Digital Fluency Intensive Week 6

SHARE

27/8/18

SHARE Staff Meeting with Donna Yates, Manaiakalani

Simon Scott, the Deputy Principal at Hornby Primary School, reflects on his blogging journey with Manaiakalani.

What I learnt?

Simon started with a general classroom blog. After the first year, he moved into individual blogs. This was a natural transition for both him and the students, as they had become familiar and confident with the use of blogging.

Key to the transition into individual blogs, was the initial teaching of blog comment protocols with the students. Students follow three steps to write something positive, thoughtful and helpful. This strategy is outlined below.

What is the new strategy?

What are you thinking about trialing in your learning space?

Because my students do not have functioning individual blogs at this time, I will co-ordinate with one of the senior classroom teachers, so that my students can read a relevant student blog, and then use the template to make a blog comment. This could be incorporated into my Literacy programme as a learning station activity.

Relection

As well as the template, it will be important to provide some models of good comments posted on student blogs. In addition, early comments could be completed as shared writing, and then interactive writing with students that need practice before writing independently. This task will provide another authentic opportunity for short, quality pieces of writing, that will be achievable for all students in the class. It will also help to make the students more appreciative of blog comments when they start to use individual blogs for their learning journey.

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 5

During our "sandpit" time, I started to create a Google site about A Healthy Garden.
Check it out at A Healthy Garden

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 4

What I learnt that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? 
The use of blogging to share creates a wider, more global audience for students to share their learning and thinking. They can also track their blogging, by viewing the responses. Who responds, where they are... The blog also enables capability to share more than writing. They can add other features such as drawing, photographs, slides, movie clips etc.

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 3

DFI DAY THREE TEACHING AS INQUIRY REFLECTION

What I learnt that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy:

"Creativity is as natural and necessary for children as fresh air and sunshine!" - Kohl, 2008.

The learning today related to the use of different media to stimulate creativity - for myself, for my planning and for my students. Planning for opportunities to enable creativity is vital.

The examples that the facilitators shared helped me to see that creativity can take many forms within a digital world. Even for students that are not competent users of the google apps they are currently using, can create models and scenes that could be used to express and communicate ideas, thinking, stories, retells...

Working collaboratively with others would further strengthen this and open up more opportunities for ensuring all students have access to these learning opportunities.

Drawings

What I learnt:

• Using slides to create animations
• Using slides to create little movie clips by publishing to the web
• Creating quest type tasks, or contract tasks, with hyperlinks to follow up tasks on different slides to add choice
• About Audio Player for Slides - something to investigate...

What I did: 

I created a short pirate ship story animation, which Michael helped me to save by publishing on the web. I then added the link for this to a slide to use with groups of students to encourage storytelling. They could discuss in groups, add captions, tell their own story, create their own animated short story to share…

Drawings

What I learnt:

How to use different aspects within drawings to insert and colour shapes and callouts;  add gifs and images from the web; how to use my computer camera to take a photo and insert that.

What I did/ aim to do:

During the “sandpit” time I created a drawing of myself as a pirate as a trial that I could share with students to model a drawing activity they could learn with. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 2

DFI Day Two Teaching as Inquiry Reflection

Bookmarking and other useful tricks

What I learnt:

How to create folders within my bookmark bar to organise all my bookmarked sites.

How to use the AddOn “One Tab” to collapse all tabs into one. Another add-on called “Toby for Chrome” can be used to open up groups of tabs.

The notion of creating a site as a “landing page” for students in the school/ class to arrive at when they log in. This could then have direct links to relevant apps and sites.

What I will aim to do:

Finish spring cleaning my very cluttered bookmark, by sorting the websites into folders.

Investigate possible landing page for Kea class.

Gmail

What I learnt:

About how to use labels better. How to colour code them, and set up filters on them. I haven’t conquered how to do this competently as yet, so need to spend more time practicing with the function.

What I did/ aim to do:

Continue with labelling e-mails as they arrive.

Develop a system for sub-levels for students emails within class label.

Practice how to set up new filters by pasting e-mail addresses.

Calendar

What I learnt:

How to add events, and then invite others - or share with others.

Made a start on this.

What I aim to do:

Need to practice.

Also need to add in other calendar links. Check with school, RE ones...

Hangouts

What I learnt:

How to create a Hangout with others. Completed a Hangout with Gerlinde and Sally. Gerlinde used Screencastify to record our Hangout.

What I aim to do:

Create a Hangout and invite Kerry, Dorothy and/ or Donna to join.