DFI Week 6 - Enabling Access

Making learning visible allows access for all students to be able to learn.  The default is visible!  It gives students time to think about the learning and so we are pre loading students ready for learning.

Interesting thought about weather assessment should be a surprise for the student and the family?  What are your thoughts?  I am always happy to let students know when they are having assessments as I feel that this is part of their learning journey.

The day to day learning should be visible for all.
Google Sites replace the:

• the blackboard
• planning book
• assessment book
• timetable on the wall
• the dog ate my homework
• Interactive whiteboard are in every students hands.

Parent portal would be a great thing to get working in our school.  Maybe we should have a parent evening to show parents how this works?  Open the doors to students work.

 I found Clarelle's comment interesting that research shows reading out loud improves reading comprehension and fluency.

Sites

Great idea to have a media site and then they can get the photos for the class.  I am going to add this to my site so that students have access to photos instead of emailing them the link.

Colour picker can help you choose a special colour from the main picture.  Colour pallete can give you the codes for colours.

I have really enjoyed the time to play and set up my Holiday Learning site ready to go for the holidays.  I had forgotten that you could embed a file onto your site.  

Awesome day thanks Clarelle for your time and all your tips and tricks that you shared.  Here is my holiday learning site.

Animation Toolkit

Was great to learn about changing the html code from 1000 to 300 when you put it onto the blog to make the animation play faster.

DFI Week 5 - Devices

This week has been looking at the devices.  First we started with the cybersmart.  I have found that interesting as I know that some teachers think that the kids have done it so that they don't need to do it again.  Wrong!  It needs to be taught all the time.

Rather than being safe we need to empower our learners to be smart.  That's why cybersmart.

Be internet Awesome

We need to make sure we portray the right words in a positive way by elevating the positive.  All the cybersmart curriculum needs to be taught throughout the year.


Cybersmart is a whole school focus so maybe we need to plan as a whole school and timetable that more consistently into our school.  Connect our cybersmart curriculum into our values within our school would be a great idea.

By empowering our students we are creating confident, connected , actively involved life long learners.

Ubiquitous learning makes it accessible for all and cybersmart empowers our learners to harness technology.

This is a great idea to do the Kawa of Care with their students in the class.  I would love to try this.  We will have to make sure that we push the cybersmart during the first term.  I think that each class could do this?

I had forgotten that you can use groups within Hapara so it was a good reminder.  I will be setting up some groups to make my life a bit easier.

Make sure you have the tabs open that you want to use when doing a screencastify. Here is my screencastify about the cybersmart.  Not my best work as a screencastify but I had a go.

DFI Week 4 - Computational Thinking

Well what a huge day!  There has been so much learning.  It was good to hear Dorothy talk this morning and reinforce what share is all about.

Here are some of my takeaways from today.

How we share can be very different.  The mode of sharing has changed but not the connection we make when we share.

Sharing gives our learners the authentic audience in an online space.  The online world removes the constraints that if you weren't at something you missed it.

How we share limits the ability of who hears or sees what we do.

As the digital has come into our life the sharing has become easier.  The audience has the choice if they want to read or listen to your work.  

Blogger is the choice even though it is not the flashest but it has all the capabilities that we need.  Blogger is a great place to teach our young people to be cybersmart.  Blogger as secure and a safe place to be in an online environment.

Share to learn gives the students feedback and so the learning can keep on going and can support accelerate the learning outcomes.

Computational Thinking

Trailblazers Site

Left side is when you look at instagram.  Right side is when you build instagram.

Binary

You need to fill up the box completely.  You can't have a box that is not filled.

I have never seen this before and I really struggles with it to start with but once I got my head around it.  I am going to have a go with this in my class this week to see how they go.

Coding

Comput IT - Toxic Code:  This is great for when you have been doing the hour of code in your class.

10 Block Challenge

MineCraft Hour of Code

Playdough, Tin foil, and paint can al be used to support conceptual thinking and the new curriculum.  Make sure you think about what you will need before spending lots of money.  I like the idea that if you get the students to pay for the equipment (less than $8) then they get to take the equipment home.

