Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 4 (29/03/19)

Week 4 Reflection

The day began with Karakia - connecting with a great group of educators and then sharing our digital peheha through google slides and casting it on the TV in front of the room. Other things discussed throughout the day was as follows:

The Manaiakalani Pedagogy: Learn Create Share. Today we focussed on Share. Some apps used to share are facebook, twitter, bebo. We choose Blogger as the primary online space for our young people to share. Share to learn.

Completing the meet the team Google form, and then creating a google form with 5 questions and sharing with the colleagues.

Exploring Google My Maps and creating a customisable map using mymaps.google.com.

Google Sheets- setting up the sheets, basic formulas and calculations, number formatting, protecting cells and ranges,  conditional formatting and add-ons.

Levelling up - Google sheet - creating Add-ons such as QR Codes, crop sheets, mapping sheets, random generator and flubaroo.

Flubaroo can be used to create a google sheet, generate a form and make quizzes which is marked by the system using the pre-entered answers and the results are recorded in the Google sheet

Analysing data from a student’s blog whereby I went through Ebony’s blog and analysed the number of posts published from 2016 to March 2019. The analysis is embedded below in this post.

To sum up, today’s session was very interesting and informative as I can use the knowledge I have gained today and apply in my teaching and learning process and also create surveys and interesting quizzes in Google forms and Google sheets and collaborate with students and teachers.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 3 (22/03/19)

The day began with Karakia - connecting with a great group of educators and then the WWW session - reflection on last week’s learning, that is, what has worked for me since we met last week, what hasn’t worked and what help I need.

Next in the session was live streaming youtube followed by connecting with Manaiakalani, The Manaiakalani Pedagogy: Learn Create Share Today’s focus was on Create. We have to hook our learners to have the ability to effectively create. Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators. Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery.

After that we learnt about creating a youtube channel. Keep the channel unlisted and turn off commenting before activating the channel. Next was creating and using playlists in youtube. Youtube playlists are like any playlist such as itunes.

Google drawing was next in the session. Save the drawings as a png file if the drawing is used in other applications such as google site. This keeps the background transparent. When resizing images use the corners with the Shift key pressed. Created a round About Me button for my blog sidebar.

Then we learnt about google slides. We should embrace the white spaces in the slides. Use consistent formatting and basic formatting rules and let the slide be the supporting cast.

After that we learnt how to create a digital portrait using google draw. The important keys used for this task was Command + Shift + up arrow.

In the last session of the day we created digital pepeha using google slides and then tidying up our blogs.

I have learnt a lot of new things in today’s session which I can use to improve the teaching and learning.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 2 (15/03/19)

The day began with Karakia - connecting with a great group of educators and then the WWW session - reflection on last week’s learning, that is, what has worked for me since we met last week, what hasn’t worked and what help I need.

Next in the session was the Manaiakalani Programme - focussing on effective teaching and accelerated learning. When we talk about LEARN we actually talk about effective teaching. (Recognise, Amplify- technology comes in to make a great difference in teaching, Turbocharge - contacts world wide). Strategies that can be taken by teachers to promote student learning. What does LEARN looks like in individual Manaiakalani schools. Great teaching plus digital affordances equals accelerated learning. Rewindable learning allows students to go back and cover up the lessons he or she has missed because of absence, went to some tours such as rugby or volleyball and any other reason. The use of digital technologies make this possible. Technology is not just a tool.

Moving on, we had a session on Google Keep which helps us to capture and share our thoughts from any device. Google Keep also has a feature that can transcribe text from images, scan or convert handwritten text into digital text.

After the break the session began with exploring some features of Gmail such as composing with attachments, filtering, creating new labels and taming the tabs by combining using one-tab or gettoby application. Use of bookmarking websites was also covered.

The other things that was covered were google calendar and hangouts. Hangouts were used to collaborate with the invitees and later on we used the calendar to invite people for chat using hangout sometime during next week. We also learnt how to set up the events in the calendar.

The session continued after lunch break with using Google Hangouts to connect with a small group. Invites were created and a video of the conversation was recorded using Quicktime player which was linked to the agenda page.

I have learnt a lot of new things in today’s session which I can use to improve my teaching and collaborate with my students and fellow colleagues with Google features such as Google Keep and Hangouts.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 1 (08/03/19)

Today was the first day of Digital Fluency Intensive program run by Manaiakalani at Summervile Special School. The program started in the morning with the introduction of facilitators and the participants. Next in the session was Digital Fluency Intensive overview followed by the Manaiakalani Origins story. The main focus area of today's session was google groups, google chrome, google drive, google docs and creating professional blog sites.

Today's session was very effective and it has increased my confidence and capability as a teacher. I have learnt a lot of things which I can apply in my teaching and learning. I will be able to create new google group with a particular group of people such as my department members to communicate and share ideas and resources. The new things I have learnt in google docs and drive will surely assist me by sharing a better prepared lesson with my students.

My sincere thanks and appreciation goes towards the participants and to the facilitators for their support and guidance throughout the day.