2021 DFI - Day 8 - A Coach's Perspective

Computational thinking day! Always one of my favourites. This blog post is mainly about sharing some resources that I explored today that people might be unaware of.

I love Compute It. I stayed away form it today because I end up doing it for hours! This introduces programming language and is great for students to work away at independently. Super engaging!

Hello Ruby was a new one for me today. This has some great offline activities for juniors. It reinforces the fact that younger students already do a lot of activities that involve computational thinking.

I'm still exploring Raranga Matihiko but I'm enjoying the links to other apps like ClapMotion and Gamefroot. I'd be keen to hear from anyone who has used these in class. I'll also be having a watch of the Raranga Matihiko TV home learning videos.

Let me know if you are aware of any other awesome resources that might be useful.

And good luck to all the teachers in my bubble (and all the other DFI participants) who are taking the Google Level 1 exam next week!

Ngā mihi

2021 DFI - Week 7 - A Coach's Perspective

Kia ora koutou,

Today was an extremely busy day on DFI (but then again when isn't it?) so I didn't have too many notes to convert into my blog post.

I did learn a few super valuable lessons though. One for Chromebooks and one for iPads

1. Screencastify shortcuts. These will be so useful and I can't wait to try them out. I think they will really help students too, allowing them to focus on delivering their content rather than worrying about clicking in different places.

Screencastify Shortcuts

2. Screen recording on iPads. I've already made a video about this and shared it with some teachers who might find it useful. I can't believe I didn't know this was a thing!

I'm also super proud of my wonderful bubble. They created some awesome resources in Explain Everything and Workspaces today. They have come so far in the seven weeks we have been working together!

2021 DFI - Day 6 - A Coach's Perspective

DFI day six already! Another great day focusing on the kaupapa of connected and on Class Sites...

Connected:

Dorothy's presentation reminded me of the need to encourage participation in the Ako Hiko Google Currents community. I think there is still a lot of apprehension when it comes to sharing our practice but there is so much potential for us to learn from and support each other that I think it is essential.

Dorothy's toolkit about attracting an audience to your blogs was very useful. I will use some of these ideas while planning Cybersmart sessions in future terms and will also unpack them further with our Ako Hiko ambassadors who are starting their roles in Term 2. 

Class Sites:

Having time to view some sites from other clusters was extremely valuable. I found some great examples where the teaching and learning is visible on the reading or maths group pages. In many cases the learning was also fully rewindable and had links to T-shaped literacy. These will be good exemplars to use with teachers I work with this year.

In the afternoon our bubbles had time to work on their own class sites. It was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my recently built Poetry Slam site (our Poetry Slam is next week and all online if you are interested in joining us).

Ngā mihi

Phil

2021 DFI - Day 5 - A Coach's Perspective

Kia ora koutou,

This week's adventure into the Manaiakalani pedagogy was based around visibility. I don't think you can repeat too many times that the default is to make everything visible. This applies to everything from planning to assessments.

I've been really impressed with the class sites in the Ako Hiko cluster, especially over our multiple lockdowns. I think a next nudge for us is having more of the teaching visible on the sites. This could include teachers' planning and assessments and as we have discussed at this term's staff hui, more rewindable learning.

I enjoyed hearing about the purposes of Class Sites and Hāpara:

Class Sites - making the teaching visible for learners

Hāpara - making the learning visible for teachers

Class Sites:

It was my first time presenting to the whole group today. It made me realise how much content there is to cover when creating a site. I also learnt that simple themes aren't the best for macrons.

In the afternoon our group was collaborating on a Jamboard to share resources for our sites. We found a few things frustrating such as not being able to add a hyperlink and text boxes being a bit awkward. A good reminder here that with any Google Apps you can send feedback. In Jamboard this feature is found by clicking the three dots, in something like Docs it is under the 'help' section. The more requests they get about a certain feature the more likely they are to fix it!

See you next time for Week 6!

2021 DFI - Day 4 - Coach's Perspective

Kia ora koutou,

Day 4 of DFI already! Today we heard Dorothy talk about tohatoha or share. I really like the definition of an authentic audience...

 "people who choose to view your learning"

i.e. they have other options of what they could be viewing. This will be useful to explain to learners, especially when I could be reading and commenting on hundreds of different blogs in the Ako Hiko cluster.

Also a good reminder about why we use Blogger as a platform for sharing...

MyMaps

I had the idea to use MyMaps for story writing. Here's a story I created today which will require the audience to read each section carefully and do some research to find out where to go next on the map. I'd be really keen to hear any feedback you have on it.

ps. I realise I got way to deep into this so it's a bit over the top...

Sheets

I don't think I'll ever stop learning new tips and tricks about Google Sheets. Today I learnt a new way to split data into two or more columns:

data - split text to columns - then choose your separator (usually a space)

My bubble also had great fun learning how to move charts onto separate tabs and then exploring the best way to embed sheets onto our blogs. Here's what it looks like when you move a chart to its own sheet and then embed it: