Week 7 DFI

 Being Smart Online-

I liked these little images from a GIF that was in the slides that Fiona from Manaiakalani shared with us during her Google Meet this morning. I am thinking about printing them and laminating them to display in our space. A lot of the online language focuses on ‘being safe’ and scare mongering. ‘DON’T share online or you will get into trouble’ type of message. New focus is to empower learners, more of a positive way of spreading the message ‘Be internet awesome, be strong, brave’.

Empowering- Term one focus, Kawa of care. This looks different in different schools. This was developed in partnership with whanau. What does it mean to ‘be in the right place at the right time’ 

Ubiquitous- Kind, positive, helpful. Being in the right place, what do you do if you don’t know what to do, keeping your passwords secret. This empowers learners. 

Connected: Strong focus on using the language. Sharing content that creates authentic connection in order to maintain the positive online relationship. Blogging is an important aspect of cybersmart learning. Providing an authentic opportunity for learning and connecting. How do I feel when someone leaves a positive comment on my blog. Develops empathy and what it feels like to have positive online relationships. We want kids to be able to make that smart decision about whether their information is shareable or private. If you are not sharing anything personal, you’re not really sharing. Empowering kids to know the difference between shareable and private and to ask if they are not sure. 

In conclusion, Learn Create Share is based on these 4 parts .

Even 5 year olds can do this via a class blog. Another important part of the puzzle is parents. Families have a key role in helping our learners become cybersmart. We need to connect them into our learning. Positive, helpful, thoughtful blog commenting. 

Conversations online and offline are very important.

Chromebook Shortcuts

We did some exploration on chromebooks so that we know how the kids use the tools they have in the classroom. I learned some new shortcuts during a digital dig. Here is the slides that I worked through.

Here are some key take aways for me.

iPads- Explain Everything

We used Explain Everything- played around with some different functions and created slide on Explain Everything. I Airdropped to myself. See below.

DFI- Week 6

How empowering is it to be connected? Technology allows us to make real connections with people. The ability to connect beyond the people we know is essential.

Today we talked about visibility and the importance of everything we do being visible. I understand this but at the same time disagree with this to a point. There are some things that don't need to be visible to everyone e.g. resources we've paid for and don't have the rights to share OR reflections and observations. In saying this however, over the last year my opinion has been changed about ensuring the learning is open to any teacher or learner who may want to access the learning. We are professionals who like to share, share, share.

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu- Quad blogging. Many schools have used this to connect across the country. Valuable connections for students. Allows other kids in NZ to see that CHCH kids are just like them. We used to have cluster blogging buddies, I wonder why the children don't have these anymore?

We also spent time looking through different Google Sites today and had the chance to talk to others in the DFI group and receive feedback about our site. We used this feedback to then moderate our own sites, making changes and adding new functions to make it more user friendly. I did the following: - hid some pages which aren't currently being used - add where we are in NZ - add more columns so that don't need to scroll so far to find kids blogs - fixed some buttons that didn't seem to be working

Next steps (for next year) - Bilingual buttons - Use audio - Use photos of the kids?? I saw a really cool example on a Point England site. (see image below)

DFI- Week 5

 Today at DFOI (Week 5) we looked Google Sites. With Dorothy, we discussed the importance of making learning visible for our Tamariki. It..

• Encourages partnership with school and home 

• Teachers being able to see what the child is doing 

• Visibility of what other teachers are doing (blogs, planning etc)

Dorothy talked about the Hapara Hot Tip- using the sharing function on Hapara to find the children's things that they haven't put into their folders. This is a part of Hapara that I use regularly to find things that the children I teach haven't put into a folder. It's a very useful button to know about.. although still doesn't create finished work!! 

Our task today was to create a Multi Modal Site which encompasses a variety of texts to support our learners. Click this link to take you to the site I created. The site focuses on the text 'Wonder' by R.J. Palacio that I'm reading with my reading group.

I used the MultiText Data Base to support the children.

Here is the link to my learning space site that my children use daily. This is where literally everything goes that we need the children to access.

DFI- Week 4

Sharing isn’t something new, it’s part of being human.  

Connected learners share: positive, thoughtful, helpful.  Face to face sharing, Small group- whanau size, sharing with a group of known people, big groups that we share to (assembly, festival, still in real time), online world.

BLOGGER: Why was it chosen as our online platform? 

• Resembles the spaces that young people want to be on

• Able to provision this legally, systematically and securely

• No new sign in with GSuite users

• Guaranteed three check system

• Largest audience reached via Google

• Multi Purposed- it can look and feel different to other blogs

• Can be used by learners and teachers

• Supports our cybersmart curriculum 

• Teaches kids how to ‘drive’ in the digital world, Blogger is functional and allows kids to learn in an easy way

• Connecting with whanau is not the purpose of Blogger, it is to protect our kids and allow them to become cybersmart 

Share to finish learning: 

• Encourages kids to ‘finish’ something in order to be able to share it

• Lots of kids don’t value ‘finishing’ so giving them this opportunity will benefit them when they are in the workforce. 

• Having a  purpose for sharing is important (for learning from others, to teach others and to start new learning conversations) Sharing for feedback (feed forward)

Google Forms: Good for student voice and evaluations 

• A way to collect and sort information 

• Search ‘forms.new’ and start with a blank template 

• Add, duplicate, required are all great options 

• Add images, titles, sections and videos

• Settings: Top right hand corner- can turn off and on depending on what you are wanting. You can restrict the user info (distribute to people further than your school). Check only add the form once. Allowing others to edit their mistakes. 

• Summary chart - You can choose whether others can see this - or just yourself. 

• You can send the form once complete via email. You don’t actually share the file with others like with other google apps. Share it as an email, as a link or embedded (like on the site)

• Viewing response data, you can export this into a spreadsheet. You can link other forms to the same spreadsheet (this is to create a new tab).

Google maps

• Good way to introduce a new place e.g. camp destination to anxious learners. 

• Can add layers, move map around, marker - grab and drop-, pin places, add information and pictures. Line tool to connect two parts together. Use the measuring tool 

• Great for measurement - maths 

• Layering- School map with ECEs underneath then the universities on top etc

• Customise markers - click on in and add details on style, pictures, make it a house or a star etc

• Can bring in information from a spreadsheet (e.g we filled in the form, download the data from there into a spreadsheet and import the data from there. Tell google maps what you want to ‘bring in’  e.g. names and selfie pics etc

DFI Week 3- Media

Today at DFI we learned about different types of Media (Slides, Drawing etc) that we can use.

Three things I learned today
- masking an image
- aligning images with 'arrange'
- adding a clip to a playlist in Youtube

Here is a Google Drawing to show some take aways for me today.

Here is my Pick a Path for 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'

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