DFI - Week 9

External Recognition

Today I had the opportunity to sit my Level 1 Google Educators exam and I PASSED! 

A highlight for me from taking part in the DFI has been having all of the Google Tools explained to me step by step. I’ve been problem solving my way through them for years and I’ve found it very helpful to have had all the bits of puzzle I’d been missing filled in. I also found it helpful to hear the “why” that sits behind everything we do.

I’ve enjoyed taking what I’ve learnt back to school to sharing it with my student teacher and with my co-teachers. We are all using our class site and slowly building it up to become a visible reflection of what is happening in our busy, fun new entrants space!

Nothing on this course hasn’t worked for me, but it take time for me to put what I have learnt into my practice. 

It has pushed me to do better, because now I know better.

Going forward, I aim to keep using the skills I have learnt and to continue learning! 

I'd love to be able to share with other teachers the "structured literacy" journey that I have been on this year.  It has be incredible to see my children experience success as readers and writers, and really enjoy and look forward to our literacy time. I'd love to see this learning reflected in the online space and taken to the next level with some digital tools. 

Nga Mihi! 

DFI - Week 8

Computational Thinking 

The focus of our DFI session today was "computational thinking".  

We took part in some digital and non-digital computational thinking experiences. 

We worked as a team to put together a set of instructions  and one of our team members had to follow the instructions to make it safely across the room. 

  

Here is just a bit of fun using the website "code.org" to make a dance. How much fun would this be in the classroom! The children could bring their own dances to life with a dance party after they had made their dances online! So cool! 

Term Three Inquiry Planning

This has sparked an idea for our topic planning for term 3. 

Time is so precious in the classroom so making cross curricular links is always winner! I think the oral language aspect of computation thinking is would be very beneficial to my learners - especially the directional language as this is something I have observed that they are yet to grasp!  I've added in some computational thinking experiences for my learning within the Inquiry topic for next term. 

Here is what I have planned so far! More to be added over time and I need to make the links the relevant curriculum areas. 

Moko-ika-hiku-waru Topic Planning

Moko-ika-hiku-waru Slides 

On a side note - I was so amazing to come across a child's blog from Ruapotaka school sharing about this local story. I was able to leave him comment and thank him for sharing his learning. 

But the highlight of the day has to be hearing the children from Point England School share their learning!

It was amazing experience junior school teacher to see where my learners, as five year olds are heading in their journey at school. 

Nga Mihi! 

DFI - Week 7

Devices! 

We had a opportunity today to experience life using a chromebook and an iPad from the perspective of a learner in a 1:1 digital classroom. 

First up was the chromebook, overall I found it easy to adapt to as a teacher who uses google chrome everyday. I thought as a classroom teacher it would important to go over all the shortcuts with the students, especially when they are just beginning their chromebook journey as I'm sure the children who have been using them awhile are absolute experts already! 

Secondly, we had a go with the iPads. I enjoyed using Explain Everything after not having used it in many years - it was a lovely nostalgic moment that made me think back to my first few years of teaching. I loved how Explain Everything can now be accessed on a laptop - I thought this must have been a real game changer for iPad teachers (as I can remember the frustration of uploading EE files to my google drive and not being able to open them to check I'd picked the right one for my learner's class site). Overall, I liked using the iPad to create using photos, text and drawings in Explain Everything to share what we had been learning. 

Ubiquitous learning.  

Ubiquitous learning is learning that can happen anywhere, anyplace, anytime and from anyone. 

I'm interested to see what this could look like in my new entrant classroom. I would love to be able to share our literacy programme with our whanau, as we have begun using a structured literacy approach this year and it is a way of teaching that is new to our school community. I know that creating a partnership with our whanau has always been crucial to the success of our learners and sharing this new way of teaching literacy with them is important. I'd love for them to be able to see video examples of what it learning looks like for there children on our class site so that they can continue this learning in the home. 

Lastly, this slide  about 'ubiquitous learning' also made me ask the question, if it isn't worth capturing... is it worth teaching?.... 

Nga Mihi 

DFI - Week 6

The theme of our session today was "enabling access". 

As a part of our session today we were given time to create or work on our own class sites. 

I have begun creating a class site for my year 0/1 class. It is a class site that is aimed at parents and the teachers (we will be becoming a collaborative space next term) in our classroom - rather than directly at the children as we do not have devices in our classroom... yet! 