3D Pen use PLA for the fill.  Masking tape is a the best way to use the pen on so that it makes it easier to get off.  

Using scratch was great today.  It was nice to sit through a lesson as I am slowly learning about it but cannot keep up with the kids and what they know.  I am going to try this with my class this week.

I am just putting this in so that I remember this make of Robot.

Another DFI done and a brain filled with information again!

DFI Week 3 - Collaboration & Sites

Another busy day on the DFI.  Top tip this morning and one I have always tried but never managed to get to work was getting a slide off the internet.

Click in the omino box and then delete till the present/ and put in edit.
Can do this and put copy in and will force the person to make a copy.

Visibility & Collaboration

Collaborative Teaching and Learning - Site for the DFI 

We need to think about giving the option to be creative!  Make sure that they have two or three options for a creative task.

I had forgotten about using the multimodal as it was always so time consuming in the making.

Sitting down to make a multimodal site was great today.  I started on trying to incorporate my writing task (Walk the Length of New Zealand) into it but think that I have got a bit lost with it.

I am going to try and think about putting one together to  support our learning around developing our school orchard.  Finding the reading material is going to be interesting.










Here are some of the examples that we looked at before we started.



When we were finished we had to link it to the spreadsheet to continue to develop a resource bank.













Some other tricks that I thought would be good to note down was the image carousel.

Creating a Button in Google Draw page setup.

 Creating a header in Google Draw to go on site.

Another busy day done.

DFI - Week 2: Workflow

Well, bit of a mindblowing day!!  I feel like I have learnt heaps of things and I am hoping that I can remember them.  There has been lots of time saving  tips that I can see will help me save time during class and in my personal life.

Some of my takeaways from today are:

I need to dabble into to rewindable learning so that I can start collecting some rewindable learning and catching my teaching practice.

If technology is just a tool then it is a waste. We need to make sure that it is just not a teaching tool and that we are turbo charging our teaching and giving students the best possible teaching and learning experience.

Google Keep

1. Take photo  
2. Then click use photo
3. Tap and open photo
4. Click grab text

This will then take all the text from the photo and put it into Google Keep and then you have the text from photo.  I think this will be great to grab text from journals to help students develop the idea about creating pictures in their mind when they are reading.


Here are a few of the short cuts that I managed to get down in a very hectic and busy session with Tanya.

Shortcuts in GMail:


GT - Opens Sent
GD - Opens Draft
GS - Starred Emails
C - Opens a New Message
/ - Search

Shortcuts in Calendar:

D - Day
M - month
G - go to date
C - create new email
S - settings
J - goes to next week
A- Agenda

I found using Quicktime really hard to use.  I think screencastify might be easy.  Will have a go at doing this again to see if I want to use this in the rewindable learning.

Adding pictures to blog you can create a drawing and insert them into blog.  Will have to have a look at this and have a go.

Another day down and my brain is feeling very full!

DFI Week 1 - Core Business

This was my second experience doing the first day of the course and I have to say I still found it interesting, informative and very engaging.    Great to know that we have a DFI website where we can go to find all the information.

It is always nice to hear the background of where Manaiakalani originated from and how we are now part of this incredible journey. 

Today I learnt lots of tips and trick to make life a little easier.  I loved the right click on the tab to then close all the tabs to the right.  I always seem to have a problem with this and the kids in my class give me a hard time about them.

Another sneaky tip that will be very handy was Command Shift T - Opens the last tab on a MacBook and Control Shift T - opens last on chromebook.






I created a Doc that I am going to share with my learners and we are going to look at what we do in our class to learn, create and share.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with and how it differs to what I think.

I think any little tips that save time will help me manage the busy life teachers have.  Even if it is only something really quick it will save time over the duration of our year.

I think we are going to have a great learning experience during the next nine weeks and I look forward to working with everyone.

See you all next week.