Today was the first day of the one Digital Fluency Intensive. This involves 40+ teachers from around the New Zealand.
The morning started learning about Manaiakalani and its origin story and the journey they have been on since. Its very valuable learning more about why Manaiakalani was started and how the community were able to work together because they wanted to do better for their children. I think this is important because we all want to do better for our students and being apart of this DFI is going to help me learn a lot of new skills to use within my classroom.
Some of the key points of the why
- They knew that the digital world was hooking young people and that this needed to be harnessed. It was a way to grab the attention of learners because they were already interested.
- They could see the potential in this and wanted students to be content creatures and be able to share their learning.
- Equity! They needed to make sure that everyone in the community had access, its important that no one is left behind.
- They wanted to focus on the fact that achievement is much bigger than test scores.
Today I was also able to revise a range of skills for using google drive/docs and even learned some new skills!
- You can add a bookmark by dragging the padlock down to the bookmark bar (this one is exciting)
- How to check the groups you are in and change settings etc
- How to use headings in google docs
- Getting students to practice their reading fluency with the voice to text tool
- Control + Number to switch between tabs (only the first 9)
- How to set up workspaces in the priority tab of google drive (this is something I want to do over the next week to help save time).
We also got some time to be creative and design something on google docs using a table. I choose to create a talk moves poster for my class that we can refer to during mathematics. I used remove.bg to remove the backgrounds of the pictures that I have added onto my poster. Having more confidence in being creative will help me model to students some of the possibilities of what they can create. Although I am constantly learning from them!
Here is my poster
Overall I had a great day full of lots of learning. It was great getting to work in digital bubbles, with just a small group of others. I feel like this time will be very valuable. I am really looking forward to next weeks session to continue building on what we started today and learn more about Manaiakalani and the 'learn, create, share' pedagogy over the next 8 weeks!