I'd like for the children's learning to be as visible as possible (in a classroom without devices). I have aimed to mimic the site layout of a class site with iPads by using large icons for the main learning areas and will insert Google sides into each page that show what the tamariki will be learning in class each week. I've tried to keep it as clean as possible white background and a limited colour palette but also had a little fun with adding some bitmojis and photos as we are a class of colour lovin' five year olds!! I used bitmojis as I struggled to find images I like that matched each other (colour and style wise), were high quality and free. In the future, I'd love to use photos in my buttons BUT I think I would have to take photos with the buttons in mind in order for them to be effective. 

I still have quite a bit of work to do to get it looking right and reflecting the learning that happens in our classroom.. but it is getting there slowly. 

Click here to see my Class Site.

I'd very much appreciate your feedback. 

Nga Mihi! 

DFI - Week 5

 Collaborate - Google Sites

The theme of this week was exploring Google sites with an emphasis on the importance of creating sites that are visible, multi-modal, and multi-textural. 

 Exploring Google Sites 

The most valuable tip I learnt today about Google Sites, was how to plan a Google Site. We spent time with pencil and paper planning the layout and design of our sites before clicking "create new site". I found that this helped my site to come together easily. 

Here is my planning:

Here is the multi-textual and multi-modal site that I created. It is a site aimed at year 1/2 learners with access to iPads. It explores the theme of "keep trying" through the topic of Matariki. 

Rebecca's Matariki Site

In reflection, when I create a site for this purpose again I would keep the layout the same with an engaging home page followed by pages for "Learn", "Create" and "Share". Next time, I would use Google Keep to gather all my ideas and create buttons and banners before beginning to create the site. 

I am curious to know how other junior school teachers (especially those in new entrant classrooms) use multi-textual learning with their learners.

I am thinking of using quality picture books read by teacher with class discussion of the vocabulary and story. I also think using images, youtube videos, and songs would be effective ways of exposing new entrant children to new vocabulary, ideas and to make links between texts to deepen their understanding. 

Any thoughts? 

DFI - Week 4

Welcome to week 4 - our focus this week was dealing with data!

The focus of my blog post today is Google Sheets. 

Google Sheets is a tool that I find I am using more and more often in my teaching life. I started diving deeper into sheets last term as I was handed a piece of PAPER to track student attendance in a literacy programme I am implementing in my classroom. The stress of not losing the attendance sheet each week and then having to go back and count all the ticks made me think... in 2022 there must be a more effective way to do this!

I've decided to use Google Sheets as a way of recording this data for myself and my colleagues. All our data is now visible and easy to manage. Wooo! 

I learned a little about Google Sheets as I problem solved my way through trying to make the Google Sheet work in the way that I wanted. 

I found today's session was very helpful as I picked up a few tips and tricks that I've now used to tidy up this Google Sheet and make it more effective. Here are the three things I found most helpful:

• freezing the first column/rows (so that the children's names or the categories are always visible wherever you are working on the Google Sheet). 
• protecting sections of the spreadsheet (permissions can be given to particular tabs etc.) 
• grouping data (so that it can be hidden or viewed in groups e.g. classes, year level, gender) 

I have recently started using Google Sheets for my classroom planning. I find it very helpful to have all my planning in one place. It is so easy to flick between the tabs for each curriculum area. I pin this sheet to my top toolbar so that it is easy to find and refer to during my teaching day.  I also like how I can add a comment to a cell if I have something to reflect on from that particular lesson/small group. 

I'd love to know how other teachers are using Google Sheets for their planning... do you have any tips and tricks to make using sheets for planning more effective?

Photo of the DFI Term 2 Cohort. 

DFI - Week 3

This week was an online week for DFI. We worked on Google Meet for the day! 

The theme of today's session was Media. We learned about many different types of media, within Google and beyond. 

Here are my three takeaways for the day: 

Youtube Playlists:

My class enjoys singing and dancing along to YouTube videos. They are such a handy tool to have as a teacher. 

I've now created a playlist that includes many of our classroom favourties. If you are a junior school teacher and you haven't heard of Loopy Tunes Music, go and check them out. They are always a winner in my class! 

Google Draw: 

We made a slide for our blogs or class sites today called "All About Me". 

A trick I learnt that I didn't know before was just the masking tool to turn an image into a shape and the use of the shift key to keep the image or shape correctly proportioned. 

Creating a personal slide theme:

We learnt how to create a personal slide theme in Slides. Creating a personal theme was a simple as opening a blank google slide, clicking on slide and then "Edit Theme". 

I can now use these slides for my lessons as the slide theme includes all the templates that I think I will need for the lessons in my classroom (and if I change my mind or think of a new idea I can always edit the theme later on once I have used it in practice). 

