DFI Day #7

Every year we have the induction meeting for new students about devices and I'm like a travelling salesman with the Dorothy Burt pitch at these evenings, explaining that we teachers struggle with technology like most adults but if we only need to learn  how to use one type of device, it means we can help our new students. That usually stops all the iPad, Laptop, tablet debates before they even start. Then I launch into why it's better to buy through the Trust rather than directly through retailers and get the remaining whanau onboard. Most of our students are coming from Manaiakalani schools so are familiar with Chromebooks but for the other 45% of whanau are usually very accommodating in setting up payments, either in full or financed. We are a Decile 2 school and people often think our whanau can't afford chromebooks but my experience is that whanau will try to support their tamariki to have a good education. The financial cost of the devices are not always a barrier, but for those who do not choose to buy one, we do have loan devices in the school and have recently started a lending library for the students, Y13s mainly, or if their chromebook is in for repair.

I am amazed by the students' knowledge around the use of chromebooks now that I have had to do an activity on one and appreciate the struggles new students to our school experience if they are not familiar with the devices. You have to learn a whole new set of skills and get the class work done! It reminded me of the time I changed from iPhone to Samsung a year ago. I still don't know how to use half the things that are on my screen and I know two shortcuts- taking screenshots and.. okay only one thing.
I enjoyed today because I learned lots like little shortcut tips which have helped me recover closed tabs, using the whiteboard simulation of iPads to use with Seniors, adding Cybersmart into my Hapara sites where relevant and creating screencastify to my documents so that I do not need to repeat myself to students and they can rewind the clips if they didn't listen the first time. I did try these during lockdown by recording the shared screens but they said they were too long and BORING! Perish the thought!!!!
Here's my exciting clip about my Explain Everything experience.  

DFI Day #6

 What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Limiting the Links helped us prepare for Alert Level 4 and even though we had staff  who assured us that their online programs were robust, it did not take long to realise that there was a lot more tidying up needed with websites, including chunking down huge packages of work. Hapara Workspace became the go to place for most of the staff who learned the importance of breaking down units of work into achievable chunks and providing links to learning that could help students understand the objectives of the work. It also made teachers aware of the importance of having alternate work for students without internet as the work with links which some teachers printed straight off their sites was not very useful for these students.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
I saw some good examples of how our school site should be set up to be more appealing to the public users.
What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
I created my own separate site on the school site for my class so that they can go into the site and works paces at their leisure and start whatever and whenever they like.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
The Hapara sharing tab and other new features we are shown were very useful. When we are in our Bubble group I often find that I can learn from the experience within from within my  group to determine what is achievable and what is not and I need to put together a plan of what I want is really important for me to get on top of

My head was not in a good space today so having quite a bit of time to work on websites was much appreciated.

DFI day 5 Halfway!!!!!!

What I learned that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy is its potential to be used more efficiently in the school for greater impact for our students


What I have learned which could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as professional is the Google sites which will have a knock on effect on my learners as they will have a more engaging worksite to work on



I am thinking of how we can move our school website from Wordpress to Google sites because it is far easier to navigate around. Here's the start to my school website for my all time favourite movie if I ever teach L2 English. I need to learn how to embed things into my site and I also have to figure out why this blog page has all sorts of margin settings and the formatting is up the whack and I don’t know how to fix it so I’m going back to a google doc to fix it. I just deleted and started again!

Arghhhh! Thank you Kerry Boyde-Preece for telling me the button in the blog post editor which has T with a red x on it that will also take out the text formatting. 

DFI Day #4

What I was reminded of as part of Manaiakalani kaupapa  was that the share aspect is really important and there is huge gap in our school with the blogging that will enable students' thinking, ideas and reflections to be be shared with everyone and be commented upon.

The new learning for me was My Maps and it will be good for showing the routes, tracking distance and

dropping a pins on places of interest and/or landmarks and it would be very useful for sharing

our local trips or the overseas one that happens every two years with whanau

I would show students how to use autofill and formulae with the spreadsheets as we are doing a unit on Data and statistics, My Maps to show their daily travel and explore where they have been and where they would like to go.

What I learned that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life is that I have to make

a lot more time for learning. I can improve my use of spreadsheets to include filters as I have been copying whole sheets and then manually filtering.

