Update on Google Data Studio #4 - It's all about sharing!

Bonjour everyone! I was originally going to white about my journey in sharing my students' writing work thanks to Google Data Studio. However, after having seen how popular my latest report had been with my class and school community in general, I changed my mind...

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how I could implement further the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. As a matter of fact, I have found that it can sometimes be a struggle over distance learning, seeing as how most of the students' work is shared over email by their whānau. I realised that I was really missing having the option to share my students' learning around our classroom, like we would normally do.

As we all know, I have a strong passion for making sure that our learning is connected, ubiquitous and visible. However, ever since Auckland went back into lockdown last term, I have found a challenge in making sure that our learning also made my learners feel empowered. Even though my students have had the opportunity to choose between different learning activities, they have been a little stuck with how their sharing would happen. With my students having to rely heavily on their whānau and on the people in their bubble to share their work with me, some students have been missing out on sharing their mahi, while some have only been sharing their work during our online meetings. There were not a whole lot of choice options available for them at that stage, and many had expressed how frustrated they have been feeling in that regard.

From the moment lockdown started, I realised that this would be an issue for a number of students. I had done some thinking at the time, and realised that some of their work (such as most maths activities, our reading log, and some writing work) could easily be sharable using Google Forms. This was a big success, and many students enjoyed seeing their individual as well as their peers' mahi thanks to the various Google Data Studio reports that I created, all thanks to them being able to share their work with me by themselves. So this was a step in the right direction, but was it really going to be enough? What about those learners who would rather use paper as their prefered way of learning? Or those who would rather record themselves in video? If their whānau was unavailable to help them share their mahi, then they still felt excluded.

In my opinion, sharing is not just about learners showing their work to their kaiako. Rather, I see sharing as an opportunity to share our mahi with at least our class and school community, if not to a wider audience. Unfortunately, individual emails did not enable us to achieve this goal. I wanted more. I wanted to find a way to make Room 2's students' hard work (as well as their well-earned feedback!) visible for everyone. I will, of course, still be replying to emails - this will not change in the slightest! 

As you might have figured out by now, I have been working on yet another project to share more of our learning journey. This little passion-project of mine has taken some time to be what it is now, and there has been a lot of finetuning to make it as engaging as I would have wanted it to be. From now on, every time a student shares their work with me via email, I will make sure to also add their mahi to this virtual portfolio, for eveyone to have a look at. This report is linked to a Google Form, which enables students to upload their mahi themselves if they wish to (if not, I will upload their work on their behalf). Children will have the chance to say a few words to present their mahi if they would like to, and they will also be able to access their feedback without having to ask parents for access to their mailbox. I've set it up so that it's kind of like hanging our work around the classroom, only in a virtual way. I have also added a couple of graphs to it (mostly because my students are really enjoying these, let's be honest, and also because it helps with keeping them engaged). I have also added a filter so that viewers can either browse through all of the students' mahi, or so that they can directly look for a specific student's pieces of work.

In the end, this is the final version of this project, where my students can share the create activities that they have done throughout their learning journey:

My learners have also been learning to add their work to our class padlet by themselves. They no longer need me to upload their work for them and have been leaving some lovely comments underneath their classmates' posts. 

Distance learning is not my favourite way of teaching, but I do have to acknowledge how far we have come. Learners and teachers alike have had to upskill themselves and most seised the opportunity to learn how to use new tools that they would not have become familiar with otherwise. I am really amazed by all the digital skills everyone has developed throughout the year, and I am confident that these are skills which we will be able to use once we go back to face-to-face instruction. 

Update on Google Data Studio #3 - Room 2's clever mathematicians term 3

The life of someone alone in their bubble can get quite repetitive and (dare I say?) almost boring at times. To keep myself occupied over the past 70+ days, I have gone back to exercising, done a bit of furniture refurbishing, and tried to improve my drawing skills. But my brain also needed some creative/ down/ fun/ challenging time, and so I have done my fair share of exploring with Google Data Studio. I have not been the best at posting though, so I will try to update my professional blog over the next couple of weeks... Stay tuned!

