I will be using Google Keep for my to do lists, which will be arranged into general to do lists, regular to do lists and then priority to do lists. The beauty of Keep is that the icon is right there on your laptop to zap into and add to and also on my phone for those late night moments when you need to add something to your to do list and now I can very easily add it to the app on my phone to remove the thought from my head to get back to sleep. Wow moment - take a photo of text, e.g. your handwritten notes and with your Keep app it will grab this text and make a copy for you to then use in a Doc etc.
I need to make more use of Google Calendar and be checking this each day to move away from using my diary. I think this will be a work in progress because I have used a diary for such a long time. I will start using the calendar but still use my diary alongside for a start to ensure I don't miss anything until I get used to everything being digital and not being written down. I will see how I go but the jury is still out on using a digital calendar!
I needed the help that was offered today with how to organise my tabs. I do tend to keep a lot of tabs open because I will be working in quite a few at a time or I will stumble across interesting pages that I want to visit later. I like what One Tab can do for me. You can just press the extension button and it will just save all the tabs you had open. When you go into One Tab it will have those tabs listed on the day you save them and then there are various options for you, e.g. you can restore the whole list of them, you can delete a couple and then restore them. You can also set up groups, so for example I have opened up each of my weekly plans that I use on a daily basis and have labelled these as Weekly Planning. I had been using the Starred part of my Drive for these plans but One Tab might make me miss this step out.
The other tab resource that I might use in the future is Toby Mini. The difference with this is the fact you can share tabs or groups of tabs with others. I think of Toby Mini as more of a bookmarking resource and I can perhaps see how I might also use it to improve my workflow but I will just focus on One Tab at this point and get that working well for me.
I have recently updated my Gmail account so I have 3 areas that the emails can be filtered into and by dragging specific emails into the different areas I am teaching it which email I want where. This is brilliant for knowing that the more urgent/important emails are going into the Primary area of my Gmail and then I have 2 other areas that emails can go to and this should help ensure my Inbox doesn't seem quite so overwhelming at times.
The learning I will take back to my learners this week will be checking they can jump between tabs easily and to open a new tab before they open a bookmark. This is something that not all my learners may be aware of. Also the shortcut of Ctrl/Shift/t to put your tabs back if you accidentally exit out of Chrome.
The Learn part of the Manaiakalani Pedagogy made me think about what Learning looks like at my school and then in particular in my classroom. It made me think about increasing my teacher effectiveness and how I can accelerate learning outcomes for my learners in the digital environment we now live in. This is a big part of my thinking and learning for this term. I am listening and looking to ensure I am picking up tips, ideas, and good quality learning for the learners in my care. It is wonderful all the ideas that are on the blogs of learners from other schools, that you can adapt and make your own.
The activity that we carried out today was discussing a blog post. Such a simple idea and I suddenly thought I don't get my students to do this. They have their buddy from another school and they are expected to comment on their blog posts. Well from this week my students will buddy up and discuss the blog posts that they are going to comment on together and discuss the ideas for their comment following the Positive, Thoughtful, Helpful structure and then if required help each other actually write the comment. This will be a good support for lots of my students who are finding the commenting part of the process quite tricky.
Kia ora Michelle,
ReplyDeleteAnother wonderfully in-depth blog reflection. It is really good to read about the things you are learning and what you want to take into the classroom. There are some great ways to organise your tabs, Mini Toby and One Tab are a couple I use. But I must say using a digital calendar is a great thing. We even have a family calendar so we can put anything that is relevant for our whanau, which means that at any time I can see things that are relevant for work and home. My kids even use it now that they have jobs. So I strongly encourage you to make the shift.
:) Sharon
Hi Sharon, thank you for commenting on my blog post. I will make the change to a digital calendar I think, it will just take me a while to trust that I'm not going to miss things because they aren't written on my 'open to a week's view' diary that I have used for ever and ever. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to see the benefits of what you are learning too, I couldn't see that I would use both Mini Toby and One Tab but one week later I can see the uses of both. I will continue to strive to head towards a digital calendar take over:)
DeleteKia ora Michelle,
ReplyDeleteYou will need a Google Keep list to organise your general, regular and priority to do lists! I can understand using the Google Calendar and the diary for a start as teachers need to be organised to the minute and build trust in the app.
Teaching your students to be smart learners and understand their tabs and to open a bookmark in an empty tab saves a lot of confusion for them.
One of the High Leverage Practices is discussions so your idea of getting students to discuss the blog post before they comment will have a two fold impact, one getting more discussion for the students and two to support students to write a more quality blog comment. Is it worth capturing the discussion?
Nga mihi,
Mark