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.