Day 8 DFI Cohort 2 2019

Wednesday 14 August 2019

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa
and pedagogy?
We had another great talk from Dorothy today about how the idea 'Connected' works
within the Manaiakalani system. All of these words are kind of like supporting pillars to everything we do.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as
a professional?
The practice on sheets has improved my confidence lots and I learned some tips from Dave
that surely will improve my speed when entering and analysing data.

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

We did lots of work on Google Sheets today which was great because I love them.
We had to
use a sheet to do a statistical analysis of a student's blog post record. My analysis is
somewhat
enhanced ( in other words, I lied and made some of it up when I realised I was not
going to get my task finished in time again).

Here it is: I am very proud that I am getting much better at using Google Draw
to make stuff.

I learned how to use a Google Form with Google Maps to create personalised route maps of a
holiday or any other human social activity. Here is my map but it doesn't show all the places
I have been because, as usual, I did not complete my task in time. Also,
kudos to Tralee from Ahipara School who helped me embed the map on my blog.

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

definitely planning to use the map idea as part of my holiday planning and diary keeping in future.

Session 7 DFI Cohort 2 2019 Computational Thinking

Session 7 DFI Cohort 2 2019 Computational Thinking  Wednesday 7 August 2019

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Kerry started the day off by talking to us about computational thinking and the new Digital Technologies curriculim. My heart sank. I was convinced that sometime today they would make us do some tinkering with coding apps like Scatch and I hate them. Went into dinosaur mode and was thinking: Don't know why anyone thinks it's necessary for primary age students to learn this stuff?? Why don't they save all that for high school? Blah! Blah! Blah! Then we started doing it. Well, my brain was turning inside out and back to front as I tried to understand stuff and figure out timing issues. Next thing I knew I was thinking, "Oh, I like this! I could be hooked!" See my creation below. OK! So I haven't got my sprites moving and they are just hanging there having an argument!!!

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
We had another Google Hangout today with Dorothy- this week's one was about personal agency and empowerment which I really liked because it mirrors my personal philosophy about the purpose of education. I believe that education should be emancipatory and that we have to do everything we can to make it that way. What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
See my notes about Scratch. We are lucky at our school in that we get regular visits from Tania, the Manaiakalani facilitator so our class actually knows a lot about Scratch and the students are already hooked. I loved the example which Monica showed us of a Scratch made by a student so that he could share his pepeha. It was very groovy.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Pass.

Session 6 DFI Cohort 2 2019

Kia ora
What did I learn that improved my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa?
Has a great session today as we were mostly working on our sites. It started with a lively Google Hangout with Dorothy about Visible and what that word means in the Manaiakalani context. This is  a pretty integral part of everything we do and as busy as we get it's good to have it talked about every now and then just to be reminded. I'm pretty good at not being able to see the wood for the trees so I need constant nudges. Visibility of class learning and planning has to be the best way to build those student/teacher/whanau relationships. So, yeah, we could have a rock anthem a la Freddie Mercury for the word Sharing and he could be backed up by Let's Get Visible! a la Olivia Newton-John! Is she still alive?

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

Well, I figured out that practically everyone else is using Slideshows somewhere or other in their sites so maybe I need to give up my idea that I should 'move on' to a web page instead. So, maybe I'm not behind the ball after all and maybe it's OK to keep using Slideshows. There are some things that can't be improved on. I do really love Slideshows as they are so easy and versatile.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
Whenever I get an insight about stuff, I always like to share it with my students. You know how it is where you get what you think is a brilliant idea, or when you think that by changing something or replacing something old with something new, you assume you are going to end up with something better? Well, that's not always the case. I found that out when I started trying to map out on paper what my updated and improved class site would look like and how it would work. There are so many new things coming at kids these days and maybe it's a good idea to remind them that there is still some old stuff and old ways of doing things that have value.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life? I would love to implement Visibility at home in the kitchen. Then maybe my husband would see what he was looking for inside the fridge when it is not placed absolutely dead centre of the centre shelf.

Session 5 DFI Cohort 2 2019

Kia ora
I missed this session as I was sick so I can't answer the four questions today.

DFI Cohort 2 2019 Day 4 26 June 2019

Day 4

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Today's session was focussed on the Share part of Learn, Create, Share.
Share gets its power and importance from a most basic human requirement- the need to feel connected with others and to establish and maintain ongoing, reciprocal communication of all kinds. Sharing with others is a dynamic thing and deprived of it, we wither and grow into a lesser being. Wouldn't you like to be an invisible time traveller and be able to hang about watching how we humans evolved from grunting gesture  makers to the articulate poets we are today? You would have been bound to notice some revolutionary moments in the growth of our cognitive abilities and they wouldn't have happened without the evolution of our intricate oral languages. Also, just think about the ways, thanks to being handy with gadgets, we have levered language into the practically miraculous instant dissemination of detail to millions, over thousand of miles, in the blink of an eye. Sharing! If only it was still possible to communicate with Freddy Mercury, maybe the head honchos onboard the Manaikalani Mother Ship would hire him to compose an anthem about that word!

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

Today we learned more about how to make multi modal Google sites. It was very hard and confusing but I did learn some stuff. But will it stay in my brain??? I was feeling rubbish today with a headcold and blocked nose and was identifying strongly with Naughty Little Johnny at the Back of the Class.  I would like to be able to whip up a site easily so I could move away from using the same static site each week and just updating my embeded Slideshows. Slideshows are great but they are quite small and restrictive.

Here is the incomplete site that I made. I really do not like it but it seems that I can only learn how to do this stuff by having a go and then discovering how I could change it to make it better afterwards. 

Then, after lunch we came back in and we had to make another site from scratch. This was easier than before lunch so I must have learned something. Or, maybe it was the walk to town and back and a sushi lunch that helped revive my brain. Spent most of today thinking: Now I know what it's like to be a kid in school again and I don't like it!!! Had several different lists of names in my head as I identified the ways I was feeling with observed student behaviour in my own room. Procrastinated about getting started, shot a few fresh drops of decongestant up my nose and finally cranked up and made this. Happiness!

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

Sites of course. Would be great to be able to create one as easily as I use Slideshows but that seems a long way off. However, I believe that it won't be too long before we have students actually creating their own sites. It just seems like a natural progression.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Well now, if I had more free time I reckon I would make my own family site just to share with my husband, children and a very few close friends. One could abandon Facebook then and stop feeling like you were trapped within a horde of self-promoting, narcissistic dingbats, in orbit around some kind of evil, mind-controlling Death Star. Emancipated, your ideas and images would zip freely and privately across cyber space. It might be nearly as exciting as running away with Han Solo on the Millenium Falcon.

DFI Cohort 2 2019 Day 3 19 June 2019

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani

kaupapa and pedagogy?

Create -needs to be focused on creativity. All the traditional and old-fashioned activities that we used to engage children in are still totally relevant at the beginning of the 21st century. You are still allowed to build constructions, mould clay and make dioramas etc. However, we can make use of 21st century digital devices to facilitate the creation of such stuff and to share the end products with the world.

Matt Goodwin visited us from Pt.England School and told us  a lot about his journey so far with
Learn, Create, Share.

SiSoMo

Creativity combines Sight + Sound + Motion Innovation + Imagination+Accuracy + Attention to detail

People say students are more engaged when they are creating something and as they get more
creative they will require less scaffolding.  Example: "Create a movie on the 5X tables" - kids will
seek answers. If they have ownership, it'll likely be more successful. Students will be  learning naturally
as they 'doing' something. You have to be careful though to construct creation tasks which can only be
completed by using/displaying what you wanted them to have learned at the same time leaving space
for them to incorporate incidental insights which they have picked up along the way.

