DFI 8: Computational Thinking

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa today - specifically empowerment?

Being EMPOWERED - we want our young people to feel confident and EMPOWERED to drive their own learning.

How can we use technology to enhance learning and empower our students?

Decile 1 students on average have heard 30, 000, 000 LESS words spoken at school entry compare to those entering decile 10 schools.

To have a voice everyone needs to be empowered to be confident to use the technology as we move forward into an even more digital world e.g automated checkout, online voting etc.

EMPOWERMENT = Student Agency.
Agency is having the power or capacity to act and make choices. (NZC 2007)

http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/NZC-Online-blog/Learner-agency

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

What is Computational Thinking?
What is the Digital Technologies Curriculum.

Computational Thinking is being able to give a set of instructions that a computer could follow so that they can become CREATORS of Digital Technology and not just users.
Coding is at the heart of Computational Thinking and the Digital Technologies Curriculum however this is not where is begins and ends.
Its about kids creating their own digital solutions to problems.


We had a chance to try out some of the technology.  Meg and I used a combination of StopMotion, GreenScreen App and iMovie to create a simple movie where the focus was on us using the software so we can take this back to use with our classes.  Here is the SHORT clip we created.
We even uploaded to Youtube!



Monika from the Waitangi Center told us about a free app called FLICK which allows files to be literally 'flicked' from one device to another e.g ipad to Chromebook.  This will be AMAZING for timesaving and frustration in being able to share video files especially.  I am looking forward to trying this out.

DFI 7: Dealing with Data

What did I learn that increased my understanding of being connected with Manaiakalani’s kaupapa and pedagogy?

When we are well connected we are all getting and giving the same messages.  

The possibility of visiting other Manaiakalani Schools in Auckland to see their Learn, Create, Share in action was discussed.  This sounds like something that would really great!

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
In Google Sheets I really liked the tip about being able to 'freeze' a column or columns and then navigate across the rest of the columns.  This is great and something I was not aware of.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  
Google Maps - although I was not able to try this out as I did not have access to MyMaps I can see this being used by my class as we investigate our family histories this term.  It would be cool to make one of these maps showing where all of our ancestors originally came from.

I am really enthusiastic about the ideas shared by Alicia Craig from Ohaewai School around using Google Forms.  She shared ideas such as a from for gathering students number knowledge and creating reading responses on Google Forms to help them prepare for online testing situations and make them familiar with such applications.  The thing that most inspired me was the BreakOut idea, I can see the kids being very engaged and motivated by this.  I have begun today creating my own BreakOut for my students later in the Term linked to our Topic and Reading.

I learnt a lot more today about what is possible in forms and began creating a simple example of how a pick-a-path type story might work.

Link to Pick a Path 

We also explored Google Sheets today.
As part of our learning around Google Sheets we created Charts which can be inserted into other Docs.  These can either be "published" and embedded or saved as an image.

 We then also completed a Blog Analysis Graph to show a students blogging history since they began.
 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
I learnt how and why to clear my cache!

DFI Session 6: Enabling Access

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa, pedagogy and enabling access/ visible learning?

Today was a great reminder about where docs and slides need to be filed in my Drive to ensure that people outside of school have access to what is visible on my site.
Lots of the docs would not show when sharing my site with others at DFI!


It was great to be able to have time to look at the sites of others and critique these before reflecting back upon my own site and making developments and changes to my site so that more of the Learning Intentions and Purpose for learning is shared throughout the learning areas.

https://sites.google.com/mangonui.school.nz/kowhai-2019

DFI Session 5: Devices

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? 

Notes from the themes explored today include.......

Being Cybersmart: empowering our learners as CONNECTED and CONFIDENT decision makers.

Slide extracts from DFI Session 5 Full Cybersmart Presentation

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

HAPARA

More Key Tips:

Class Info gives you student emails etc.  From here you can go to Open Class Folder to see eveyones Folders e.g Inquiry.  These however don't have their names on them so you will see 24x Inquiry folders.

