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?

DFI Session Five

Day five here we go .........

So we started looking at Multi-Modal and how we engage and communicate with our children. We based our ideas around sites and that your home page is key as this will draw them in and get them hooked. So you need to provide engaging opportunities with the learning to deepen their understanding. Learn Create Share is the perfect way to engage learners and to accommodate their needs. We also looked at making all teaching and learning visible.

Next, it was Hapara hot tips. I thought I knew my way around Hapara quite well but every week I am learning things that I can take back into the classroom. This week was knowing about blogger in the teacher dashboard. This is an easier way to find children's blogs and comments. I will be showing my team this so they can use it as well. 

The part of the day I was looking forward to the most Google Sites. I knew there was more for me to learn and I wasn't wrong. We had a 30 Chalk'n Talk about sites with how to set one up. I have never set one up from scratch so this was new learning for me. The other new learning was adding the buttons to create links to other pages. 

After we went off into groups and did some planning together about animal migration. We used Jamboard for our planning. I didn't realise that was part of the Google Suite. It will be something that I would use to collect the children's ideas on things. I will share this also with my team. 

The next part of the day was creating a Google Site and I was looking forward to this. I learnt a few things about making sure that your site is appealing and enticing for the children. I created this site about animal migration. It's still a work in progress and something I will go back to. I have some new tips and tricks that I can take back to my team to make it easier on sites for us. If you click on the picture it will take you to my Google Site.

Have you ever made a Google Site before? If yes, what are some tips that you can give me?

DFI Session Four

So the day started off meeting with our group and going through what worked for us from last week. It was great to share what I had been doing with my children this week. I look forward to sharing the Digital Pepeha's my children create over the next few weeks.

Share Tohatoha

2005 was the year that changed the way we share!

Sharing is a great way to have an authentic audience for their learning outcomes. It's worthy and it is so important to have an audience. When you share you need someone to listen. Whether it be another class, school, community and best of all now you can have a global audience. They can celebrate with us.

Next, we did a Deep Dive into Google Forms. I needed this session as I have not had too many chances to be making my own forms. I think this is something that would be useful for collecting data within my hub. I attempted to make a form for some children in the Year 7/8 hub that helped out being referees for touch. This will keep all their information together. After our staff meeting today I thought of ways that I could use forms for testing children and made a form to check their number knowledge today.

I had never heard of Google My Maps before so I was looking forward to exploring this a bit more. We had a play round in our Bubble Groups. This is something that I would be interested in using for measurement in the hub. I think that the children would really enjoy this.


We then moved onto sheets. This is something that I was looking forward to finding out more about. I knew that my knowledge on this wasn't great as most sheets we are given or someone has made for me. I now feel more confident in using these in my daily school life. I feel fine about the questions that are in the test at the end of this course. My takeaway from this session was freezing parts of the sheet and to be honest, this is a lifesaver if you have a lot of information on it. We had one of our progressions sheets that had lost the freeze function and I have fixed it for my hub.

Are you an expert at Google Forms. Sheets or My Map? Would love you to share your tips and tricks.

DFI Session Three

Day Three here we go ......

So we started the day looking at Create. This is something at my school that we know the children really enjoy. During lockdown, we used the learn, create, share process and this was very successful and enjoyable for the children. John Dewey talks about giving them something to do rather than something to learn and this is when learning naturally happens. 

"Creating is a purpose for learning (Dr Rebecca Jessen, Nov 2017)".

This is a plan that our children used during lockdown. This shows our learn, create, and share process.

Next, we learnt how to set up our YouTube channels with the correct settings. I have done this to my account. This is something that I will need to keep going back to do as we know that it will be in the exam. It was helpful to know how to create playlists. Now I have some playlists set up that I can use them with my children. 

We then looked into Google Drawing. I feel like I have become quite confident using Google Drawings as this is what we use for our planning. I was wrong and Vicki has taught me so much more that I didn't even know existed, so that is going to be fun to explore.

