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 : )