DFI- MEDIA

DFI- Media 
We started today's session with a google hangout with Dorothy. She discussed the importance of connecting with others and how connect goes hand in hand with share. She shared a slide that showed the Manaiakalani mantra of Connected..ubiquitous..empowered...visible. It was interesting to hear her state that if there was one thing that schools are most likely to not do as well at it is the visible. I totally agree with this as I am one of those teachers that would always be the last to share their links and make pages visible. It is not that I don't want to share any of my ideas but there is something about knowing that anyone can go in and look at my planning and lessons that I struggled with. I am getting alot better but I guess it is just a new way of education that we all need to get used to as I know I am not the only one who feels this way. I guess no one wants to be judged..... I totally understand the importance of sharing and I think as time poor, hard working professionals the more we share the easier our lives will be and the richer the experiences we can give our tamariki. Funnily enough children don't seem to have the same hang ups that adults do with sharing everything on the internet. It was interesting to hear how the technology behind twitter has been used to get manaiakalani blogs out to even more people. Blogs are powerful tools for connecting children to outside world.
LIVE STREAMING 
The next thing we did was another google hangout with Kent from point England School. WOW! Its very impressive what he is doing with drones and live streaming. I loved the idea of streaming their sporting events and showing parents when they are having cross country and they can't see the children. This is definitely a goal for the future ... I can see so many opportunities to be able to connect whanau even more as well as the rest of the world. But first I must learn how to use a drone!! You Tube We also explored Youtube today. I already had my own channel set up which I had done at a GAFE course but I learnt how to make playlists today which was very handy and also how to embed them into a site which was very useful for the classroom especially as it stops the problem of things popping up or extra videos running on after children have finished. It is a much safer way to share youtube clips with the kids.

OOGLE SLIDES
After this we looked at google slides. Google slides are something that I use quite often for planning and sites so am quite confident with them. We also got a chance to play with animations using Google slides. Creativity was lacking in me today but I did manage to create something. Slides can also be used for pick a path stories or quizes. This is something I would like to explore with the kids sometime as it can be done on ipads easily.


GOOGLE DRAW
Google draw was another tool we looked at today. we saw some amazing art work using tracing and colouring which is another activity to explore with the kids. I have always shied away from Google Draw as I found it fiddly but I am becoming more confident with this now and am finding it a very useful tool.

DFI Day 5

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

• Today was another session on sites which was good to have some extra time to really get into things and experiment. I found the discussion in the morning with Dorothy interesting particularly when she brought up about "old school" teaching was alot about success going to the kids who could participate and anticipate what teacher wants. I had never thought about how we used to teach being like this. It highlighted just how much rewindable and visible learning makes learning accessible to so many more kids at different levels. One thing I did think about though was with all our learning so visible those children who love to learn could be providing extra work for teachers as they will be the ones that go on the site and complete the weeks work in one day! I understand that even though all whanau do not access In a our sites and in a perfect world they would but it can be a little disheartening when the majority of parents don't go onto the blog or site when you put so much time into it. I have found that sites are alot more pertinent in senior classes than junior classes. They still do play a role in juniors but I am yet to have it direct learning and be the crux of learning like it is in a senior class.What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

• I redid my class timetable today for my site and was frustrated when I the columns cut off half of the sentences so I was able to google how to make the columns in a sheet bigger and make the changes. Having the time to take today to look through other blogs and have a play with sites which has made me more confident to create and change sites. It just highlighted that with all of our DFI things it just takes time and practise to master things.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

• It wasn't so much what I learnt today that I could use with my learners but rather a reminder that I need to make my juniors be more active participants on my site and use it better to as a teaching tool. It would make sense for the children to be more independent with their learning which they could be with the site. I found moving from a chromebook class to a class with ipads I lost the need to use sites as a daily teaching tool.
  What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

• I think from today I created more work for myself as I got alot of ideas from different sites that we explored but I think the experiment time allowed me to get faster at using and creating sites which in the long run will save me time. I must try the site challenge this week !!!

