DFI - Day 9

Today was our External Recognition day!

We got to spend our time this morning doing the Google Educator exam and I passed!! It feels great to have sit the exam and test my learning! I think this was a great way to end the DFI. There were a few questions (mainly about google classroom) that I had no idea about but we got there in the end!

This has motivated me to give the level 2 exam a go in the next holidays. I will post the results to my blog after I do that! 

What an amazing 9 weeks! There is so much we have covered and it has been fantastic to have this time to learn, create, and share. I think having the time to try out new things is so important before we try to use them in the classroom. Also, after being in a Manaiakalani school for 3 and a half years it was great to get a better understanding of the Manaikalani pedagogy and kaupapa. 

One of the highlights from DFI for me was working in my digital bubble. I found this time very valuable being in a small group as it was a lot easier to ask questions and learn from each other. Its been great to see everyone grow in confidence throughout this term!

One of the biggest changes going forward is going to be ensuring I make learning as visible as possible. This is now something I really think about when planning and updating my class site. I look forward to reflect on how this is going in the future. 

I am so thankful I was given this opportunity to take part in DFI! It has been a fantastic 9 weeks and I am going to miss this time to focus on my own learning! (although I know my class are looking forward to it being over). 

Thank you Cheryl & Vicki and the rest of the DFI team!

DFI Day 8!!

This week for our focus was empowerment and computational thinking. Below are some of the amazing things I took in today!

During lockdown students were empowered to make the choice if they wanted to take part in the learning we set or if they would rather play games, watch netflix etc. We need to think about how are we going to engage and connect our learners? I feel coming back from lockdown I have some students who have really struggled getting back into the school routine and this question has been going through my mind. 

We also discussed the importance Encouraging students to have a conversation on their blog posts. Its not just a "great job" we should be encouraging students to ask questions, reply to their comments. This is something I have been working on but it needs to be ongoing. We actually completed the cyber smart blog challenge during lock down focusing on quality blog comments. As I am making commenting a regular task in class I will keep working on this with my class! Its also something I can model with my class when I comment on their blogs.

Today we also talked a lot about the digital technology curriculum and integrating this into our classrooms. We were shared a lot of resources to look through. I spent quite a bit of time looking through Raranga Matihiko and their resources and am excited to think about how I could use some of these resources in my classroom.

We also got some time to check out some coding tasks! I chose to work on code.org and started with a minecraft task then moved onto coding a flappy bird game. Check out my game here. I know this would be so engaging for my students! Can't wait to give it a try with them. I remember using code.org 

For create I got to spent some time on scratch. Our focus was how we can link mathematics into scratch - with a focus on geometry. We looked at creating a range of different 2d shapes which you need knowledge of the interior angles of these shapes to put into the code. I think my class would love this!! We are going to be looking at angles next term so I am excited to give this a go in class. I think this will be incredibly engaging for students and will be a great way to get them engaged with this learning!

I can't believe that next week is our final session! I am excited for the exam next week. But sad that it will be our last day! I have really enjoyed having this time on DFI to learn, create and share! It will help me so much going forward.

DFI week 7

Today was our 7th day of DFI! Crazy that we are already this far through the term. This morning it was great meeting with my digital bubble and talking about our experience going back to school yesterday. It was apparent that everywhere the most important thing was maintaining those relationships with students. 

Ubiquitous - Anytime, anywhere, any pace, anyone! 

Being apart of Manaiakalani has been amazing and put us in a great position going into lockdowns. It has meant that our students are able to connect with us and their learning is visible on our class sites. This really shows the importance of rewindable learning! 

Summer learning journey - this is something I have tried to get students involved with in the past but not a lot have taken on this opportunity. I will really try to encourage my students this year as I can see the amazing potential of taking part in this programme. The statistics coming from this programme are really impressive and I think I would like to share some of these with my students when explaining it later this year. 

Cybersmart - In our year of being apart of Manaiakalani I was lucky enough to have Vicki come into my class once a week to model cybersmart lessons for me. This was great PD and I learned a lot from this experience. It is great that all the students in our cluster went through this cybersmart programme so when they come to us at year 7 we can carry on with what they have previously learned. I almost feel that lately I have been slack with focusing on cybersmart so listening to this session this morning has reminded me the importance of these lessons and I am going to think about how to include this in my learning programme more! I have enjoyed setting the cybersmart blog challenges during lockdown and am thankful that these were made available to us. 

