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.