Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 5 blog post

Yesterday was our fifth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - this session's focus was collaborate & Google Sites.

During this session, we kept on diving deeper into the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy, with our main focus being on class sites, multimodal planning and visible learning. When I was busy creating my class site earlier this year, I did want my home page to be quite minimalistic but I also wanted it to give users an easy window to guide them through navigating the site. After yesterday's session, I can say I resonated with the idea that class sites are an extension of our physical classroom. And this is really true! 

I teach a lovely Year 2 class, with a 1:2 iPad ratio. Both at the end of term 2 and at the start of term 3, I started running workshops to teach my students how to use and navigate our class site. It has been really useful for me as well, as I was asking them to tell me what wasn't really working and what they found challenging. I have been able to adapt my site to my students' needs, and most of them find it really easy to navigate. Even though I have not been able to go through every learner before the country moved back to alert level 4., I was confident that most of my students already knew their way around our site.

Once we head back into school (hopefully soon 🤞), my goal is to help my students utilise the digital skills that they have been learning and to integrate these more into my classroom program.

I find working on creating a Google Site quite soothing and relaxing, and I feel like I can really try and get creative with my ideas, and I really enjoyed today's 'create' activity. I loved getting the opportunity to look at the way other junior multimodal sites were organised, it gave me a lot of new ideas. At the moment, I have created all my T-Shaped Literacy units as different subpages. I am trying to decide whether I like the idea of having multiple sites more, or whether I prefer doing it this way. For this year, I will probably be sticking to creating these units within my class site as this is what my students are used to, but let's see how things go.

But today's 'create' activity was about more than creating a new Google Site: it was about working collaboratively with other teachers on finding texts relating to a theme (our group's theme was friendship). We then used these resources to each create our own multimodal site on the topic.

Here is the link to the multimodal site I created today: click here to learn more about kindness.

Back when I used to play with Blogger as a teenager, I remember that it was indeed possible to embed a website into a blogpost. I have tried my best at using the iframe HTML tag, but to no luck. Maybe that is no longer possible? I'll definitely have to do some googling on that one. But don't mind me being me, I digress...

After attending a google meet on T-Shaped Literacy back in term 1, I have started giving multimodal planning a go this year. I have only done a couple of units so far (you can check some of them over here if you are interested), but really I am still just figuring it out as I go along. My students have really been enjoying these units though, and I am currently working on two units for my kids to enjoy this lockdown.

I loved being reminded about the multi-text database. We did get introduced to it back in term 1, but I had completely forgotten it even existed! I spent a bit of time creating my own ones, which I really enjoyed, and I might take some time to add them to the database once I am happy enough with them. Sharing is caring, and I love working collaboratively with others. This is also one of our core values at New Windsor School!

Digital Fluency Intensive : Week 4 Blog Post

 Last Friday was our fourth session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - today's focus was dealing with data.

During this session, we kept on diving deeper into the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. We started the session by exploring the 'Share' kaupapa - I was super excited about this one. 

I really connected with the idea that, instead of sharing to learn, we are sharing to finish learning. It is true that sharing our work enables us to feel satisfied. If this is how we feel, as adults, it makes complete sense that this is how our students would also feel.

We looked at quite a few google tools today, I love getting a bit of diversity throughout the day during our create sessions. 

1. Our first tool of the day was Google Forms. I am a big fan of google forms, that's one of the Google tools that I use quite a lot. I find that they are a really convenient way of collecting data, whether the information comes from students or from their parents. For example, I created one when we administered our eASTTLE writing prompt back in term 1, as it was a much easier way for me to collect my students' voices for the attitude questions. I also send some to parents via emails sometimes, I usually get more replies this way than when I ask them to email me back. I thought this 'Create' activity was rather fun to make.

My next goal with Google Forms would be to differentiate them depending on the answers that students would give. If they get it right, they can move on to the next section, but if not they could either get asked an easier question or else they could get a thank you message which would direct them towards some other activities for them to get more practice... That's something I am currently looking into, it's pretty fun!