"we need to empower them to make smart decisions when online"

Today during our create session I started making a hapara workspace with some key areas of smart learners that I feel like I need to spent time on with my class. I will start the first one next week and will update how it goes.

Digital Dig - Today we got to spend time in our digital bubble working on a digital dig. I can see the importance of doing something like this with students to ensure they know how to use their chromebook! As a teaching it is important I know how to do these things on a chromebook too. I always struggle with the screenshot on the chromebook because I always forget. Lucky I have some amazing experts in my class that are happy to help. Check out my digital dig below (may not be completely finished as I did not have a chromebook to work from).

Explain everything - Today we got to have a look at explain everything which is a tool used in junior schools on ipads. We don't have any ipads in our school but it was good to check out this tool and how to use it. My nephew uses an ipad at his school in Australia and he loves showing me all of the things he had been doing in class with explain everything! Below is my attempt at having a play around on the web version. I think it would be a lot smoother on an ipad but it was great to give it a go. 

Reflecting on the Kaupapa of the Manaiakalani Programme in light of COVID 19 , whether you did Lockdown: Season 1 or Seasons 2/3/4, and YOUR readiness for ubiquitous learning...

• What are you proud of? I was proud of my students and how willing they are to adapt to the challenges of online learning! I am also feeling good about my class site and how far I have come with the work I am sharing on here.

• What do you regret? I think the thing I regret was maybe thinking we wouldn't go into lockdown again so I didn't take the time to prepare my students for online learning. We talked about different ways we can prepare students for online learning in the classroom - practice google meets, exploring our class site and doing something like a class site scavenger hunt.

• What have you taken forward into the ‘new’ era of schooling? Going forward I am going to plan how I make the learning that takes part in our classroom more visible on our class site. This is something to think about going into next term! Lets so what I create!

How are you using rewindable learning to support

1. Young people with learning needs? Something I am enjoying using is Mote records on all of my tasks I put onto my class site. I have a number of students who struggle with reading and often get stuck when I can't read a task to them. Mote has meant that I am able to record myself explaining a task to students and there is no longer this barrier.

2. Diversity, groups, wide range of abilities? With my year 9s I have been making slideshows with videos and screenshots of the learning we have been doing during lockdown and then sharing this on my class site. This is giving students the opportunity to go back and view these lessons again when they need it and in the own pace.

How did you support your learners for these days when you knew you were going to be absent (ie at DFI)? Thinking about when I first started teaching and setting relief was such a mission. It was often busy work, follow on tasks or one of tasks to fill the day. Now I am able to leave students work as if I was there. I can make videos and post on my class site and students can access everything they need!

What COULD you have done from the beginning if you knew what you know now? I think one of the most important things for me is just building my confidence to put myself out there and create videos/rewindable learning for my students. I hate hearing my own voice or watching my own videos but they are so valuable for our students!

What digital tools could you make more use of? One tool I have really enjoyed recently is jamboard! I really want to continue using this in my learning programme in the future. I also feel I know have a lot more skills in using google slides and drawings that I can use within my future learning programmes.

Here is an example of one of the tasks I created during lockdown.

Overall this was another great day at DFI! Its exciting thinking about the google exam coming up. I can't believe we only have 2 more weeks, it is going so fast and I am really enjoying having this time to learn and be creative with the support from the facilitators.

DFI Week 6

This weeks session was all about google sites! Its good to continue building my understanding of the importance of visible sites and seeing lots of different examples.

It is important that google sites are visible for students and Whanau. Because the learning is visible on our sites it has meant students have been able to continue with their learning during lockdown. I have had feedback from parents that they have enjoyed being able to go through my class site and see what we are doing in class. My next goal is to keep adding rewindable learning to my class site. I need 

One of my Goals for this session was to get my students blogs linked on my class site. This was something I started just before lockdown on a google drawing but never actually linked the blogs to it. I created the template below and got students to decorate a text box each with their name (its still a work in progress as you can see). Today I linked all their individual blogs to each box so now you can click on the name to access the blog. This is going to make commenting on each others blogs a lot easier! Check it out here.

