DFI Day 4. Data and Spreadsheets. Eeek!

Today was a little hard for me if I am honest. I have a data phobia! Combined with a ton of NCEA marking I found it rather hard to engage with some of the content today.

Google forms-adding pictures and file upload.
Today I learned how to add pictures to my forms! The rest of the content I mostly knew how to do but the pictures will make my forms look pretty now.

Google maps


I'm not sure if I will use this application but it seems pretty neat. All my previous experience has been with getting google maps to navigate for me while I am driving somewhere.



Google Sheets.


Overwhelmed a little with this. I did learn some neat things like how to create graphs from sheets and it has helped me progress from avoiding spreadsheets like the plague to actually seeing how they can be applied. I like how you can collect and sort data from your forms on spreadsheets, this is something I had not done before but will do from now on.

DFI Day 3. Media

Today was the first day of 'new' content for me (having completed the last 2 sessions prior lockdown version 1) and it was a little bit of back to feeling like I am rushing to keep up. There were lots of interesting things that I am keen to explore-particularly using google slides to create a 'pick a path' story. This initially seemed quite complicated but the small group session helped to clarify how to do this. I think this will be a really good activity for my lower-level English students to create stories. Using slides to create animations is also an exciting task to explore with my students.

DFI Day 2. (Round 2) Learn, Create, Share.

This pedagogy is new to our school and we have some great facilitators that endorse this pedagogy and encourage us to think about it.  If I am honest, it is a bit of a jump for us. The idea of visibility is met with a bit of resistance from some teachers and I used to be in this category myself. However, I am proud to say that I am currently organising a shared drive for the English department to put resources to share. One aspect that I am still unsure about is the application of the ‘share’ for students. Hopefully, this will become clearer to me as we go on. 

Looking back on my first blog post for this day I felt very overwhelmed by all the new information. At this stage, google Meet was a totally new concept. Little did I know, a week from writing that post I was to become an ‘expert’ at this and it was to become a vital tool in my teaching. A few new things I think are interesting are the extensions such as Meet attendance, this would have been VERY handy over lockdown. 

Google Keep is not a tool that I have taken up using, however, I will have a go at the function that allows you to use your phone to take photos that convert to text. I think this would be great for when groups are creating notes with the old A4 paper and felts situation (I'm sure there are better ways to do this digitally, hopefully, this is something else I will learn on the DFI)

My Gmail is much tidier now than the start of the year and now I will look at improving my filtering and labeling. I also need to use my personal email account more to avoid all the shopping updates from cramming my inbox. 

Google Calendar is another tool that I am now using. We have also had a big push on this at school and have spent time with each of our students in Vertical Form time to support students to set up a calendar, add their timetable, and use it to plan assessments and homework. I have very quickly become reliant on my google calendar to tell me when my meetings are and I look for the agenda documents to be linked in any invites. We are encouraged as teachers to use the calendars regularly with our classes to get the boys in the habit of checking and using them too. 

Looking back on the tools covered so far I am amazed at how far I have developed personally in my knowledge, confidence, and how I am using them. I’m so glad I got a couple of sessions in before lockdown as they really helped me and I feel like I am coming back into this with a greater sense of purpose than I did before. 

DFI Day 1 (Round two) Back on the horse!

I’m feeling good to be back on the DFI. I have to say that I was very hesitant to commit to this course being delivered online as I was not sure if I would be able to focus if I was working independently and having to actually navigate through using all the technology. I decided that for me, it would be better to come into school each Friday and work as if I was at home I would be constantly distracted by the mounds of washing and other housework I have been neglecting. 

After some support from our IT technician, look at me now! Multiple screens and obligatory coffee. Having two screens is so helpful to navigate between the content and bookmarking the meets has helped me not get lost and come stumbling into ‘class’ late. 

Today has been a refresher for me and it really helped solidify what we covered last time.  I will able to use all of what we covered today in staff PL I am delivering next week. 

DFI Day 2. The Bullet Train.

Phew! 😅 Another day packed with information. I feel like my brain is constantly scrambling to catch up. This is a humbling experience and one that makes me reflect on my expectations for my own learners. How often to I really stop to allow students time to use the new information and get their head around new concepts before I am racing off onto the next thing. The DFI so far can be likened to the bullet trains in Japan, running at speeds of up to 320km per hour and I feel a little like I have been hit by one.

We started the day off with google hangouts. This was pretty much right out of my comfort zone. I can see how these are great for remote meetings and, especially in the face of the coronavirus situation, remote teaching. For me, however, the tech issues were frustrating and put me off using it.

Slideshow with Lenva Shearing.

Lenva had some interesting things to say. This table showing the difference between the three stages helped to clarify the way you can 'turbocharge'. I will share this with our staff as I think it really shows the differences in digitising the curriculum and using digital tools to enhance learning.

Google keep.

Organising webpages-wonderful for me! Pre-DFI Haley was doing this:

(Having a google doc with links to all the articles that I found as teaching resources or to support what I am doing in class)

Now I have this!

A dashboard in google keep organised with labels.

And then I found out about Toby. Sigh. That digital bullet train just keeps on rushing by. Toby seems like it would be a better way to keep all of the articles together, especially as I can then share them with students all in one go.

DFI Session One. Digital Hoarding.

The day kicked off with some background of the Manaiakalani (NOT MK!) programme. One thing I found interesting was the origin and meaning behind the name. Manaiakalani being the name of the line of stars used to navigate to New Zealand from Hawaiki. The English teacher in me loves a good metaphor and this one makes me think about the way our learners are navigating through their learning and how digital technology can help guide them on this journey. A quick google image search to add a picture to this blog also reveals that Manaiakalani is the name of Maui's fishhook-extending the metaphor to include the discovery of new knowledge. Diving Deep into google groups. Christine made the comment that google groups are sort of like using messenger on facebook, a good comparison, I thought. I can see how this would be useful and seems fairly easy to set up. Cleaning up your google account. Here's where it got real for me. My google account is the digital equivalent of the place the junk lady from the film Labyrinth lives. It would make a great episode of the show Hoarders. It felt good to create a 2020 folder (it's purple!) and start my new life as a tidy and organised teacher. You guys weren’t joking when you said this was an 'intensive'. Luckily I was taking notes because we learned so many things in this session that will help me clean up my drive, for example creating docs in folders, moving and adding docs, shortcuts. I might just sweep everything pre-2020 under the carpet and all into one folder so I can start afresh.

Creating Posters in Docs. This is an exciting possibility for me, I can see how this could be a great replacement for the old 'static image' posters we make our juniors create based on the texts we read in class. They always groan when presented with a bucket of dried up old felts and a piece of A3 paper. The tips we learned today (making it A5 so you can see it all, using a table to lay it out, background removal) are awesome. My effort was a little disappointing and there are few extra tools I want to learn to help improve these even more.

I was feeling pretty smug about all the stuff I had learned today, then Maria mentioned 'code'......

Nau mai, haere mai

Welcome to my professional learning blog.
This is a place where I can reflect on my teaching in relation to my Teaching as Inquiry goals and how they link to the Education Council's Standards for the Teaching Profession.