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

DFI Cohort 2 2019: Day One

DFI Cohort 2 2019: Day 1
Time to reflect and share with colleagues about what I have learned today. What I write is supposed to answer the following focus four questions:

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?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 did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Here's an overview of our agenda and who was here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16QaXpXCoZPeqbjZWpUtRgORNzFCIfDg_ly9RLd5Gkso/edit#

Here is the presentation about blogging tips.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IrsabPDi1hVOc3hkQYymeClaTfsAGBi9cxHDztcG28U/edit#slide=id.g3bfd3f60ee_0_0

This gadget helps you tweak your blog page so it looks more fancy.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BsXVwP5Fmvl051DNdiy1ZRpwZW_W5M6WkS8PFBp7eZw/edit

We learned some cool tips about how to jazz up Google docs.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IhIo9I5OqQZwPHdAGjnff17BtuMv8SEQC3UMZRorEg4/edit#slide=id.g5ae249cff7_0_17

We were supposed to use what we had learned to create our own snazzy Google doc. I did not meet the deadline.




Highlight of the day for me:
This was something Dorothy showed us using a Google doc. You have a shared doc and students have to highlight some text in the doc then write a question which the highlighted text would answer. You write the question in a comments box after inserting another student's email address. Then you assign the question to them and an email gets sent to them and they have to answer the question.
I thought this was very groovy.