DFI Session 8: Computational Thinking

Today was our final session before we participate in our 'Google Certified Educator Level 1' exam next week. Dorothy started our day off by discussing the Manaiakalani kaupapa of 'Empowered'. This was centered around our tamariki taking back control of their own lives and empowering them so they can be confident to interact in a variety of ways (kanohi ki te kanohi, online etc). It has definitley become clear through participating in this DFI course that our devices are not just a tool. Manaiakalani is all about ensuring there is equity by giving everyone an equal opportunity to be connected in the digital age. The aim is to create an educational advantage, rather than disadvantage like there has been in the past. Whanau also develop a sense of empowerment and become partners in their childrens learning as they go through the process of purchasing their devices. It was pretty cool to hear that in paying the devices off whanau can generate a credit rating, which can be a common issue within lower decile communities.  

Thinking about the future and what could be in store in terms of technology, blows my mind a little bit! We already have robots that can teach themselves and apps that can detect cancerous moles, so who knows what advancements there could be in 5....10.....20 years? The moral machine activity was really eye opening and generated some interesting conversation. It highlighted how so many different factors come into play when making moral decisions and how these factors can be vastly different from individual to individual. 

I have been able to gain a better understanding of computational thinking and become a bit more familiar with the digital technologies curriculum. Our school is still at the very early stages of integrating this into our curriculum so it was awesome to hear about other schools' experiences and the progressions they are uisng.

A good portion of today was spent exploring various coding activities and resources. I came across a free website called 'SculptGL' where you can do virtual clay modelling and carving. I really enjoyed exploring this website and am going to try using it as a follow up activity with my reading groups by asking my students to carve a character. This video below explains how it works...

During our breakout session I chose to attend the 'Creating with Scratch' workshop run by Kerry. It was completley new to me and I was way out of my depth! I probably should have chosen the 'Introduction to Scratch' and learnt some of the basics and 'scratch' language first. However, I was still able to pick up a few things and was able to observe what is possible. I would just need to spend a lot more time experimenting to grasp all of the different functions and how to manipulate them. This is the random 'scratch' I managed to create.......not sure what is up with the noises haha

I am feeling pretty nervous about the exam but I am just going to give it my best shot and make sure I spend some time revising the provided materials. I am sad that my time on this DFI course is nearly over but I am also feeling really excited to have more time in class next term to implement all of my new learning!

DFI Session 7: Devices

Today we started off by further unpacking ubiquitous learning, which in a nutshell means barriers are removed so that learning can take place anytime, anywhere, any pace by anyone (A4). This allows students the time to learn outside of the traditional school hours at either a slower pace (rewindable) or faster pace, whatever best suits them. 

                            

We participated in a couple of activities using the devices that our students use (chromebooks and ipads). The chromebook activity was a digital dig which my class had completed last week with our Manaiakalani facilitator. My students enjoyed learning a few new tricks and shortcuts on their devices and so did I. Our ipad activity was exploring the 'Explain Everything' app. It was fairly straightforward to figure out and I can see why it is a popular tool in junior classes. Our school is currently in the process of setting this app up on all of our ipads and I am looking forward to seeing how our junior teachers integrate it. Click on this link to see a video of what I created. It was awesome to explore some of the teacher created tasks as well and see different ways that teachers are utlising this app.

We spent some time looking at the Cybersmart Curriculum and one of the main things that stuck with me was to focus on using positivie cybersmart language. Subtle things like using smart instead of safe and switching the focus onto what we DO rather than what we DON'T do.

I have had limited experience with the workspace side of Hapara so I chose to use our create time today to experiment with setting one up. My workspace was based on the cybersmart aspect of 'Digital Footprints'. Click on this link to see the workspace I created or you can watch the screencastify below where I explain my workspace...

 

I enjoyed the brief presentation about screencastify. I was already familiar with this extension but it was awesome to learn about a few extra functions in the toolbar (like the torch mouse function I am using in the screencastify above).

Reflecting on my experience of Covid 19 in regards to my readiness for ubiquitous learning, I wouldn't say I was prepared, but I am proud of how we (my collaborative teaching buddy and I) managed. Looking back over my teaching career, I started off at a school (over 10 years ago) that was fairly onto it with digital learning and required every class to have a google site (I think it was actually a wikipsace back then). However as I moved to different schools the expectations weren't there and although I still continued to create a class website each year, I defintley didn't do it as well as I could of and it was more just a site for the links I wanted my students to access.  When we were all forced into distance learning due to Covid, it made me realise how I had kind of just cruised in terms of my own professional development with digital learning (since leaving a school that had certain requirments in this area). With the combination of Covid and our school joining Manaiakalani, it was definitley the wake up call I needed and has set me on the path of a whole new teaching aproach/pedagogy. I just need to keep reminding myself to take baby steps and not get overwhelmed!

DFI Session 6: Enabling Access - Sites

Gone are the days where schools only came together to compete against one another.....the introduction of the Manaiakalani Outreach made things explode into a world of collaboration where students, teachers and whanau share a common language. There is no reason now why any teacher should have to feel isolated or stuck on their own, as we have a massive community of colleagues who have all been brought together with the common goal of learning, sharing and creating together. I am stoked to be a part of it!

Our main kaupapa for today was looking at our class sites and seeing where we currently are in relation to the points below...