It was good to be shown a way that we can embed the link in using the HTML code ready for it to be published to the web or blogs. I appreciated all the different ways that we can find images, how we can crop them and how we can make them different shapes. Knowing that when using the explore tool we can search for images that have no backgrounds by writing bird PNG. This will bring up all images with transparent backgrounds. I liked the changing border thickness, colours and designs. My favourite thing was discovering the gradient colours for the background and mixing them together to get beautiful mixed colours. Here is the gadget I created for the sidebar of my blog. I am looking forward to sharing some of this new learning with my hub.

We had a good look at how you can use Google slides in creative ways. I went to the session about making a Digital Pepeha. I knew that this is something that I could use with the children in my hub. They will enjoy creating as much as I did. Here is my final product. I need to work on my screencastify skills but it's a start. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Google Drawing

Here is the Google Drawing that I have made for my blog.

DFI Session Two

Wow, there has been a lot of new learning today!!

Firstly we looked at the background of the Manakalani Learn (Ako). It's moving schools from analogue to a digital world. It's increasing teacher effectiveness and accelerating learning outcomes in the digital world. Technology is a great tool to give children opportunities to learn in different ways. I love that we share our planning with children on the hub site so they can go back at any time. This is rewindable learning at its best.

Then we looked at Google Meet. I feel that this is something that I have my head around already as we have been using it online with our children since the beginning of lockdown. However, there are a few extensions that could be handy. I love the grid extension which allows you to see all the people that are in you Google Meet. Meet attendance could have been something that we could have used during lockdown rather than me writing it in my notebook.

Google Keep is something that I need to look into a bit more. I realised that I actually already had used it but I think I need to check out all its benefits. It might be something that my team could use to create checklists. I guess it's like a new notebook which can be digitally shared with others.

Luckily my Gmail is looking amazing with the help of my other colleagues that have completed DFI and my thirteen-year-old son. I have folders set up and I have the settings perfect for me with an unread section and then everything else below that. It works for me and that is what it's all about.  I think that some of the children in my hub would benefit with some lessons about how to organise their Gmail.

Google Calendar is something that I had never really taken much notice of before lockdown. I feel quite confident using it for school use.  I know how to add Google Meets and how you can customise your different calendars. I also know that there is more that I could be taking advantage of and this is something that I plan on looking into. 

Here is the video that I made today with Maria from my Digital Bubble Group. We had to find a blog and comment on it. We then were shown how to embed the video into our blog. This is something that would be really easy for children in my hub to use. 

Next Mark talked about blog commenting. My takeaway from him was reminding us that when we post a comment it should be: Positive, Thoughtful and Helpful. 

This is something that we need to remind the learners in our hub when we are back on site.

Overall, a productive day. I am loving having all this rewindable learning right at my fingertips.

What have you read that you might want to learn more about from me? 

DFI Session One

Day one online DFI course.

Firstly I had internet issues, then technical issues with my camera not working. That made it pretty hard. Overall it was a great day of learning.

There are some things that I learnt today that I am really looking forward to implementing into my hub. My biggest takeaway today will be the Eyes on Text: Reading Mileage. I know many of my readers are reluctant to read out loud in any setting, but this would be a really fun task for them all to do over the week. Setting guidelines about how they create docs in their folders is going to be useful and something that I will be trying out in the hub as well. This will make it easier when uploading and marking in Hapara.

I had a couple of quick tips and tricks that I will use.
Shift + z when you want to take a doc from someone else's folder and get the updates if they edit it.
Command + shift + t - This opens your last tab.

I also found that website remove.bg is great for removing coloured backgrounds from pictures. This will be a great tool for the children in my hub and my colleagues when we are creating our a learn, create, share documents in Google Drawings.

I have enjoyed playing around with Google Docs today and seeing all the endless options that can be done on it. I had fun playing around creating a learn, create, share document that our children use.

What was your one takeaway from today?