DFI - Seasion 4

This morning we had a go at using chromebooks.... a device that my students have used for several years in my classes. I found the experience quite frustrating at first but I was feeling much more comfortable by the end of it. I get quite bad eye strain from starring at screens, this time on the chromebook was quite uncomfortable as the screen was tiny!

So then came our time to use an ipad. Having grown up in Auckland where inorganic collections were an annual event, as kids we would collect the old computers that were being thrown out. PC's were great, we would pull four dead computers apart and make one work. As apple is less flexible with both hardware and software I have never owned any apple devices. I failed at using an ipad. I struggled to navigate it. No thank you.

An activity that we did on the chromebooks had the objectives of learning keyboard short cuts. Always good to learn some new tricks!

We had a go at using 'Screencastify' to create a video to share some ideas on Cybersmart. This is again another tool that I could use with google sites and there are many similarities to loom. I think this is a great way to explain how to do things online for my digitally illiterate family members.

Maria discussed Cybersmart, todays multimodal approach to blogging includes this video below:

DFI - Session 3

DFI - Session 3

Having spent the week thinking I’d found a weakness in Google Keep, and having questioned my ManiaKalani mentor person on Wednesday, Maria showed me how to do the things I’d decided weren’t doable. Will have another play this weekend.

Today we looked at teaching in a Multi Modal context. This is the first time that I had heard this term and what I have taken away is that Multimodal teaching is to use a variety of teaching strategies and exposing our learners to a variety of experiences as we all learn in different ways.

We spent time looking at Google sites. Us GBHS teachers already have google sites setup. I spent this time thinking more about how I could add a larger variety of experiences on the site. I feel it is fairly multimodal. I have videos, written practice questions, submissions of loom videos, images and I use flipgrid for students to ask me questions. Maria was also talking about having sound and motion to sell a product. This is something that I could include through GIFs. With the help of Yulie I created my first GIF I think with a few GIFs and bitmojis, my math googlesite will be a bit more cartoon like, but hopefully more eye catching for the students. 

We had a go at taking other educators resources and putting together a new site. I have been wanting to create a template for each of the assessment standards to keep a consistent layout. Starting with a new canvas was refreshing. I might redo the layout of my google site.

DFI - Session 2

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

It was good to see the variety of schools engaging with the Manaikalani services and see how this has been around for a few years now. Our activity today reiterated the 'learn, create, share' model that I have heard about over the last few terms.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Even though I do not use the Google Calendar suite as my weeks are very repetitive I found the overlapping calendars interesting and I can see the use for these. I think the biggest thing that I will take away from today is 'Keep'. At work and at home, when I have a project on or I see something that could be good to refer back to I often pull out my phone and take a picture. Keep would help me to sort these out to have my ideas sorted.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Using hangouts and a screen recording program like quick time or loom, students could reinforce their recently learnt skills by creating videos to explain their understanding. It would be good to use some of these recordings to add content to my Google Sites math page.

Streaming lessons for students who are absent or recording the board with something like Hangouts would be great. At GBHS as we have many sports/cultural trips, we could help students by creating 24/7 access to the learning.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

My partner and I are in the planning stages of a renovation. I am real keen to try use 'Keep' to sort and label our ideas. We take ideas from pinterest, google images, you tube and magazines to get ideas. We have images of products from Bunnings etc and architectural drawings. All these things are never found in one place. Keep could just be creating more work but it would make it easier to talk to my partner about the smaller details if she is out of town. 

I have picked up some good little tips today like filtering out spam emails tiding up my icon bar, but most excitingly I have discovered 'ctrl+shift+v'.

The End

P.S. This is my first ever blog post. Hopefully I did it right!