• You can also "Email the Class" from here.
• In the HIGHLIGHTS tab you can share links with individuals, groups or the whole class.

WORKSPACE

Works best when used for topics.

CHROMEBOOKS:

Teachers should use a student Chromebook for a period of time so they can experience what the learner can and can't do.

Digital Dig should be done at the beginning of each year to refresh and give opportunity to practise any new tips or shortcuts that have come out.  

iPADS:

Set up ONE slide deck and folders for each area and then just duplicate the slides.
This session from Khismira gave me a lot of information to share back to my Junior colleagues.

In this afternoon CREATE session we were asked to Select ONE of the Cybersmart areas and create a movie talking through one of the lesson templates provided.
I have done q few Screencastify now for my students to talk them through lessons and as I have said in a previous post I want to make the most of the Blog kaupapa from Manaiakalani for the benifit of my learners, especially in writing.  Therefore I have created a quick Screencastify of the Cybersmart lessons that I could sue with my students to help set this up in the first couple of weeks of Term 2.

I also learnt another trick, which was using the draw tool to highlight what you are talking about on the Screencastify.

TIP: To insert a Screencastify into Blogger.  

Open Screencastify you want to embed.  Open in a new window.  Click 3 dots and choose embed item.  Then use this code to embed as HTML in your Blogger.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Nothing specific this week, however as I continue to get faster and more confident this reflects in my planning and prep time and its also getting easier which impacts on my personal life too!

Implementing Multi Modal Sites

Following our last DFI session I was reflecting on our Digital Pepeha work and created a Multi-Modal whakawhanaungatanga site for the students to access to be able to Learn about Pepeha and talking about Whanahu as well as creating and embedding Screencastify for each step of creating their digital pepeha within Google Slides.  I have found that this site has been an excellent tool for the students.  It has allowed those who were away to catch up and also those who have greater skills to zoom ahead at their own pace.  I also see the benefit of creating this as a new site as opposed to a page within my current learning site as I am then able to attach this to other places in the future without having to re-create it.

DFI Session 4 SHARE

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Share within the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The important of AUTHENTIC AUDIENCE and how this can give so much more purpose to the learning.

With a digital audience people are they because they are choosing to listen to you or view your work. 

Sharing creates a real reason for students to actually finish their work as it is going to be published online as opposed to just being shut inside a book.

This however is not only and ending.  Often in the process of SHARING new learning begins.  If people engage in what you have shared they will often provide though feedforward and feedback a spark for a new challenge or line of learning.

Multimodal = having different opportunities for students to engage with the leaning around one topic of theme.   Eg read the book / listen to the story online / watch it as a video.

Multitextual: using a variety of different text written for different purposes or audiences and being able to make meaning from these.

How can I use digital technology to reach all my learners in the way that will work best for them.

Same content displayed or received in different ways.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?  It was worthwhile having a go at creating a multimodal site and thinking about all the bits and pieces that can be put into such a tool to support learners across a range of levels and abilities.

It was also great to find out more about Google Keep and the many ways in which this can be used to simplify things.  I look forward to sorting out my array of 'sticky notes' that currently cover my desktop!

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  
The creation of multimodal sites is something that I would like to use next term.
Here is the one I created today on Gardening
https://sites.google.com/mangonui.school.nz/gardening/home

Creating and embedding playlists from Youtube into my site.  This was further developed from last week.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
The use of keep notes and how this can work together with Docs and Calendar will also help my personal life as it will help with reducing doubling up and searching for things.

DFI Session 3

Today at DFI there was a whole lot of new learning to be had!

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Create within the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
The following points resonated with me within the LEARN (about Create) session.

You cannot create until your have first LEARNT and have something in your kete that you want to share with others.

Create = allowing our young people to be creative human beings as part of the learning process by using the affordances of technology to do things that they could not do without it and would not have been able to do in the past.