Cheryl when shared with me a way another teacher is making her students more accountable of the work they are posting on their blog and making sure they are commenting on each others blogs. I am going to use the template to create one for my class and give it a go. I will update how this is going in a a few weeks after I introduce it to my class.

My next goal was to add some buttons to my class site. I have had buttons on my home page before but went back to have the tabs across the top. This just seemed to work better for me and my students. But maybe I will try again some day.

In saying that I did today create buttons for my mathematics page. Making this look a whole lot better! I'm still trying to figure out what colour I want the background but for now I will keep it as the default theme one. I also created a banner at the top! Check out these screenshots of the before and after.

Before

After

Or maybe in pink?

Kate from my bubble also showed us how to add an announcement to our class sites too. This is where you can write daily/weekly announcements and it will show up at the top of your site. You can also change the colour and choose if you want it to be on every page or just the home page of your site.

Overall I had a great day being creative and having time to have a play around with my google site! I am already thinking about what buttons I am going to create next! 

DFI Day 5

Visible teaching and learning - the idea of can we see it? or can we not? Important this is about teaching and learning. We need to think about - Is it visible to the learners? Is it visible to the Whanau? Is it visible to the teacher? Is it visible to colleagues?

We need to think about when is it truly necessary to have stuff password protected. We want our students and Whanau to be able to access our teaching and learning without barriers. One of the helpful tips I got from Vicki previously is make the folder assessable for everyone so when you create documents in the folder you don't have to share again. 

I still don't have a lot of parents that make comments on blogs but it is something we are working on. Going into lockdown has made the visibility of teaching and learning even more important. I have had a few comments during lockdown from parents that they have had a good look at our class site and like how students can carry on with work as if they were at school.

One of the things I am still working on is creating videos of teaching to share on my site. This is quite out of my comfort zone but I am finding students are engaging well with this. It has meant when I am away they can continue with their work and they can work from home. 

Multimodal - delivering communication to people in a way that interests them and suits them. We want to design a class site that is accessible for all of our learners. This can help students become self directed. 

Leveraging up - Multiple texts through multiple modes. Exposing students to a whole range of texts and different. Gives students the opportunity to be critical thinkers (something I am currently working on with my students).
We are able to improve students' understanding for;
- Different perspectives and points of view
- Discern levels of credibility and reliability (really important!!)
- Different 'types' of texts - written, audio, visual, symbolic, etc

This has been an area I have really on just started to look into. We have done 1 off multimodal tasks for students but I really want to make this much more common within my teaching programme. I really like how we were shared the multi-text database and can see the value of this. I want this to be a focus for the near future in my planning. I look forward to continue exploring different ways that teachers set this up for students (again another amazing thing of everyone's sites being visible!!).

Kerry also spoke about recreating a new site each year and seeing how much these develop over the years. This got me really curious to go have a look at my sites from previous years. I have been using google sites since I started teaching in 2016 (back in the old sites days). It was great to go back and see how my sites have developed over the years. Some things I noticed - I have a lot more of my teaching/learning visible, I have changed the way I have my learning planner (I have written straight onto sites, used calendars, used google sheets, and the last couple of years I have been using google slides). Its amazing how much google sites have changed since I have been using them, they are always adding more options which is exciting! There are so many possibilities!

Google sites

Today we have gone over the basics for creating a site again. I found this very helpful as I am often one of the people in my school who helps others when they need assistance in creating their sites. Tips - making sure that you use the year in your site URL so you know what year it is from. 

We also got the time to start creating our own multimodal sites. I started 2 (because I kept changing my mind on what I wanted to create and had a really good idea related to next term). I started with an ANZAC day site - check it out here but keep in mind it is still a work in progress. 

I plan on using this next year so will continue to work on. So far I have really only added in videos and texts but will work on some tasks to complete with these. The other site I started to create is to do with our health topic for next term which is focused on getting active. This was sparked by looking through the multimodal text data base that was shared with us and one related to walking/getting active. I will continue to work on this site too and use it as a way to introduce our topic next term.

Overall another very enjoyable day on DFI! I am getting so much out of being part of this PLD and really enjoy working with my bubble. I can also see the benefit in using multimodal texts! I am looking forward to seeing how much students engage with these. Can't wait for next week.

