5 DFI 1/06/2021

Learning- 

Visible - Can you see it or not? - Is learning visible to whanau/our colleagues - schooling in the past has been a mystery. In the past learning has been 'a bit of a maze'. Websites now repurpose the olden day blackboard.   Visibility encompasses the 3 A's- Accessible, Availability and Advance. Is school an open learning environment (Is learning able to be accessed easily?) 

Learning has to be multi modal - What engages one learner might not engage another learner. I love the old teaching quote that you 'cannot get a fish to climb a tree'. 

Hapara- Log in to the sharing tab, then go to the unshared tab. This will show you how many documents that children need to allocate to the correct folders eg. Literacy, numeracy. The documents that come up are currently unallocated. It is recommended to do this once or twice a week to keep your drive clean. 

We created a website today collaboratively. Initially, we were split up into age levels that we taught. Our group decided to do a one page website on Financial Literacy.  Information was gathered from wide range of sources. The next task was to use this information and individually create our own one page website. The website that I created can be found here.

One tool that I will take back into my classroom will be teaching the children how to navigate their drives and sort their folders. I am excited now that I have a easy way to scrutinize how clean their drives are via Hapara. 

I have also made amendments to my class website adding a number of resources that are going to further support their learning.  

4 DFI -25/05/21

 Learning:

Sharing within schools is constrained by time, places and people. Authenticity of the audience is at the heart of sharing- an authentic audience according to Manaikalani is people who have the power to move on. 

Blogger: Tool to show people how to teach - resembles spaces our young learners want to be on. Similar to learning to drive. When you learn to drive a car you don't learn in a flash Ferrari most often you learn in an old/nana car. Same thing applies for Blogger. One big advantage of Blogger is owned by Google. 

Google Forms: Great to make surveys to get feedback from your class. You can also make quiz's. Good to make required fields so that students do not skip questions. You can import data that you have collected from a specific Google Form to a Google Map and add it in for example if you have a question about which is your dream destination to visit. 

Google Maps: Great to show bicycle routes. You can add multiple layers with different information. Maths - could use maps to work out the perimeter and the area. 

Google Sheets: Google translate was a good function. Once you have a data set and you select the data you want to make a chart on. You can go down to the bottom right corner and click the 'explore' button. This will bring up the recommended graphs that will look best for the data you are wanting to chart. Filter- Once you select the data that you want go up to the top right corner and click on the funnel icon. When that pops up go into your headings and filter accordingly. 

Blogging- Writing a quality blog

3 DFI-18/05/21

Day 3- Learning:

Hapara session- How to filter groups -can create a media folder to keep an eye on content students are creating. 

Creativity (Under the learn/create/share) philosophy  - Great NZ based documentary (The Heart of the Matter Documentary) -Tomorrow Schools, National Standards are some of the ways stated in NZ that have allegedly killed/diminished creativity in schools) - 'We need to return to our roots' was common thread when Dorothy spoke this morning- Start with 'create' so learning emerges and there is a child centred focus. In 'creating' a child gains purpose- Sir Ken Robinson (How Schools Kill Creativity, is another great doco). Sight, sound and motion - How important it is in advertising and how it relates to creativity- adds a greater connection for the user (Good to relay to our students about how to connect to their audience).  

You Tube Channel session- Have videos marked as unlisted (You have to give people the link-suggested) - Don't go down the public route. Turn commenting off on you videos. Think about the channel name. Best way to share videos is via a blog or a site. Ensure that children do not have their own You Tube channels when using their school accounts. There a legal issues associated with this. 

Media session- A tripod is great to help stabilise the camera when recording learning (could be a cup, box ect) is a must. Audio - Obviously need to have somewhere quiet to record it. Camera should mostly be on landscape mode. Be aware of lighting (window- make shadows on screens). If students are filming using laptops you can just tilt the screen.  Screencastify is a really great tool for rewindable learning. Zac Moran 2019 has a really good tips via videos on how to use cameras ect. 

Google Slides session- Remember to use only 2 fonts maximum so that your slides are not to busy. Keep in mind your audience. When you create slides for your learners, make sure you drag the most recent slide to the top so it is easiest to create for your learners.  Google Slides are awesome for getting your kids to make animations. Some kids have completed approx 1000 slides. Very engaging. If you are doing an animation, after you create your first slide you can duplicate it by hitting 'command D'. Make sure that when you have positioned all the images in the slide the way you want them go to 'arrange' then hit 'group'. 

Making interesting Google Slides-start off be making a interesting background- For example type in the search bar 'Floor and wall.png' - putting the .png at the end will make the background of the image you are wanting to select transparent. Then you can add say a plant, rug, tv, couch ect.  

Unsplash.com - beautiful pictures that are free to use 

DFI was very interesting online today. I definitely became more familiar with using Google Meet. 

2 DFI -11/05/2021

Day 2 - Learning:

Google Keep- The functions that really appealed to me were the fact that you could use them as a 'checklist' and adapt it accordingly for groceries. I like the fact that it can be used on you phone too and the ability of the 'app' to add people like my wife. I thought it was interesting if you turn on your location services and you apply a particular setting, you can actually get notified of the note when you drive past the location like the supermarket. I also liked the picture text grab tool, very handy for things like close reading activities. 

Google Meet- It was interesting to learn how to share your screen so that everyone else could see what you were looking at and so you could talk to it. I liked the fact that it automatically mutes your microphone when there is over a certain number of people on the call. I found it easiest to set up the Google Meet via Google Calendar. What was neat was that I could also add a location as well. The raising hand signal was also helpful. I did get kicked off the 'meet' on a couple of occasions which was annoying. 

Google Mail- I loved being able to categorize my email into 3 folders (Primary/Social and Promotional) and my email then applying this automatically. 

Taming tabs- I found this useful especially the 'pinning' aspect of it . One Tab was a good extension for bringing all your tabs into one place and then also restoring tabs. Could be useful when managing reading groups ect.

Google Calendar- I liked the appointment slots and the colour coding that you could format the slots with.

How to embed a video on your blog:

-First change your settings in share and make sure 'anyone with the link can view'

-Double click on the video

-Next go to the 3 dots and go 'open in a new window'.

-Next go back to the 3 dots and hit 'embedd item' and when the box comes up copy that text.

Then go to your blog and hit the pencil drop down in the top left corner and go to the HTML view and then paste the text you copied in there. Go back to the compose view and voila. 

Dialogue examples meme model for students

 

1 DFI - 4/05/21

Day 1- Learning:

What a fantastic start to the DFI course.

Today I learnt that Manaiakalani is a Hawaiian name given to a group of budding educators who wanted to bring digital technology to children in schools in NZ no matter the decile. Essentially breaking down barriers. I found it interesting that external help setting up the programme was sourced from educators who had done something similar in Maine in the USA. However, their big tip to the original Maaiakalani founders was that they needed to find some way to be able to get families to be able to contribute money towards devices.

The first session has helped me gain confidence with using Google Docs, Google Drive and Blogger.

Short cuts I found useful were:

Swap between tabs- control + #

Shift z- will allow you to save it into a folder

Control shift v- to bring through paste without formatting

Control shift b- bring book mark bar down or to remove it

Remove bg- https://www.remove.bg/ (Great website for removing background from your pictures)

Google Docs - Use explore to add images that don't have copyright to your work. It was also interesting to add subheadings then access them quickly via the table of contents. Would be beneficial if children in my class are writing a book and these sub headings could be chapter names. 

Remove boarders using Google Tables by setting the table colour the same as your page colour.

If you want to bring your folders in your drive to the top of your drive. Label the most important one with an astrix which will bring it all the way to the top.