DFI- Week 7

This was week seven of DFI.
The beginning of our session allowed us to go for a digital dig and see Chromebooks from the perspectives of our learners. I learnt a lot of short cut keys that I believe will be useful to teach my students.

We also gained insight into the juniors world using Ipads. This is useful to know how other devices other than Chromebooks can be used in the classroom.



Our final task was to create a screencastify using one of the cybersmart areas. I chose to talk about blog comments as it is something that I want my class to focus on. We are starting Tuhi Mai Tuhi so I believe that the students remembering to be positive, thoughtful and helpful will be vital.
I also learnt how to embed a video onto my blog which is an awesome new skill.

Highlights:

• Video embedding 
• Chromebook knowledge 

For next time:

• Start Tuhi Mai Tuhi with Mark

DFI- Week 6

This week I was able to spend time on something that I really needed to focus on which was my class site. I really benefitted from this week's session because it was something that I really needed to work on. It was excellent to have the support of the facilitators and scaffolding to create a site that is much more inviting than my site was before. 

One thing I really took away from this session was representing my students on the site. I want to have their images on the site and make it be a real reflection of them. I got started with this idea as soon as I got back to school and had one of my students use Google Draw to create new site images.
This is going to be something that we work on as a class this week to make the site our own. Here are before and afters of the images on my site.

Before:

After:






I also learned how to make buttons on Google Draw which will make my site far more aesthetically pleasing.

A good before and after is my home page which drastically changed and is now far more accessible to the students. I'm excited to continue developing my site. I am full of ideas and inspiration to make it multimodal as well.

Before: 

After:

Considering I didn't know what Google Sites was at the start of this year, I'm feeling pretty happy with the progress so far. I'm really appreciating the benefits of the DFI program and I'm looking forward to the weeks to come.

DFI- Week 5

It is already week 5 in the DFI program and I feel as though what I did today will be very relevant in my teaching practice. 

The focal point of today was Google Sites. I use Google Sites in my classroom currently and this platform was the gateway for online learning during the lockdown. 
Over the lockdown period, I became a lot more comfortable using Google Sites but there are still lots of areas of development. 
We started by making a sandpit site, pictured below: 

This site will be beneficial when testing out buttons and other tools that I want to use on my Classroom site. 

We then moved into our groups to plan and brainstorm what our new sites would look like. I wanted to create a resource that would support the extension of my higher readers. This site would offer multimodal texts around the theme of Environmental Change and Future Survival. This is a work in progress but I was really happy with the progress that I made in a short period of time. Here is a link to the site along with a screenshot of how it looks so far. 

I will continue to work on this resource and then share it with my team, I am excited that this is a resource my colleagues can use as well.


Highlights:

• Being able to create a resource that a few of my students already needed that is engaging. 
• Working with multimodal texts. 
• Learning about the carousel feature on sites which could be useful for Camp photos and other site sharing. 
• The MultiText document 

To work on:

• I don't really have an 'eye for design'. I need to work on my site and what will make it attractive and appealing to the students visually. This means focusing on what colours will work together and fonts to use.
  
  
  I am looking forward to Week 6 of DFI. 

DFI- Week 4

This week there was a lot to take in for the DFI program. We learned about several different programs that will assist us in our teaching practice. This included Google Forms, Maps, Google sheets, and Blogger Stats. 

Challenges: 

• Google sheets is one of the tools that I am less experienced with. This was a learning curve for me however I feel a lot more confident using this tool. I use it for assessment normally but it's great to see other ways that it can be used. 
• Google Maps was a new concept for me. I think that I am going to need to practice Maps a little bit more. I did see the positive benefits of this program and how it could be used for our inquiry topic of 'Culture'. 

Highlights: 

• Latham took us through using Google sheets and how to insert graphs. I feel as though this tool would be incredibly useful for a statistical inquiry unit at school. It is great to find news tools that my learners will enjoy. 
• It was fantastic to have a visual representation of student blog posting in graph form using Google Sheets. I was surprised how quick and easy it was to create so many different styles of graphs. I analysed the data from a girl in my class and I was interested to see the drastic increase in blog posts and sharing over the lockdown period. I have attached the graph below in the results. 
• Google Forms is an excellent skill to have mastered and something that I can see myself using in my year 5/6 class to gain student voice and ideas. 

Results: 

My Google Form

The increase in blogging over the lockdown period.

                                         The dream holiday destinations of the DFI cohort.

DFI- Week 3

This was another week of learning new skills and ways to improve our digital fluency.
One application that I was really excited that we talked about today was Google Draw. Google Draw is a platform that a lot of my colleagues talk about but I was yet to use. I feel like I will use this tool when making buttons for my class site which I am very excited about.
It was cool to talk with other facilitators such as Cheryl and Gerhard.  With Gerhard we talked through Google Draw. I was excited to see how this could be used in the classroom and I know that a lot of my students will enjoy some art based activities using this application. I liked the idea of using Google Draw to create self portraits and I think this is an art idea that I will use in the classroom.
Cheryl taught us about making a slideshow representing a song which I have embedded below. I feel a lot more confident embedding slideshows into the blog now which will help myself and my class.
I'm looking forward to week four of the DFI.

Tools that I think I will use:

• Word Art 
• Londrina Font
• Google Draw 
• Searching for images using png. 

DFI- Week 2

This week was our second week in the DFI programme. The theme for this week was Workflow.
We learned about several different programmes that could help with our workflow.
I'm really enjoying the way that the DFI programme is set up where we click another link to join a smaller group of people. I wish that I had thought of this at the start of lock down because I feel as though this could have been a great way to set up group work.

Programmes that I enjoyed:

There were several programmes that I enjoyed learning about and believe will improve my workflow. One of those was One Tab. I often leave too many tabs open that I don't need, One Tab allows you to organise your tabs and come back to them later.

I also enjoyed Mark's rundown of Hapara in our group as I realised there were other capabilities of the site that I wasn't accessing. I think that I will find the 'Unshared' folder particularly useful when finding student work.

Google keep was also a very useful tool. Especially if i'm taking photos in class for blogs. I know that they will go straight to my laptop. The Grab Image text tool is so valuable as well and something that I wish I had known about at University!


To work on for next time: 
There are still some skills I need to work on such as creating an email signature.

Connecting:
It was really nice to connect with Katie a new entrant teacher at St Francis of Assisi school. Together we discussed blogging and how we have been teaching during lockdown. I have included a screenshot of our learning together.

DFI -Week 1

Today marked the first day of professional development with DFI. New Learnings: On this first day of the program I learnt a lot of new skills that I believe will benefit my learners as we work together online.After learning about the history of Manaiakalani we explored different online tools, with a particular emphasis on Google Docs. Something that might be quite basic to some but that I really needed to improve was the way that I create tables on a Google Doc.I think that I will use the tool of voice typing in the classroom to help with children's punctuation. The fact that you have to actively state what punctuation you want to use, I believe, will benefit children in my class. I used my new found skills and knowledge to create this P.E challenge for my learners next week.

There are still some skills I need to master but that is all part of the learning journey. I'm looking forward to see where the next phase of the DFI journey takes me.