DFI 4 - Sharing and working with data

Today was Day 4 of DFI, also our first one in lockdown. DFI was moved to online last year because of the lockdowns. I think it is great being able to connect with teachers from all around the country for DFI so really enjoy having it online. Also very evident is the importance of the skills we are learning with the potential of lockdown being extended.

Sharing

The ability to share and connect with other people is so important. Using blogger students have share with a much wider audience that they previously could. 

There were many reasons why blogger was chosen as the platform for students to use to share their learning. I actually remember using blogger as a year 8 student and how exciting it was seeing each others posts.

Some of the things we do in my class

- Having blogs shared with Whanau 

- Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu

- Commenting on other students without our school blogs (students love this!)

One thing that I need to work on is not just using blogs to share 'finished/final' version of work. Students can use it as a way of getting feed-forward from others. I also need to get students to start replying to the comments they get. 

Google forms

I love google forms. They are something I have been teaching myself how to use for a while so it was good to have a focus session on using google forms. There are a lot of different settings with google forms that I have not explored yet. So I will be able to have a good look at these in the future. I did really like how people use google forms to do spelling tests and can see how good this would be!

My test form

I have also created another form my students to fill out while in lockdown, just so they can check in with me each day and I can get a sense of how they are feeling or if they have any questions.

Google My Maps

I have used google my maps with my students before but today I learned so much more about my maps! I did not know you could import spreadsheets which is really handy to know,  I will think about how I can use this in class. Here is a quick google my map I created with places around my town. 

Google Sheets

Filter options - There are a lot of filters that you can use to sort data. I had a play around with this and can already see how I can use this to look at data differently!! (and a lot easier to sort that manually). I would like to keep working on how I use sheets for my assessment data in the future. 

We also looked at using sheets to do an analysis of blog posts. We watched a lovely video of a student doing this with her blog pots. 

Here is the example I made using data from one of my students blog posts. I really liked this! We are currently doing statistics in mathematics and I think I will use this as one of my tasks for next week! Will also be a great way to show students what their blogging stats look like.

Quality blog comments

Its important that students have a framework when commenting on blogs. Below is one about writing quality blog comments. I will be showing this to my students again and talking through it with them. I think this is something that constantly needs to be revisited with students as they often forget what a quality blog comment should look like.

Overall another great day of learning. It will be good to be a bit more creative over the next couple of weeks with my students. 

DFI Day 3 - Media/Create

Manaiakalani pedagogy - Create

Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators.

I really liked the quote “Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining” (Kohl, 2008). I think it's really important that we encourage our students to be creative and that they know anyone can be creative! I find that giving the students the change to be creative is a great way to get them engaged in learning.

"Not just getting them to use the tools we have - getting them to use them in a creative way"

"We want them to create content, not just sit there and consume."

Something I have been trying to do is give students more choice. For example, we are currently working on novel studies this week. For one of the independent tasks students were given was “create a quiz with questions about the chapters you have read this week”. I did not say how they needed to create this and students choose lots of different ways to do this. I really liked how some students created pick a paths in google slides.

I do realise some students really struggle with this and having too much choice or just having no idea where to start. I found one of the really beneficial things we have done is being apart of Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu where they have been able to see what other students their age have created. This has really pushed my students further with their creativity.

As we are currently going down the Deep learning path at my school it was good to see how closely this relates with the Manaiakalani pedagogy. 

Fonts

One of the most exciting things from today was being introduced to google fonts and the amazing amount of different fonts available!! I could spend a very long time exploring the different fonts. I am going to choose a couple I really like and start using them with my learning planning etc. I love fonts and am happy to know how easy it is to get new fonts! Also Cheryl showed us the perfect pairings too! Can't wait to keep exploring.

Pick a path 

For our create time today I attended a pick a path workshop. I thought it was relevant because of the work my students created in the last couple of days. Today I created a maths starter for my year 9s to get started on our next unit.

Handy tip - always make sure that you check as you go by going into present mode.

Google drawings

Today we created a blog profile in google drawings. I have now put this on the side of my blog for people to look at when they go onto my blog. Next step make sure every student has one and also make one for my class blog!

 

 Today we also had the chance to have a play with google drawings and making a cartoon version of a picture. Here is my not so amazing first attempt (this was very challenging). This is something I could see my students loving though! Might be a fun afternoon creative task for them to create a new blog profile picture.

Overall this was another great day of learning! I am looking forward to being more creative with my class.