Week 4 - Dealing with Data

Unfortunately I was away for this session so I have caught up by going through the agenda and reading the other blog posts from the DFI group that I am in.  

The Share part of the Manaiakalani pedagogy was discussed.  Blogger was selected as the platform to share our students' learning on.  It has the ability to reach a large audience and the students can easily share their blogs with their families.  I need to rethink my ideas of what can be shared on the students' blogs.  It is not a showcase for perfect published pieces of work.  It can be parts of learning and it can be learning shared to get some feedback on next steps.

  

Google Forms was explored.  I have created one Google Form in the past and of course I have filled quite a few in myself.  I need to do a bit of investigating on how to incorporate them into my teaching.  I have seen it being used when we were teaching during lockdown where the teacher had set up a feelings survey type form, a form for students to use to check in with their teacher each day.  As I write this I am thinking it could be used as a reflective tool at the end of Inquiry topics, and as a starter - collecting prior knowledge on Inquiry or other areas of the curriculum.

I have had a play around with MyMaps but it seems a little bit beyond me at first glance!  I will need to find some nice and easy step-by-step instructions and go through what it can do.  I can see my students loving to map out their own trips/holidays/adventures but I will need to be a little bit more confident with how it works first.

Google Sheets was also worked through.  At this point I use Sheets for my planning and the Must Do/Can Do type planning that I share with my students.  I also use it to collate my weekly reward system but I am using a Sheet that has been set up for the whole school, I did not have to input the formula to ensure the addition is correct.  I also find Sheets handy for students to keep track of things like their Prototec maths results - they know how to type in what stage etc. they worked at and then insert the link to their results.

I can now:

• freeze columns and rows to keep headings in place
• select and resize multiple columns together to keep the sizing consistent
• highlight cells for a quick add (I knew this trick!)
• applying formula to multiple cells
• autofill cells with months of the year and numbers
• a beginner trial with the Explore button to create graphs

Week 2 - DFI - Workflow

Another week of learning!  This week's learning was all about Workflow.  Again I am taking away a toolbox of new learning that I will use in my every day school life.

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.

Week 1 - DFI - Core Business

Today I attended my first day of the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive (DFI).  I was so excited to be invited on this term's course.  It is each Tuesday for 9 weeks and the name of it really does explain it...Intensive...but in a really great way!  What an amazing opportunity to attend a course each Tuesday where you know you are going to head away with such valuable thinking and tools.  Day 1 and I am already excited about the things I now know and can take back into the classroom.

Learn, Create, Share is the message behind the Manaiakalani story.  What stood out was that it started well before 1:1 devices for children, it didn't begin as a focus on technology.  If you are lucky enough now to be in a classroom with plenty of devices for your children then the possibilities are endless. For me it is keeping that motto in my head - Learn, Create, Share.

Stand out learning from today was how to make a Google Doc look pretty!  You can use remove.bg to delete the background from photos, insert a table into the doc to help with the layout, change the background to a different colour and get rid of the margins to use the whole page.  This sounds simple when I write it down but I feel like lots of the things we will learn on this course are the things that we have always wanted to know how to do but just haven't had the time to discover them yet.  Some of the little tips that were shared are brilliant, I have already numbered my Literacy and Maths folders so they sit right at the top of my Drive because they are the folders I am in and out of all of the time.  I have also put this week's maths, reading and writing plans in my Starred section of my Drive because again these are the documents I am using all the time this week.  I will remove them from the Starred section next week and replace them with the Week 2 plans. So as you can see I am already integrating what I am learning into my day, now I have to think about what I can share with my students.

Student Learning this week:  I am going to get them to all use Voice Typing to complete a piece of writing this week.  I want to take the stigma (if I can call it that) away from it being a tool for the learners who struggle with typing, spelling and writing skills.