Share to Learn: Week 4 of Digital Immersion Intensive.

It has been a very busy day today! Dorothy began the day by highlighting how we Share to Learn. This is particularly apparent in blog posts that can be visited, commented on and revisited years later. Learning should be visible, rewindable and able to be revisited months, even years, later.

Feedback was another area of interest today. Comments on blogs can be valuable learning tools, particularly when conversations back and forth are entered into. We looked at The 4 Fundamentals of Feedback to students as well as the Manaiakalani “Positive, Thoughtful, Helpful’ tools to help us leave useful and relevant comments on our students' and peers' blogs.

I really enjoyed getting on the Chromebooks and I-pads today, to get a taste of what life is like for our students. By completing the 'Digital Dig' I learned a lot of new shortcuts and skills to speed up my work on a Chromebook and MacBook for that matter. (I'm a little embarrassed to admit I didn't know about the two-fingers to right-click and scroll on the touchpad!)


I shared a lesson I created in Explain Everything to use with my class on their i-pads and enjoyed seeing my fellow teachers have a play and complete it. Ben and Trish shared some of theirs as well, and we were lucky enough to have one of our Col teachers, Khismira Lal visit to share her expertise with us. I learned about lassoing images and Ben taught me how to create simple animations. I liked how Khismira makes a template for images that the children can copy into their Explain Everythings when appropriate. I can see that they would enjoy the Spiderman and Queen Elsa images more than the few shapes available in the app.

Here is me using Screencastify for the first time to comment on Trish's blog.

Week 3 of Digital Immersion Intensive

Today we reflected on what the CREATE portion of learn-create-share means to us. We looked at children's blog posts and thought about how much of an opportunity to create was included in their work. We came together in groups through Google Hangouts (video of our Hangout at the bottom) and looked at the opportunities for learner empowerment and agency while becoming familiar with the tools that Google Hangouts has to offer.

Norah-Jade's Blog Post

I learned to organise my Gmail more efficiently using settings and filters. It even looks much prettier now that I have discovered the Themes option. My Calendar is organised to include the school calendars as well as those of my colleagues.

The most exciting thing I discovered today however, had to do with Google Keep. I had been using it for a little while as a post-it note type service but today I discovered two new things I can do with it! I love the ability to strip text from an image, and then transfer that into a Google Doc. Also, being able to voice record my notes could make my multi-tasking life a lot easier.

I look forward to seeing what next week has in store for us.

Inquiry, Term 2 - Where to from here?

I have been working really hard at making Explain Everything activities tailored to my students' needs. These have been easier to do with my Reading Groups than with my Maths Groups, but I'm working on changing that.

This week, I made two EEs targeted towards my whole class Maths lessons on Fractions, and I am really proud of how they got the students to both reflect on their learning and extend it. The first one was a follow-up reflection on a really hands on lesson, and the second was more of an assessment of their learning. By taking and using photos of the hands on sessions, the students felt that it was really their personal learning that they were working on.

I look forward to many more learning opportunities truly tailored to my learners, while extending my practice with my colleagues' awesome resources that I have at my disposal.

I hope I might even pick up a new skill or two to use on the i-pads from the digital immersion intensive that I am currently taking part in.

 

Digital Intensive Session 2

Today was my second digital intensive session. We have been focussing on the Create portion of the Manaiakalani Learn-Create-Share philosophy.

It was lots of fun today designing forms and quizzes to find out more about each other at our Digital Intensive day. It has been really interesting to see the different ways forms can be used. I like the way data is easily graphed and transferred into a Google Spreadsheet. We even looked at plotting peoples' location answers on google.com/maps. (As well as pinning the locations of our cars on our phones!)

I am hoping to utilise Google Forms on the i-pads in the class as it seems like they would be quite straight forward for the kids to follow. I have made a Google Form pick-a-path Maths test which was an experiment in children following basic facts questions at their level. Now that I have made one, I could see myself making more for Writing and Reading activities in particular.

I look forward to taking lots of clever tricks and tips back to my team at school.

Digital Intensive Session 1

Today was the first of 9 Digital Intensive courses that I am lucky enough to go on this term. We have been familiarising ourselves with Google Drive and Google Docs in particular as well as various Add-ons and Extensions to make our lives easier!

The venn diagram above shows some of what I have been learning about today. As my class of Year 2s  are very young and still getting to grips with the basics of using their i-pads and saving their work correctly there are less things in the kids’ circle. However, there are many things I have learned that are valuable for my personal administrative needs as well as being interesting to think about how older classrooms can work.

I think the take aways for the children in my class are the word cloud (I think they will enjoy the visual plan), keeping their Google Drives well organised and the Text to Speak extension could be at the very least fun to experiment with, and hopefully, quite useful.

I have learned a lot about using Google Docs, such as using headings and inserting a table of contents. I like the Easy Accents add-on for writing Maori (and other languages) properly. I have been further familiarised with Hapara Dashboard and the many useful things it can do.

We have been encouraged to use our phones and all devices available to us to be making the most of every opportunity by having our accounts and apps set up across our devices and ready to use at any time.

Lastly, I’m looking forward to trying out Google Save some more to see if it can help me organise my many ideas more easily and visually. I look forward to what I can learn from the next 8 sessions.

I have made a bit.ly! Go to bit.ly/25PES17 for my class site!