Week 9

Final week of DFI

It's been an amazing journey thats enlightened me with new knowledge and skills I can apply to all areas of my life especially teaching. It was great meeting educators from around Auckland and sharing our learning experiences, knowledge and resources.
Alongside the DFI PD, we were working on attaining skills to sit the Google Level 1 educator exam.
In preparation of the exam I went through a checklist and practised the skills. Later I sat unit reviews to test my understanding through Google for Education. This I found very useful as it helped consolidate my learning. Really excited to share, with all the hard work and effort I can now say I'm a Certified Educator level 1. Thank you Manaiakalani for making this happen.

Thanks to Gerhard and Dorothy for presenting the course! You have been very helpful and supportive. I have learnt many skills and strategies that I can apply. One of things I was amazed by what we can do on Google Sheets. I don't use google sheets often and if I did it was for really simple things. This course has allowed me to organise data and view results. Another one was Google Form, thinking about ways of how I could collect data and view results on Google Sheets. I found this interesting as we looked at ways we could integrate this into our classroom programs. A way I use Google Docs, Google Forms and Google Sheets is a really easy to integrate in my Reading tumble. Using Google Sheets I set the instructions e.g. Child needs to read a book. Then the child fills out a form to review the book. Using the data from forms, you can review the data and read all the children's book review.

In relation to Kaupapa and Pedagogy we looked at

Ubiquitous Learning
It's different from how learning use to be
In the past more learning happened at school.
Not a lot of academic learning is not happening outside of school
In a school term → learning accelerates and drops over summer
Summer learning keeps the momentum going
Harnessing the power of digital tech and scaffolding children's learning outside school hours.

Manaiakalani provides this opportunity for students to continue their learning via the Summer Learning journey. Children blog in the holidays whilst being Cybersmart.


Woohoo that's a wrap for DFI Auckland Cohort 2019.

Week 8

Week 8 - Digital Intensive Course

This week our focus was: Being Cybersmart - empowering our learners as connected and confident decision makers. In our session I have learnt:

The language we use is very important - we need to ensure that we use positive language.
For example, "being a Cybersmart learner", "are you leaving a smart footprint?"

Getting children to think about their digital footprint.
Having a shift of from being protective to proactive

Implementation - Cybersmart needs to be a whole school focus. Being Cybersmart is just not for Chromebook kids, it relates to all aspects of activity eg playing games at home.
Similar to PB4L looking at desired behaviours and deliberate teaching.

3 categories

Smart learners - navigation, and idea of at home in a digital world.

Smart Footprint - what types of info do we share, learner should understand what they share is visible, or comments on a google doc.

Smart relationships - connections they are making and how to best do that via blogging. What is the correct structure and how do we get audience to engage in our blogs.
How can we equip our learners to make smart decisions.

Use of Blogger - legally allows us to use the accounts, up to year 10. Teacher has visibility to see post, comments. Posts are emailed to the school - to ensure we have a protected network around our learners.

Kawa of Care - empower parents and caregivers by partnering with whanau and aiga to confidently connect with their children's learning.

Quality blog comments
Having consistent language for smart relationships to develop.


Teacher dashboard
Today I have learnt how to effectively use my Teacher dashboard, I have listed some tips and tricks that I can refer to for this application.
Hapara - making learning visible.
Children must open or drop the file in the folders -
The posts and comments are visible on the dashboard - an overview of what's happening on the learners post.
Red comments - are anonymous user commenting on the blog.
Don’t tell children what you can see or can’t.
Files - Friday - get children to tidy up their drive.
Highlights are unavailable after hours
Focus browsing - short time frame
Reset class folders - use that if the child had accidentally deleted the folder.
When using guided browsing - you need to manually put each link.

For me, it was really eye opening to use this application because there was more to his application. Not only could I see their online activity at school. I could reset their passwords focus their browsing. I think I will find the guided browsing very helpful as there are some student that will require that extra support.

Manaiakalni 1:1 journey

Use of the Treaty -
Partnership - learning from one another, community undertaking, owning the device - connecting through partnership


Participation,- making sure every learner can participate, every teacher can be supported to become digital fluent, children having the same device.

Protection - empowering our learners to make smart decisions, provisioning of blogs, it's happening legally and students/ teachers are protected.

IPADs

There is a really neat application called "Explain Everything". I've never used this tool before, but I do see how this could be integrated in my classroom. The application allows children to attach videos, record and free style draw on the platform. You can use different modes of media. I really cool example presented in class was - 'Spelling Test'. The words from the test were recorded on the page. Children can replay the recording to hear the sounds to help them with their spelling.

For fun and a bit of and sandpit time -  a friend and I explored using the tool and thought about ways we could use this with our students.

Week 7 - Computational thinking

Week 7

This week, we had 2 wonderful people from OMGTech to support and teach our cohort about computational thinking.

To start our session off - we focused on Empowerment. It was really eye-opening using an outside perspective of the term ´Agency´. I often use the term 'Student Agency' with parents and people in the wider community. Not realizing the word 'Agency' could also relate to child and youth services. It is very important to explain any teacher/education jargon to people outside of the profession.
Empowerment - It's not just a tool.  When it transforms the way we learn, offers us new uncharted experiences and opportunities.

The second half of our session was lead by OMGTeach. I found ethics and morals very interesting, using the context of self-driving cars. Scenarios were given to make decisions about what we would do if a life and death situation arises. Personally, I found it very tricky as it does determine your moral and ethics, however, through our discussion, these situations are thought of by a special team.

We later looked at the Digital Curriculum and what it consists of.
Digital technology is defined by creating something with digital technology
E.g. darkroom for photography

Speaking of Darkroom - a very interesting point was raised especially with today's younger generation. Most children have no idea what a darkroom is. This was notable from a popular Netflix series - Stranger things. Viewers had no clue what was supposed to happen inside. This reflects how digital technology has developed over the years. I recall, in my childhood, we had the windup cameras and we only had one shot to take the perfect picture. Only after getting my photo's processed I would be able to see what I have taken. In comparison to the present, we are able to take photos on our handheld devices and view them straight away in our gallery.

Key terms that were defined were

Digital fluency - being able to use the product
Digital technology  - how do we make it on photoshop?

The most enjoyable part of our session was learning about Scratch. I have used scratch before, but it was a good session to refresh my memory and challenge myself. I had to create a maze, I was given an example to work with to familiarize myself with the functions available on scratch. I have embedded the maze I created, it's a work in progress. :)