DFI Session Eight

Session 8!

So meeting again in our digital bubbles. I really enjoy this time to share what has worked well for me during the week or what I have used in my hub. The Digital Dig from last week was a real hit with my Year 5/6 children. I am loving all the resources that I am getting during this course. Even in our digital bubble, we were sharing Matariki resources.

We then moved on to The Manaiakalani Kaupapa of Empowerment. This was one of the most important messages I got from this session.

Devices are not just tools they are transforming the way that the children learn and offer them new experiences and opportunities.

Having a better understanding of the Digital Curriculum Document was a great session. The slide that we were shared has some really good information for a better understanding. Hopefully, you enjoy looking at it.

Next, we had a look at coding and had some playing and creating time. I enjoyed seeing what was actually available for children. I will use some of these in. my hub. I especially liked the Minecraft Voyage. This would be great to use for strand maths. Children would be very engaged in this.

Have you ever coded before? Did you enjoy it?

DFI Session Six

Session six wow!

So today I was ready to learn about getting connected. It's really important to connect with other schools and teachers. You can learn and share from each other. The students are also able to learn when they connect with other students.

Visible learning gains engagement, teachers conversation, visibility and scaffolding. Visible learning means it can be accessed anywhere and at anytime. It's personalised. My favourite thing is that it is rewindable. Google Sites make this a lot easier.

Then off we went to our digital bubbles and it was about critiquing each other's sites. This was quite daunting but really good to see what other people thought of our hub site. The feedback that I got from this was that our site looked impressive, some said that it was quite hard to follow and others said that there were too many clicks to get into things. So I took that feedback on and I have been thinking about what I can change to cater for this feedback.

Next session was working in our digital bubbles and making changes based on the feedback. I made a copy of our hub site to see if I could make some improvements. I played around and tried to make it less than three clicks for the children to get to their work and also putting the most relevant work at the top of the page. I made links to pages with pictures of the teachers in the hub to make us visible. I also enjoyed playing around with making buttons in drawings.

Vicki, my bubble leader also shared some really good information about YouTube videos when inserting them into slides. She told us that you can go to format options which give you an option to have a start time and an end time on a video. There is also a mute option so they can just watch the video. There is also an option to make it automatically playback when the slide changes.

Overall a great day of learning about getting connected. I am feeling even more confident with sites. Having the time to play around and experiment was very helpful for me. I am looking forward to sharing my learning with my team.

Do you feel confident creating a Google Site?