DFI Session 4

Hangout with Dorothy

Today we started our morning with  a Google Hangout with Dorothy to discuss the concept of "share."The main ideas behind this was that we have been sharing our thoughts and ideas forever but as time has gone on and in our digital world now we now we have the ability to share with a much larger, far reaching audience than we ever did before. It was refreshing to hear that there is no right way to share, that it was up to the individual and the needs. Sharing is such a normal part of school life and now we are able to reach a far wider audience and interact with these people. Dorothy made  a really good point now that sharing has changed we are sharing with people who want to listen. I liked that she emphasised the fact that all of this needs to come under of the umbrella of accelerating our children- this has a purpose. We had an interesting discussion about the children's blogs and the comments that they get. The idea was that the posts should be open to receive feedback without the teacher checking the comments are suitable with the idea being that we are allowing the children the chance to solve and react to the problem if it arises- teaching them how to deal with it. I sit on the fence with this idea as I feel that some comments could be quite damaging to certain children , as well as that some of the parents may not be so happy. I understand the idea behind it but am not 100% I am comfortable with it.

Multi Modal Learning 

Next we moved onto multi modal learning. We looked at how we could personalise learning for students and how this can help with accelerating children’s learning. It is important to sell learning to children and make it fun and exciting and it can’t be the same each week. One thought that did come into my head though was that we need to be conscious that it is not all about looking flash. It is ok to put on pretty pictures and  videos but we still need to make sure the teaching/direction is there. It is fine to have it look great but the learning is the main point.

DFI session 3

Google Hangout: We started the day with a google hangout with a west coast DFI group. This was interesting to touch base with other people who are on the same course but further along. It was good to see what they were feeling about the work and how they have used some of their skills. It was great to see how comfortable I was using Google Hangouts this time. CREATE: The next focus was centered on Create. It was a reminder of how important the create part of the curriculum is and that it is not about telling kids what to do but instead giving them a platform to create and using those teachable moments for you and students to guide and collaborate with learners. Not putting too many confines on the learning and allowing students to delve into lots of different thinking and concepts allows them to best create. After discussions it was easy to see that there are so many different ways in which you can incorporate “create” into your classroom program.

DFI Day 2

Dorothy We started the day with a google hangout with Dorothy Burt . Again it was an interesting and informative chat. I liked the idea that we are not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the recognition of that all schools are different with different needs. It is always a worry when a new idea or direction is taken up in the education sector that we will have to start from scratch and/or completely change the way we teach when some things are definitely working well and making positive changes/acceleration. The question -” What are the effective practises?” Is a question that would be really interesting to put to all staff and see our differences or similarities in responses. This would be a great way to see if we are all heading in the same direction. Dorothy brought up the thought - Can the children articulate what ‘learn’ looks like? This is something that we ask the children all the time at our school and it is very powerful to see what the children actually do understand and if they can articulate it. This is a way to show that the learning is deep learning. Great teaching + digital affordances = acceleration I think sums up what our learning journey is about for our schools at the moment. Lastly Dorothy talked about rewindable learning .- This is a very crucial and highly effective tool for for all learners. No longer are those children that take a bit longer or need repetition at a disadvantage to the others in the classroom. Also it is a way of catering for different learning styles. Google keep This was a place to add notes, save sites/docs. Another way to further organise things. Looks like a one stop shop to be able to collaborate and store important notes and resources. This is something that I will definitely explore further. It seems to be a more compact way to incorporate information held on bookmarks bar, notes, google docs etc. Gmail The next area we concentrated on was gmail. This was an interesting part of the course when I discovered the 1000s of emails sitting in my inbox !! It was great to refine my labels and learn how to add filters !! If I had only learnt this today I would have been a happy lady. Calendars Exploring calendars, bookmarks and tabs allowed another chance to give organise, discard and generally get a better command on what resources/documents I actually have. Some of the apps such as google priority Hangouts We also explored Google hangouts. This was great because although I had been a participant in them before I had never had the opportunity to actually present so this was beneficial. I think this tool could be helpful for my age children for contacting experts / other schools as part of research. We then used it as cooperative group activity. This was an interesting experience. I have been part of hangouts before but never set one up myself or had to record one. This was good to have experience for future reference but unfortunately the recording part was not successful. Alot of learning took place there! We did end up with a beautiful blank video with no sound that was very impressive…...NOT. But I now know how to record the right way and have learnt by making mistakes : )

DFI COURSE DAY 1

Today began the first day of the Digital Fluency Intensive. It was a full on day that moved at a fast pace and delivered lots of interesting and valuable chunks of learning. First we had an overview about the Manaiakalani story from Dorothy Burt via Google hangouts. It was really interesting to see just how far this initiative had come. Being involved in a manaiakalani school for a number of years I was still shocked to see the transition from very using few computers to what is available today and the amount of effort and work that was needed to get there. Next we moved on