• Here's a google form I made for Voting for the 2020 Senior Ball theme

DFI Day 3 Media

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today was a reminder how important creativity is in a child's learning and cognitive development. Some times as educators we are focused on a destination and forget the journey, especially if there is no quantitative measurement or result. I remember being a primary teacher and having whole days of Art or Science. There's no reason why our secondary schools cannot adapt to our recent online distance learning experiences and morph into something different. Do students really need to 5 days a week onsite to learn or could they continue to learn from home?

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I have only being using about 20% of the potential most of these platforms offer and the capacity of these media to be less annoying and more engaging just by following some basic presentation rules

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Today there were lots of explicit tasks. I could furnish them with a range of media tasks and provide some of the extensions that I discovered today to encourage them to use a range of media to create docs/slides/movies/drawings to demonstrate their learning and share to with others. I tried to make a cartoon version of a student but she was not impressed because she looks like a man and the ear colour is not right

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I have learned to simplify things that I have been doing the 'hard' way. I have also not been checking settings on my emails, youtube and blogger but now I know why I do or do not receive information. Another great week with an awesome group of presenters and leaders!

DFI 2020 Day 2

I am soooooo tired. Screen time does that to me. I have learned so much today and now I will go away and practise all the skills that I learned. It helped that I knew how to use some of tools already  because it gave me extra time to work on other areas that I wasn't so great with eg my emails and figuring out how to do blogs properly. I absolutely enjoyed everything today and it has provided me with the tools to streamline my day to day life.  The last extension, Dualless is going to make my online classes even more awesome as I can will still be able to see the faces of my students whilst I am working on another screen.  Kia pai o koutou wiki.

DFI 2020 Day One

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

I have heard Dorothy, Russell and Pat Sneddon speak about the Manaiakalani  journey and each  time pick up more details. It is important to understand the origins and the struggles that were part of a programme’s evolution and acknowledge the pioneers; those people who believed in a vision and worked towards achieving it. We were fortunate to have been invited to join when KET was already well developed. We just jumped onto a fast-moving train and we've never looked back. We enjoy it especially now with the covid-19 and working online from home. Our staff are not having the struggles that other schools have had to face. We are familiar with online learning and now it's probably just trying to make sure that the staff manage the work that they are producing and the students are completing so that when they return on site, that the marking and the assessing or evidence is collected already. If they can manage to put routines and practices into place now, the return to school will not seem such an insurmountable task. There is no reason why we cannot continue to work develop independent programmes online once we return to school for students that we can already identify have found that this to be their preferred learning style.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I need to organise myself right at the start like putting work in the correct folders or naming them clearly or even using an asterisk so that a folder in my Google Drive pops up first. Those little key factors can reduce the amount of frustration I find sometimes because I don't label things properly or I leave things and think I'll get around to it pretty much like this post, thinking if I go off now I'll come back later and do this blog but the reality is if I click out of here right now there’s going to be a 27 other things I need to do. Because of what I have learned today I better understand how some of the documents could be more user friendly and how my workload could be easier eg.  having the contents and linked to headings so that it is easier to find something or direct readers to a specific place. 

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Doing some whole class online activities with everyone doing what you say and following your instructions means that you are asking everybody to start at the same point. This acknowledges that for some students there are parts of digital learning where they will be learning from scratch and others will be at various stages but if we go through the basics, there’s always little important pieces of information, like pasting without formatting that some students may have missed. In class with our students there is a mix with many of them coming from Manaiakalani schools but some are not. Going through some basic stuff really helps the students so they are not overwhelmed and feel that any movement forward is a step in the right direction. It that doesn't rely on you already knowing everything.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I think I need to balance the time I spend on my computer. Even though I haven't been on the DFI course before I have picked up a lot of things from our regional KET Coordinator and every time I see or hear something I want to try it and see how much I can incorporate that new learning to do everything I do. Rather than simplifying the work for me this course will probably end up making me amplify everything. I do need to manage myself and my time online better and I have enjoyed picking up on all the little snippets today that will help me.   I enjoy creating and I like sharing. It would have been my dream 40 years ago to have been a student in today's world because I liked to read and listen and watch so I could have taught myself from Google and Youtube. Also my teachers were not very good. We are fortunate that our staff are very responsive and have good relationships with our students because that is the element that the students who need it, are finding difficult with the online learning. As one student said to me last week, “ I  miss you giving me grief about being out of uniform or late to class,I even miss you roasting me!’