2. Our next 'Create' activity was based on Google My Maps - a wonderful tool, which I had used before but would not have thought about using in my classroom. I took the liberty of adapting this task to something that my class would be more able to relate to. Instead of retracing someone's famous journey, I decided to try and remember all the places that I have travelled to before moving to New Zealand. This is something that my students ask me weekly (if not daily for some!), so I thought it would be a fun one to do. I'm sure I forgot a whole lot of places and events, I'll have to add some more to this as I remember.

         

Although I must admit, I got a little carried away and this map feels quite heavy now. I am yet to decide whether to use it with my class or not... Even if I don't use this one, I'm sure I can find some exciting ways to use this tool within my classroom program.

3. Our last 'Create' activity for the day was based on Google Sheets. Now, this is my absolute favourite Google tool: I am simply obsessed with spreadsheet. I am always trying to find a reason to justify creating a new spreadsheet, that's how obsessed I am. I use them to track students progress, monitor Google Forms answers, budgetting, and the list goes on. I don't think I could ever run out of ideas. 🧠💡 I'm the happiest when I can play with colour coding or formulas, when I can use data from different sources, when I can make pretty graphs... But I must admit, I haven't yet found a way to use them with my students. 

As much as I love a good spreadsheet, my Year 2 students really don't. Although they do get excited when I show them that I can get a random name just by pressing a key, or that different numbers get a nice colour automatically.

Our Google Sheets 'Create' task was to create a chart out of a blog, looking at the number of posts that are being made on a monthly basis. I decided to work with Finau's blog, and wow, I was super impressed with the number of posts she already has on her blog. I am a long way away from catching up with her!

Here is the link to the spreadsheet I created if you are keen to check it out. I could not help myself form having a play with some formulas after having created my graph... I am hopeless, aren't I?

I think it is safe to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this session, I am really looking forward to some more learning next week to learn more about being collaborative. Stay tuned!

Oops, I am a little late to posting again this week... I'll catch up though, I might even post twice in one day!

Self learning - Google Data Studio #1

If you know me at all, you are well aware of my love and passion for spreadsheets. Colour coding, formulas, graphs, pivot tables... You name it! But if you know me, you also know that I love a good challenge. I just simply cannot stay still. My brain needs to always be working in the background, one way or another. With New Zealand being back into lockdown, I've had to find new ways to keep myself busy and entertained.🧠

Everyone knows how much I love spreadsheets and pretty graphs, but I felt like I needed a new challenge to keep me entertained over this new lockdown. I had been thinking about using Google Data Studio for a while now, but I did not find enough time to give it a go.

With the country's swift move back to alert level 4, the students in room 2 and I have been working hard on our distance learning programme. Not all my students have access to their own devices, so I've been using google forms to try and keep most of my students engaged and get them to share their learning without always needing them to ask their parents to email me their work. It's been working really well, especially our reading log, but I didn't feel super happy with what sharing looked like given that I was the only person having access to that data...

As much as I love a good spreadsheet, my year 2 students really don't - which is why I wanted to create something different that they could access too. So I made the most of being stuck at home: I started teaching myself how to use Google Data Studio, and I figured out a way to display the data that I have been collecting with our class reading log.

I love the final result because it visually appealing to students, and also (let's be honest!) mostly because it will update itself automatically every time one of my students fills in our reading log.

Look at this, how cool!

I mean, it is still very much a work of progress. I would love to be able to add a filter for us to pick which Room 2's book review we want to read, but I haven't gotten that figured out quite yet. This should keep me busy over this lockdown! 🤭

My students' favourite feature is the 'most recent book review', which they can see changing quite frequently throughout the day as more people fill in the form.

I can really feel myself falling in love with this tool already. I might be slightly obsessed, but I do feel like the possibilities are only limited by one's creativity and immagination. If you're already confident using Google Sheets, I would highly recommend giving it a go.

