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.