Here's a little diagram we were asked to redesign to show some creative things our students have done.
Let's see if I can remember how to embed this:

Live stream with Kent Somerville - using HD camera, laptop webcam and dromes. An expensive and
 complicated procedure-also slightly creepy about the time delay- your feed has to go all the way to
California and back -this is not something benign- you can be sure that someone very Big Brotherish is
watching. Might be an  inspiring notion for kids to research: eg. Think about all the different forms o
f surveillance that exist in the world nowadays that we know about….there are a lot...Now, try and think
about what’s out there that is being directed towards us that we don’t know about….What kinds of
surveillance would you invent if you could and how would they work??

Here’s another thought-Why are we so obsessed with recording everything we do on film? What ever
happened to just being there in the moment-in the real world? Sometimes I think we are in danger of
raising children who feel they are not part of nature. Is constant connectivity via the cyber world making
us become addicted to the notion of never missing out on anything and having to be present and
witnessing everything all the time like some kind of  I-can’t-stand-to-not-be-in-on-everything
attention addict ?

I have previously set up my own You Tube channel but it was good to get tips on how to organise it
and set up folders to sort your stuff. I find it particularly good for maths and science.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or

workflow as a professional?

Learning how to embed Youtube and slides  has been helpful. You can then be very specific with videos that you want to direct your class to and embed them into a slide etc. It would reduce problems with students wasting time.

The Google Slides tips were helpful as I use Slides all the time for planning and lesson creation.

Here are some tips:Google Slides.

Google draw - lots of templates.  I already have most of these but found a few new good ones.

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

I use Google Draw, Slides and Youtube all the time for planning and teaching. I definitely want to use
them more. I think I should get the Youtube movies I have used in the past for maths instruction
organised in a better way so that it is easier for students to use to rewind their learning.

I'm going to keep working on Google Keep. Found out about a guy called Tim
Bowers who runs a site called Control Alt Delete. He has a lot of tips for all kinds of stuff plus
he uses Keep to help with students' comments. Here is a link to some of his stuff:

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability

or workflow in my personal life?

I should learn how to use live streaming using a laptop/cellphone. It would be great
to be able to send stuff to my children and my class when my husband and I are in
Yellowstone Park in September.

So, now I am going to attempt to imbed a slideshow I made with my class last term. It's about Chlorophyll.

DFI Cohort 2 2019 Day 2 12 June 2019

What a busy day! We did lots of work with Google Hangouts which was not easy as one of the first few things you have to grapple with is realising what you look like on the screen. It's enough to make you want to give up and go home but we ended up having some fun and feeling a lot better about it by the end of the day.

We had to look at some blog posts by children who had been involved in the Summer Learning Journey and see if by reading them we could figure out what the learning intentions behind them were. This was quite tricky with the one I picked as the writer had not written much and had not started with an introduction that clearly stated the learning intentions. So, that's a good reminder of the importance of teaching children to always start a blog post with an adequate introduction.

Here is the video we made of our Google Hangout discussion.





Before that, we had an online talk from Dorothy Burt which went a bit in depth into what the Learn in Learn Create Share is really about.  We made a Google Keep note to summarise this.
Here is my Keep document:

Now it's time for me to comment on someone else's blog and then go home.

Reflection time:

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani

kaupapa and pedagogy?

That effective teacher practice is fundamental. Digital technologies can enhance and

learning outcomes but they are add-on to teacher effectiveness not an instead-of.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or

workflow as a professional?

Using Google Hangouts to have meetings with a small amount of colleagues and students

Screen recording using Microsoft Powerpoint

Google Keep for uploading photos and a whole lot of other stuff that I don't understand yet

Creating a signature for emails

How to organise emails and bookmarks

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

Powerpoint screen record to make a video -

Powerpoint - insert - media - screen recording.

Right click - save media as - onto desktop and then go into drive

and upload onto the drive

  

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability

or workflow in my personal life?

Organisation of emails, bookmarks etc. creating a personal calendar for
birthdays, organising emails with tabs ,Google Keep will be helpful for
taking pics of things on my phone that can be linked directly to Drive