Next steps:

• I'll be creating more of these to showcase our learning, but I'm wondering if anyone else out there uses Data Studio to display their students' learning journeys?
• I am SO looking forward to attending a toolkit on Google Data Studio with Dave walker this Wednesday evening to find out more about this tool. Stay tuned...

Digital Fluency Intensive : Week 3 Blog Post

Today was our third session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - today's focus was media, and how to make some small adjustments to our daily practices.

During this session, we kept on diving deeper into the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Today, we have been focusing on the 'Create' part of the pedagogy. I am a big fan of  'Create', and can totally see how we can link this to our school values (where 'Creatiativity' is, in fact, one of the stepping stones). I liked the idea that the  'Learn' and 'Create' can be untertwined and linked to one another. New Windsor School has started its DMIC journey this year, and this would be a great example as to when the learning and the creating can take place simultaneously. 

I feel like we've had 2 create sessions today. One was based on Google Drawings, and the other on Google Slides.

We started using Google Drawings to create an About Me image which we can use to introduce ourselves on our blogs. Here is mine: 

Then, we moved on to Google Slides. I had heaps of fun creating  a Pick-a-Path slideshow for my class to use. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to finish mine, but I am super excited about doing some extra work on it and using it with my learners. Hopefully it is not too wordy (I am aware that I did get a little overexcited, and the activity will be challenging for some of my students... I might have to work on it some more, and find a way to differentiate it to make it more accessible to my learners... Definitely worth a thought!), and my students can enjoy playing around with it. Have a look yourself and let me know what you think of it:

I was already pretty comfortable using YouTube, Google Drawings as well as Google Slides before today's session, but I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed working on my pick-a-path activity.  I have always love those kind of "pick your own adventure" books, and had been thinking about doing my own one for a little while. I had started working on a similar project using Google Forms at the start of this term, but using Google Slides instead made it way more manageable and easier to create.

I cannot wait until next week's session - I love Google Forms, but if I am being totally honest with you, Google Sheets is my absolute favourite Google tool to use and have fun with. (Although I must admit that I recently found out about Data Studio, and I can feel myself falling in love already... To be continued...)

Oops, I am a little late to the party this week. It looks like someone might have forgotten to hit the 'publish' button last Friday.  🤦

Digital Fluency Intensive : Week 2 Blog Post

Today was our second session of the Digital Fluency Intensive course for term 3 - today's focus was workflow, and how to make some small adjustments to our daily practices.

During this session, we dived deeper into the Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Since last year, my kuraa has been encouraging us to apply this pedagogy to our learning programs, especially when we were in lockdown and had to give distance learning a go. I am trying to embedded the pedagogy more and more in my planning (although I must admit it is still a work in progress!), and my students are really enjoying it. They particularly enjoy working on their create activities, which they love to share with their peers or with other adults around our kura. 

Today's create activity was through Meet, which I thought was pretty cool. We each hosted a meet,  recorded ourselves talking and answering questions about our task, and then embedded it onto our professional blogs.

We were asked to look at some student blogs from last year - and let me tell you, there was so much awesome creative learning going on! I looked at Celine's blog post, where she was showing her audience how she made an Oreo cheesecake.

Unfortunately, all the rain from today has meant that my internet connexion was lagging at times. When I was watching the recording of me presenting to Tracy and Michelle, I noticed a lot of black patches with no audio so I've super quickly used screencastify to get rid of them. Hopefully, I haven't missed any!

If I am being completely honest, if I don't mind recording myself, I'm definitely not quite at the stage where I feel comfortable listening to the recording itself. 🤪 

I wouldn't have thought of using it for my learners to record themselves and share their learning. However, I do teach 6 and 7 years old and don't think it will be the most accessible activity for them - I will be sure to keep this in my kete for later. 

I am really, really looking forward to some more learning with the team next week.