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!