It was really beneficial to just have the time to sit and explore such a variety of sites. I found it really inspiring and motivating and I will definitely continue to do some more exploring and 'stealing' of ideas. The old saying of 'no need to reinvent the wheel' definitely applies and I just feel grateful to be part of this community. 

Below are my goals I set for myself for today in terms of my site and I was able to achieve them all...

-  Make our site more interactive  

- Apply the 3 clicks or less kaupapa (simplify things). 

- Make it appealing to whanau as well (link to fb, newsletters etc)  

My site is definitely still a work in progress but I feel more focussed about how I want to utilise it now. In the past my sites have pretty much just been a place where I organised all of the website links I wanted my students to be able to access easily. I now have a much better understanding of the possibilities and am planning to gradually start using it more and more as a living and breathing workspace. One thing I am a little bit confused about is Hapara versus Sites for setting work tasks. They both have their pros and cons and I think I will probably end up using a combination of them both. 

Here is a link to our class site...

DFI Session 5: Collaborate - Sites

* This mornings discussion was all about visual teaching and learning. The key concepts being that the teaching/learning is accessible, available and in advance. We discussed how our google sites are what we use to make the teaching visible and Hapara is what makes the learning visible. Participating in this DFI course has really modelled these concepts to me and allowed me to step into my students shoes to become the learner and experience how they must feel on a daily basis. The fact that our agenda is available in advance makes me feel more comfortable for the day ahead as I have an idea of what to expect and it is reassuring knowing that the resources are accessible to me if I need to revisit certain things at a later date.  I can see just how beneficial this whole visible teaching and learning kaupapa is for our students and I will continue to work on making my own teaching practice more in line with this.  

We also looked at what multimodal means and how it makes the learning interesting and engaging for not only our students and their whanau, but anyone really. 

Multimodal means having or using a variety of modes or methods to do something.

The over aim behind multimodal is to: REACH THEM, SUIT THEM and ENGAGE THEM. Initially the devices themselves are engagement enough, but that doesn't last. We are now in competition with a mind blowing array of digital media and in order to keep our students (and their whanau) hooked into their learning we need to ensure we keep things visually appealing, interactive and fresh.

During our create time I set up a new site for our Enviro kaupapa but then realised half-way through that I should just add a new page to our main school site so that everything is in one place. I am quite comfortable with how sites work but will definitely be aiming to keep our site more multimodal and constantly changing so that our students are excited to check in and see whats new! Below is a link to one of the pages I added to our school site where we will be starting a seed bank collection....

The 'Hapara Hot Tip' was very handy. I had no idea about the functions of the 'sharing' tab, particularly the 'unshared' function......quite scary looking at the state of my students drives and the amount of docs that are floating around loose! Eeeeek!

DFI Session 4: Dealing with data

Today Dorothy started our session off by talking about the 'SHARE' component of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy. She highlighted the importance of sharing with a purpose and for an authentic audience (not just the teachers red pen).....an authentic audience is people who CHOOSE to listen to you! Sharing in the digital age now goes far beyond our LOCAL communities and has become GLOBAL!

As part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, BLOGGER is our main online space for our students to learn to share. Blogger has similarities to other popular social media spaces but is a lot safer as it allows us as educators to control and monitor commenting much easier.  One message that stuck with me from this mornings presentation was creating a culture within my class where my students don't say 'Im finished' but rather 'I'm ready to share'. The act of sharing can be where the learning begins sometimes...for example the feedback given on blogs etc.

LOTS of new learning for me today! I was not familiar with google sheets, google forms or google my maps. My bubble leader was called on a lot for troubleshooting! I can see that google forms could be a really useful tool and I am looking forward to having a look back through at what other people created to get some ideas. This is a link to the google form that I created today.

Google my maps was a lot of fun to experiment with and I can see that my students would also be fascinated. With younger students I would probably use it more as a whole class activity. I liked the idea someone shared of using it as a follow up reading activity where you plot the journey of a character or even plotting our route after an EOTC trip. We are currently studying our waterways and have recently completed a roadside clean up. I am wondering whether we could use my maps to look at the journey a piece of rubbish might take from our school... to our local awa....to our moana. 

This is a google map of our cohort's ideal holiday destinations....

Google sheets was definitely the thing I struggled the most with today, but I now have a basic understanding of the various functions. I think, like anything if I continue to tutu I will become more confident. I spent some time this afternoon continuing to experiment and was able to work out a few other handy functions. I can see lots of different possibilities using the data to create charts and it was valuable to have a principal in my group so that I could see the way in which she was learning to use it to collate school wide data. It is awesome learning how the Gsuite tools all work in conjunction with one another. Below is the data I used to learn how to find the average, sum, max and sparkline. I was very pleased to learn how to make sheets more appealing to look at to!

Today's CREATE activity was to use google sheets to input data about how often a student was posting on their blog. We then used that data to create two different graphs, one displaying total blog posts for each year and the other displaying total blog posts per month. We were able to use our previous learning of google drawings to insert our chart from our google sheets and ensure they were linked so that when we modify our sheet it automatically updates on our drawing.  I will continue to explore ways in which I can use google sheets to work more efficiently.  Below is the 'Blog Post Analysis' I created...

We were given the code below to use when we are commenting on someones blog and we want to link in a website or a file in the comments section....

<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>