As a side note, something that I always find challenging as a junior school teacher is finding a good font for my children. Very few fonts are simple enough and with the letter correctly formed (no added flicks or "funny" letter a's or g's). Any suggestions would be much appreciated? 

Kia kaha!

DFI - Week 2

Workflow 

In this blog post I am focusing on three different aspects of today's learning. 

1.  The "Learn" phase of Manaiakalani's Learn, Create and Share cycle. 
2. Google Meet
3. Google Keep. 

Learn

Today we focused on the Learn phase of  Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share cycle. We learned about the acronym R.A.T  as you can see in the image below.  R.A.T. describes effective practice in the digital world.  I think an important point to remember was that what learning looks like is different in each school but effective practice will be underpinned by these principles. 

R is for recognizing effective practice. Examples of effective practice in my classroom are my implementation of the  Better Start Literacy Approach (structured literacy) and Heggarty (phonemic awareness). 

A is for Amplify. We can ask ourselves,  how could these effective practices be amplified with the use of digital technologies? Examples of this in practice in my context are the BSLA Facebook group, taking part in Zoom calls with teachers from across the country to learn how to effectively implement BSLA  or the sharing of resources on TKI (phonics plus books and teachers guides) or on websites like teachers pay teachers. I am interested to discover how technology could be or is being used by teachers with their tamariki in this BSLA context. 

T is for Turbocharge.  This means that technology is being used to create learning that was not possible in an old-school paper-based classroom context. This links in with the S.A.M.R model. Learning that is turbocharged charged fits within the Modification and Redefintion phases (or above the line) in this model. An example of this would be meeting with lecturers from the University of Canterbury online alongside other teachers from across the country. Something not possible in a paper-based or face to face context (especially in a pandemic). A question I have for my own classroom practice is, how can I better use technology in my classroom to modify and redefine learning for my tamariki? 

Google Meet

I found that the learning and exploration that we did today with Google Meet was most helpful as this was an area of Google that I haven't had much experience with. It is surprising that I have made it this far in a pandemic without running a Google Meet, but here I am!  I have only ever participated in other people's Google Meets, but today we were set the challenge set to run our own Google Meet. We had to create a meeting, use our Google calendar to invite the attendees, share our screen, and run the meeting. 

Google Keep

We were introduced to Google Keep. I am planning on using Google Keep to manage my workflow by keeping things organized and in a place where I can find them. I have added Google Keep to my bookmarks so that it is easy to find. I like that it is integrated across Google (Mail, Docs, Sheets... everywhere!). I have begun to collect all the website links and documents I use for my planning each week and organize them using Google Keep. Fingers crossed this makes my planning life just that little bit more streamlined and gives me back a little bit more time.  

Kia kaha! 

DFI - Week 1

Manaiaklani Digital Fluency Intensive  

Over the next 9 weeks, I am taking part in the Manaiaklani Digital Fluency Intensive, aka DFI. It is aimed at increasing teachers' digital fluency and confidence. 

We opened with the story of Maniaklani. It is a story that I have heard told many times over my years teaching at Glen Innes School, which is a part of the Manaiakalani cluster of schools in Tamaki.  It was refreshing to be reminded of the journey other educators have traveled before us and the "why" that collectively drives us all to support our tamariki to be the best they can be. Manaiakalani was the word gifted to this kaupapa. It means a hook from heaven. A hook to engage our learners. Digital technology is our hook. It brings a sparkle to our children's eyes and engages them in learning. 

Throughout the day we learned many tips and tricks to use  Google Apps (Drive and Docs) and Chrome to use ourselves and pass on to our learners back in the classroom. 

Organizing my Google Drive (a Marie Kondo moment!)

I've used folders and colour coding to organise and easily identify my files. 

I aim to name my files with many key words so that they are easily found using the search tool. 

I have used numbers/letters in a strategic way to get the folders into a sensible order.

 Voice typing in Google Docs rather than typing. 

For someone like me, that isn't the fastest typer or the best at spelling this will help save me valuable time. 

Just open a google doc, click on tools, voice typing and then select the New Zealand English option. 

The voice typing tool could be used in a classroom context to support children in their writing or to create more opportunities for children to increase their reading milage. 

Google Docs to collaboratively write and send emails.  

This is a building block new to docs in the last few weeks. Simply open a doc, go to insert, building blocks and then click on email draft.

 

It will open something that looks like this in your Google doc. It is then able to be shared and edited like a Google doc and when it is ready to be sent simply click the mail icon and it will open and send through your Google Mail. 

I am looking forward to learning more over the next 9 weeks of the DFI course and taking this learning with me back to my school to share with my colleagues and my learners.


Nga Mihi Nui