Digital Fluency Intensive - Dealing with Data

Before Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa became common practice, many of our learners from lower decile schools thought that their sports and art skills were the only valuable things that they had to share. Many believed that their academic ideas were not worth sharing. What we needed to find out was how to hook these learners in academically? Authentic audiences and sharing learning on a social platform!

Trialled many sharing platforms and it quickly became clear that Blogger was the most effective to use with underage students.

Learn about something, create a DLO then finish creating it to share. All students need to learn to finish things! Posting helps!

John Hattie has identified that feedback is the most critical and powerful aspect of teaching and learning. How do we make feedback relevant and current? Commenting on learning posts is a very effective and motivating way.

Google Forms - Had the opportunity to make one for my science leader role. Some ideas to try. Using these for basic facts and spelling tests. Link to spreadsheets and the add-on flubaroo.

Google Maps

• Learnt that I can add in information straight from a Google spreadsheet. One idea is to use student info from a google form about family etc to create a class map of our class community and cultures, for the class blog.
• Dorthey shared with us the tacking aspect of my maps. This would be great to use when on class trips. Share where we are with the DP so school know how long until back at school.
• There are tracking tiles that can be slipped into bags, wallets, keys etc. You can track these on your phone.

Google Sheets - Check out these add-ons

http://robynjanderson.blogspot.com/2018/02/using-statistics-to-create.html

CREATE Data Case Study:  Select one learner from the table below and statistically analyse the data that can be gathered from the child’s blog. 

Embedding makes everything live. Changes will automatically be seen on your blog.

• Remember to add in the height/width after the " but before the ><.

Embedding whole spreadsheets like this can be a bit messy. Think about only embedding the chart. That makes it live if the data changes. 

Example from the above sheet.

Big takeaway today - Time to revisit how I use these tools in my class and in our team as they have endless possibilities. 

Digital Fluency Intensive - Media

That was my takeaway from our sessions all about:

We started with a deep dive about live streaming by Kent Sommerville from Point England School. It was interesting hearing the way they have included live streaming into key school events like sports games and cross country. What a creative way to help more of their school community to access these events. 

Next Dothery talk about how all kids are born CREATE and how traditional school knocks it out of them. We talked about Ken Robinson and his excellent TED talks. 

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" Kohl, 2008 

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”  John Dewey

How do we plan for 'create' in our daily teaching?

Next, we had some chalk and talked about Youtube and making a playlist. Check that your videos are set to unlisted.


The rest of the day was looking at Google Slides and Google Drawing. I enjoyed playing around with these tools I know so well.

A button for my blog using Google Draw

Self-portrait using Google Draw

And finally, my visual pepeha made using Google Slides.

Check that you use WHITE SPACE well! That your animations enhance the content and don't take away from your message! Think about adding in extra slides instead of the animation (stops mistakes when sharing) and remember to use your arrows when presenting.  

Digital Fluency Intensive - Workflow

Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer...should be...

We started the day talking about what is effective teacher practice and how this is the key to supporting our learners to achieve their personal potential.

: recognise, amplify, turbocharge!

These are the keywords that explain effective teacher practice in a digital learning environment. We use technology to help turbocharge learning!

Woolf Fisher Research Centre identified these 7 ideas around effective teacher practice in 2013 and they are still relevant today. 

We heard how the learn, create, share model doesn't replace deliberate acts of teaching with online content, instead it works alongside, like the 2 sides of a railway track, enhancing learning opportunities and student engagement. In other words.....

Google Keep

Next, we took a deep dive into Google Keep. This is a personal favourite tool of Dorothy Burt, who uses it to organise both her professional and private life.  I had dabbled with this in the past but never used it to its full potential. 

After today's session, I learnt to:

• save web pages, images and text straight from your computer and then drop them into my drive
• record voice notes
• transcribe notes from pictures of a text
• set reminders for myself so all task are achieved. This links to my Gmail.
• share my notes with colleagues  

I found this video very informative.

Now I need to embed Google Keep into my daily practice. 

Managing your workflow

Next, we looked at both Google Mail and Calendar, focusing on trying out the different settings to see if it makes these easier to use. A few new tools to try out are:

Google Hangouts is a great tool to use when you want to video call from remote locations and share your screen during this meeting. This will be very handy to use with buddy classes across my school or when using outside experts who can't come into school. 

For the 'create' part of the day, we needed to create a Hangout in a small group, discussing blog posts from the Summer Learning Journey. My group had some trouble with this. Our sound and video quality were not very good so we decided not to share the screen recording of it on our blogs. Instead, here is a video showcasing its great features. 

Digital Fluency Intensive - Core Business

Day one of the digital fluency Intensive allowed me the time to dig a little deeper into why we have invested in the 1:1 digital learning environments at Owairaka School and how powerful this is for all our learners.

Every time I hear the story of how Manaiakalani began, how it continues to meet the learning needs of all our students, especially our at-risk learners, I am once again inspired to make sure 'learn, create, share' is at the forefront of my teaching.

As Dorothy Burt talked about the kaupapa and pedagogy of Manaiakalani, few comments have resonated with me. Pencil and paper are also a type of technology, one that has historically failed to engage all of our learners. And that effective, deliberate acts of teaching makes the difference, the device is only one of the tools we use to do this with. 

From here we talked ways to use Google Groups for streamlining communication when working with students and colleagues. I am going to try this when communicating in my Team Leader and Enviro Leader role as a way of keeping track of the communication I send.

We took a look through the features of Chrome and Drive. It was nice when your current practice reflects what you should be doing. I was reminded that you need to check that all your students should have multiple opportunities to learn good Drive habits. Key ideas from this session included: 

• using the search bar to streamline locating files
• colour coding folders to show years or topics - easy to find
• numbering folders by year - easy to find
• use shift z to move shared files into my drive

Did you know to make a folder pop up to the top in your drive, use a double ** when naming it!

The session about Google Docs blew my mind. I have been using this as a teaching tool for a few years now and after today realise it can do so much more. Below are the key points I took away from this session and I will be passing them onto my learners. 

• use ctrl + shift + v to paste without formatting. This means you don't bring over the layers of formatting from one doc to the other. Makes everything neater.
• Use the Heading Function in formatting so you can include a table of contents. This hyperlinks sections of the doc. You can use this to locate text easier. One idea is to use one doc continuously over weeks or the term, use a 'heading' for each new date so you can go to the latest work quickly.
• Control + F to search the doc quickly for keywords.

A great way to help your learners practise these skills is to use a group shared story or make a Google Documents Scavenger Hunt. 

Here is a screenshot of one made by our facilitators. 

We broke into groups and I spent some time talking about the best addons, extensions and scripts. Here is a screenshot of the addons I am now using with my docs.

Our learning follows the learn, create, share model. Here is what I created today, using all I have learnt about Google Documents.

I have learnt so many new tricks and tips in just one day, I am already looking forward to next Friday.