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.