After having created a reading log for my class (which they are still loving and using daily), I thought that I needed something to keep my students engaged with their maths learning. During one of our online meetings, I asked my students how we could make this more fun for them while they are learning at home, and what they would like to see more of. As a general consensus, they all talked about how much they would like to see how many maths activities had been done by who, and which ones had been the most popular. So I put my brain to work, and tried my best to do create some sort of a maths log.

However, with the wide variety of maths Google Forms activities available on our class site, this one took some creative thinking to get right. I have been using many different google forms for our maths activities, which means that I had to come up with a way of utilising the data from a lot of different tas within the same spreadsheets. This was a little trickier to set up and took more time, but he is what I have come up with so far:

This one will not update itself automatically for now as I am still tweaking a few bits and bobs on it, but it also includes the work that my students have sent me via email.

I am looking forward to seeing what else I could add to this, but I think I will leave this to next term for now... I can already confirm that my learners are really enjoying looking at our maths display, and they have requested I make them another one for term 4... Stay tuned for more updates on how I have been using Google Data Studio to display my students' writing over this extended lockdown period!

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 9 blog post

This week was our ninth and final session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was external recognition.

Today was our very last DFI session, and we were provided with the opportunity to complete our Level 1 Google Certified Educator exam. I finished and passed early on, and figured that since today was 'External Recognition' day I might as well attempt the Level 2 Google Certified Educator exam as well, and I passed this one too! Phew.

Both exams consisted of 35 questions (multiple-choice, drag and drop), and I wish it had been a little more hands-on rather than knowledge-based. Still, I thought that it was a great opportunity to practice the skills which we have been learning over the past 8 weeks.

I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the DFI sessions, and have found that learning more about the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy has really helped me reflect more on my practice. Going forward, I will do my best to keep on implementing this within my classroom program, and I will do what I can to help and support other teachers in my kura with doing so in their own class as well.

I really enjoyed connecting with my bubble group every Friday (especially going into lockdown, it has made my bubble of 1 feel more connected to the outside world). If I were to change one thing about the way the course is run though, I would say that it could be a great idea to rotate the bubbles each week. This way, participants could interact with a wider variety of teachers, and making different connections.

 My students have really enjoyed using the resources I have created throughout the course, and I am sure that they will enjoy being introduced to new apps once we head back into school. I look forward to keeping on learning new digital skills in the future - after all, this is what being a lifelong learner is all about isn't it?

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 8 blog post

I am definitely getting there, I will be able to say that I am up to date before the end of today as it seems. I'll do my best to stay on top of posting next time, catching up is not super fun!

This week was our eighth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was computational thinking.

During this session,  we focused on computational thinking and on the Digital Curriculum.  If I had say that I had looked at the Digital Curriculum before, I cannot however say that I really looked at it in depths as I had placed it quite low on my priority list as a beginning teacher. However, I realised today that I have been teaching it, to some extent. Sadly, the multiple lockdowns that have been taking place in Auckland since March 2020 have not made this an easy task. With having to constantly go back to basics and to behaviour expectations, I have not been able to do as much in this space as I would have wanted to. Still, I got really captivated once I realised that we did not have to teach this as an extra subject, but that we could (and should!) rather integrate it to other learning areas, such as maths for example.

These days, the technological world is constantly evolving (I LOVE staying up to date with all the new tools and gadgets that are popping up - this is certainly one of my happy place whenever I need a break from the hustle and bustle that life can sometimes turn into. Change is definitely not something that I am afraid of: on the contrary, this is something that is sure to make me excited!), and it is and I strongly believe that it is essential that we, as teachers, are providing our learners with the appropriate skills to adapt themselves and be fluent in their use of digital technologies. It is crucial that they keep their mind open to new opportunities as one of our jobs, as educators, is to push our kids to become life-long learners.

For today's 'create' activity, I was really looking forward to learning more about scratch junior. However, with Auckland still being at Alert level 4, I did not get a chance to pop into school to grab an iPad. As a result, I ended up not being able to attend the scratch junior session, and decided to join Cheryl's session on how to use scratch to draw geometric shapes. Even though I knew that this might get a little too technical for my students, I thought that this would be a great learning opportunity. Towards the end of our breakout room session, I had learned and understood how to use the platform to create a fun spirograph using pentagons as my starting shape. Look at all these fun colours!

I'd be really keen on having a look at scratch junior once I get access to an iPad, as I really think that this is the kind of app that my students would enjoy falling in love with.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 7 blog post

Slowly but surely, I am catching up on getting my professional blog up to date. I know I've said it last week, but being completely alone for 5 weeks makes it hard sometimes to stay on task. My goal for today is to catch up on both week 7 and week 8's blog posts.

This week was our seventh session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was on devices.

During this session, we had a deeper look at what the notion of ubiquitous learning means for our learners.  I really felt like I could relate with the idea of making sure that students would have the ability to connect with their learning outside of their usual school hours as well as within, but also how it was important that they could do so at their own pace. It also helped me realise how important it is that anyone can access what is going on in our classroom. I thought that the image below really was a representation of what using your class site as a way of expanding the walls of the classroom, and thought I should include it to today's post.

I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to learn more about the students' experience in using different devices (iPads and Chromebooks). I thought it was quite fun to have a go at completing the Digital Dig, and can definitely see how this would be both useful and beneficial to students using Chromebooks. I have not used a Chromebook before myself, but I am a confident Chrome user, and I was not too surprised to see that most of the shortcuts are actually the same. 

Still, doing this task on my own made me realise how important it is that we do this every year with our tamariki, in order for them to become confident and experienced Chromebook users.

Today, I got to spend some time exploring Explain Everything, and how to use this app within junior classrooms. I had seen it in place in two schools that I visited last year already, and was really keen on giving it a go with my students this year. However, I found out pretty early on that this is not a suitable app to use within a classroom where students have to share their iPads with each other. This is a real shame, as the app offers so many great opportunities for the teacher to engage with their students' learning and gain an understanding of their learners' strengths and weaknesses, which would allow them to target which further learning would be required. Later on, once our junior school starts having access to 1:1 devices, I would absolutely love to use this tool properly.

Next steps:

• I'd like to get make sure that the learning I have been adding onto my class site fits the definition of ubiquitous learning as defined by the Manaiakalani pedagogy.
• Once we start having access to 1:1 iPads within our junior school, I would like to push the use of Explain Everything.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 6 blog post

Being home by yourself is no easy task, and I have to admit that I tend to avoid being faced with my loneliness by finding new projects to work on and creating new activities to keep my students engage. And as a result, it is possible that I might have forgotten to update my professional blog, again. Thank you, Phil, for reminding me!

This week was our sixth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was enabling access.

During this session, I really enjoyed looking at different class sites across different age groups. It made me realised that was might be working for me this year in a year 2 class might not necessarily be working as well if I were to move to a higher year level at some stage. It also helped me reflect on what was working well with my site, and what needed to be improved.

However, I thought that the criteria we used to assess and give feedback on each other's sites might be a little subjective. As I was thinking before, different year levels will have different needs, and what might work in a class might not work in another class of a similar level. At the end of the day, I strongly believe that whatever it is that works best for your learners is what you should be focusing on as an educator. It does not mean that what one is using is perfect and shouldn't change. On the contrary, I think that if you start asking yourself the right questions, you might be able to improve the experience of the users who will be navigating the site. Instead of focusing on what you would like to see, why don't you ask your learners/ users what they need and want? Personally, I know that I loved getting feedback from my learners at the start of this term, it really helped me improved the way my site looked and it helped me make it easier for junior students to navigate. That being said, certain things will be true regardless of year level or personal preferences. Anyone (especially students!) would get discouraged by spending too much time looking for where their activity is located, whether it be because they had to click on too many links or whether they had to scroll for too long to get to the aforementioned activity. 