It is NOT simply creating a piece of writing on a doc or slide (which just replaces writing in a book).

It's choosing the BEST way of doing things, if pen and paper is the best way to do this then still do this!

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Learning about the tools and tips today will enable me to be more confident and competent in using them and exploring these tools with the students in my class to allow them to respond to their learning in creative ways.

I continue to learn little time saving tips which will help me with my workflow such as that I can copy and paste straight from the snipping tool and I don't have up save and then upload.

The tip about how links can be added to specific parts of images or photos without the need for a text link was great.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

There were multiple things that I tried today which I would like to try out with my learners, this will however take time!

One thing we learnt how to do was create animations in Google Slides, here is my one.

Through animations I also tried out a digital Pepeha and worked on one which is our school pepeha and then also a single side about my own family with animation.

Pepeha is something we will be working on in the last few weeks of this term and I will definitely share and try out a digital version with my students.







I still need to learn about Youtube. How to create different channels and embed so that students only have access to the videos that I select for them and cannot access wider youtube.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
The more we talk about it the more I feel that it would be worthwhile to explore having different 'people' set up on my computer so that I have a 'work' persona and a 'home' persona rather than having it all on one.

Adding Photos to Blogs from Drive

This week when Blogging with my students I found there were a lot of complicated steps involved for students to insert photos into their blogs related to their posts which we had taken on the ipad and put into a shared folder.

When sharing this challenge with my DFI Cohort team Kent, our visitor from Point England helped out!

I needed to makes sure that the folder the photos were in had share settings of "Public - on the web"

Once this was done and a link to this folder embedded on out class site, students can insert photos using the "by URL" tab and copying and pasting the "shareable link".

Thanks for help everyone!

My challenge to my self will now to be create a screen-castify of this process so that students can revisit this learning to help them insert photos from our experiences and learning when blogging.

DFI Day 2

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? 

The LEARN explanation this morning gave me a better understanding of this area and wha it means and looks like within Manaiakalani.


I am interested in reflecting on and having conversations around what this will look like in how school and how it we can show its specific alignment to our current school kaupapa.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I enjoyed hearing about the SAMR model and I want to reflect on the activities I use against this. I have a gut feeling about where I am and want to think about which areas I could begin to make changes so that I am moving up this model.

Organizing my tabs and bookmarks was FANTASTIC! This along with my email organisation and applying labels and setting up emails to move into these folders will save me a lot of time as I find myself frequently using the 'search' function within my email.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
I would like to explore the concept of rewindable learning. I am excited about the Screencastify tool and how this can be used to allow students to review / rewind instructions of learning if they need to hear or see this again.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
The organisation of the tabs and emails will not only affect work-life but also personal life as it will save me time in locating what I need.

Being able to add 'notes' or 'tasks' from my email or calendar instead of having multiple 'sticky notes' all over my desktop will also be refreshing!

Using 'Docs' tools in the classroom

Following our DFI day 1 I had couple of tricks and tools that I wanted to try out within the classroom in a meaningful way.
As part of our class Inquiry I set up three Google Docs with readings on them to help us LEARN about our Inquiry problem.
Students were put into mixed ability groups and assigned a reading to complete before using the "comments" function to highlight aspects of the reading they thought were important or that could relate to our Inquiry.

Planning was shared and accessible on our class site.

Students then used the comment function to add their thoughts and highlight important parts.

Once this session was completed we also had a play with using the voice recording tool to record our ideas about what we had read (summarise) and say how we could use what we had read to apply to our own class inquiry problem.

As this was the first time using this tool, it was more of a 'play' than anything else but the kids loved it and I can see that it will be a useful tool in gathering individuals thoughts and ideas on topics where physically writing would take too long and put some students off from sharing all that they know.

As you can see I am also continuing to LOVE the snipping tool as a quick and easy way of capturing my screen!