Google Certified Educator Level 1

I passed the Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam!

This morning we were challenged to put our knowledge to the test. After 2 hours of hard work and confusion I submitted my exam and was relieved to discover I had passed. Thank you Dorothy and James for all the knowledge and wisdom you have imparted over the last term. 

I have also received my Digital Fluency Intensive badge which I am proudly displaying on my blog.

Our Penultimate Digital Immersion Intensive Session

We are almost done with our Digital Immersion course for this term. Next week we will be sitting the test to become Google Certified Educators - Level 1. I am almost feeling ready!

Today Dorothy started our day with a session on Empowerment. We discussed how students need to be empowered in their learning, and this can't happen without the other 3 words in the Manaiakalani ring: Ubiquitous, Connected and Visible. I found it interesting to think of how many members of our local community feels disempowered by so many facets of their lives not really being under their control, and therefore how important empowerment really is to our students.

We moved on to the NEW Google Sites. It was so easy to play around with and create a pretty page in no time. It did however feel limiting in how much of a personal touch you could add to it.

I spent some time training up on my Fundamentals in preparation for next week's test. Hopefully I'll finish the remaining units by next Friday.

Finally, after all that, there was more to learn! Dorothy has been showing us how to green screen in preparation for next term's Manaiakalani film festival. I am nervous but also really looking forward to making my first film for this. I had a little practice removing the background from a student's photo - of course his curly hair presented some challenges.

Sites, sites, sites: connecting with the world.

We have been exploring sites at today's Digital Intensive session. It has been great to see how different teachers at different schools present their lessons to their students.

Dorothy began the day by reminding us of the importance and power that comes from the connections we make, be it through blogging, our public sites, our Google+ community or professional development days like today.

I have really enjoyed having the time to fix up the little things that have been bugging me about my own site. Here is the criteria we came up with for what makes an effective site:

Visual	User Experience
Exciting Engaging Using space effectively Keep it looking basic not busy Following conventional layout rules eg white spaces Commonality- Reading/Writing/Maths Themed?	Logical Interconnected pages Engaging (resources) Learning is easy to find Main elements are obvious- landing page has important info Consistency Visibility

Do you think my site reflects these?

In my own practice I have definitely been improving my visibility and connectivity with the world through my class blog, and encouraging the children to blog on a much more regular basis.
Please feel free to check them out here and leave your comments.

HTML fun!

Today I felt a little out of my depth at Digital Intensive, but also really enjoyed building a site using HTML. We were fortunate to have Matt Goodwin in to assist us with this.

Dorothy started the day by reminding us of the importance of Visible teaching and learning, and the role sites play in this. We also looked over the draft version of the new Professional Standards for the Teaching Profession.

This all came together in today's task, to build a site to showcase how these new standards are evident in my own teaching. Take a look!

I really enjoyed picking up some skills to improve my site layout, keeping it clean and organised. I now feel confident to go back to my existing class site and see what I can improve and tidy up. Maybe I'll even attempt Image Mapping again!

Learning about sites!

Today has been a site-building day at Digital Intensive. We have been collaborating and planning a unit around the PM reader Magpie's Baking Day. It has been a real confidence boost to make a site for the second time as I am feeling much more like I know what I'm doing!

Check out the site I built today!

We also talked earlier in the day about being CyberSmart and the importance of allocating teaching time to deliberately teach the subject. Thanks to Fiona for sharing her knowledge with us.

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.

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!