Regardless, I loved being able to look more in depths as the sites of my bubble group. We gave and received feedback on what our sites looked like at that point of the session, and then it was time for us to pick goals for us to work on, before our create session began.

This week's create session: enabling access (Google sites)

At first, I had my heart set on reorganising bits and bobs on my class site. But as I thought more about how I could improve it, I realised that it might not be the best choice with us being in lockdown. Our class site is working really well as it is, students are familiar with it and able to navigate it without any support. If I were to change it, I would rather do it in term 4 when we are back in the classroom and I can teach my students how to use the updated version.

As a result, I  decided to create little mini-sites for my t-shaped units (before this session, my t-shaped units were all part of my main class site,  but I realised that this was probably not as ideal as I originally thought it would be).

There will, however, be no "before and after" picture. With my students being familiar with how to use the links that are currently available on our site, I have decided not deleted those, but I thought that there had to be an easier for me to share these sites with the rest of my team. I then decided that this was not enough, so I ended up creating an extra google site to link all the multi-modal sites I have already created this year, including a link to the template I am using to create these sites. Here is the link in case you would be interested in checking them out - just be aware that some are still under construction.

During today's session, I also managed to finish a new multimodal site, this time integrating a report from google studio which will update itself every time students (or special guests!) fill in our google form with their pepeha. I've added another section this time, in order for other people to fill in their pepeha as well (support staff, family members, students from other classrooms or other schools, etc. If you are interested in checking out what the final result is, I invite you to check out our Te Wiki o te Reo Māori site. 

I couldn't help but feel sad for not having had the opportunity to have a good before and after photo montage. I know that this wasn't really the aim of this session, but I couldn't help myself to have just a little bit of a play with Google Data Studio. I thought that using cards would be a good way to display students' writing, but in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced of the way it looked. But then, my world opened up once I realised I could use my basic knowledge of HTML and CSS to improve the way it looked and adjust it to fit my needs. I am feeling pretty happy with the results, but I might try and see if I can improve this further later on. My students have been telling me that these reports are really motivating them to submit their work, so I know I will be putting in an extra effort to create these sorts of reports whenever I can.

Unfortunately, my internet connection was impacted by the DDOS attack: I was left unable to keep on having fun with today's create session. I will have to update our class' padlet in my own time to make our sharing more visible... Stay tuned, or head to our class blog for more updates on this. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed this DFI session, which was more hands-on, as I found the opportunity to work on our class sites really useful (especially with Auckland still being in lockdown for now).

Update on Google Data Studio #2 - Reading log page 2

Soooo. It is possible that I might have done a thing, again.

I've been playing with Google Data Studio a lot over the past week (wait, has it really only been a week?! Time really does fly, don't you think?), and I can tell you that it definitely is my ultimate favourite Google tool.

As much as I enjoyed creating my original report to display my students' reading log data, I felt like something was missing and I was convinced that there was more I could do. And so I did. I created an extra page to display my students' individual reading log data. For this second page, I wanted to create something more relevant to my learners and their whānau, but I also wanted something that would make it easier for me as a teacher to track my students' learning.

Check it out:

I ended up coming up with the idea of using a drop-down list based on the names of my students. I then set up the report so that the user would be able to click on the name of the student they are interested in. This will then populate how many books have been read, which books have been enjoyed the most, as well as their most recent book review. Before selecting the student's name, the report will display the data for the whole class.

I find Google Data Studio super fun to use, although it does get a little addictive. I would still recommend you to check it out if you are interested, I would love to see what you come up with!

I have also created a brand new report, this time about maths. But I do not want this blog post to get too long, so I think that I will leave it there for now... Stay tuned!