2. Workflow (Digital Fluency Intensive)

Today we learnt about the Learn stage of Manaiakalani and some more tips for different Google applications. The highlight of the day was looking at a randomly selected student's blog.

Learn

Learning is about accessing and engaging with existing knowledge. I have underlined existing because I sometimes feel like my students think I should know everything and that everything has already been discovered - that knowledge is fixed, and I have it, and I am supposed to dump it into their brains, the end.

I want to convey that the reason you should learn what I am teaching you is because that is what we currently know, and your job is to take it and then go out there and build on it. (Keep adding more digits to Pi!!!).

Now I realise that students don't have to finish school to contribute to the existing knowledge - they can do it from right now, and every day. 

Dorothy also mentioned how important it was to break off into smaller groups, and this links with one of the comments from our bubble that the content in the main group goes very quickly and it is easy to get lost. I couldn't help comparing this to what happens in my classroom - I let myself get pushed quickly through the content by the students who are the most able and also the most vocal (and the most demanding). And this leave many students to get left behind.

I have two solutions for my classroom problem, from today's DFI:

1) Say to students - "Be happy about taking less. Look at the good things you do manage. If you pick up five things - that's awesome. Celebrate that! Don't worry about the 25 things you didn't get.

Two other key ideas:

1) Rewindable learning - so important - need to bring into my teaching

2) The Internet is a place to GIVE and GET (or as Barry says in his recording of his blog "this student is a creator rather than just a consumer").

Digital skills

• Hapara - creates classes by linking to Kamar (so I need to speak to my school about accessing my class in Hapara)
• Meet - up to 250 people - Wow!
  - bringing guest speakers into the classroom via Meet - great idea!
  - more control if you create a meeting through Google Meet (I have been using Calendar)
  - present entire screen if you want the cursor and menus to show up
• Keep - converts photo to editable text (even handwriting) - worth exploring
  - I like that you can free-hand draw in it and I wonder what other apps have that tool
  - I may not be a fast adopter of this app as I have no cellphone coverage or Internet at home and I keep my personal phone away from school. I wonder if we will soon see schools issuing teachers with smartphones rather than laptops one day???? That would change things for me. If I had a work phone I would be forever taking photos as part of my teaching.
• Gmail - I use the 3 dots Mark all as read option to "clean" my inbox. I am now experimenting with Archiving. I have used labels for a while. In a previous job, with a different email, where I was always using folders - I kept my inbox empty unless an email was waiting to be actioned.
• Calendar - I have not been a big user, but at school we have got the students to enter their timetables into their calendar and I would like to do that too.
• Tabs - I am good at closing them, and I prefer the Bookmarks bar, and I have now deleted the words from the ones with recognisable icons.

Blog

Randomly selected blog, shared with Barry Huhu:

http://bsszaraj.blogspot.com/2020/05/what-is-on-my-blog.html

This blog is very very impressive, and I learnt so much from it:

1. Core business (Digital Fluency Intitiative)

Today we covered an introduction to manaiakalani (and some history), as well as some key skills for using the Google suite of applications. 

Manaiakalani History

When Dorothy explained the problem they were finding in their community in 2006 - the students' lack of engagement, lack of enthusiasm and lack of achievement - that really resonated with me (still today). 

I was fascinated by the story of Jenny She and how she had a new entrant class writing a book, illustrating a book, then reading that book, recording their reading and then watching each other's recordings. I thought that was brilliant. 

Google Skills

Omnibox

The omnibox was new to me. I knew you could search directly in the url address line and you you didn't have to open up a Google search page. I am forever opening a calculator, so it will be much faster for me to access a calculator through the omnibox.

Google Groups

I like the idea of Google Groups. In the past when I wanted to email a group they've usually been in a Google Classroom of mine so I've checked the option in there to email all the students, but what I love about Google Groups is when someone new is added they will have access to previous emails.

 I particularly liked the adage Dorothy gave us: “Just because you can doesn't mean you should”. I intend to keep that in mind.

 

I've made a note to myself that when I'm creating a Google group that I shouldn't invite, I should only add (unless I'm asked to invite in an exam question).

Google Profiles

I have some cleaning up to do on my Google profile because I tend to add accounts where other people are using Gmail on my computer or where I am checking emails on somebody else's computer. Now I know I should be creating separate profiles and only having the one account under each profile.

Google Docs

Another tip we had today was to set your permissions on your folders to “anyone with the link can view”, which I've never used. I've always been nervous about giving wide permission of things I have created in case they're not of high enough quality for people to see. I realise now that I can use “anyone with the link can view” as the default and then change the permission for anything that should be kept closed down or more secure.

I was very surprised to be told that we should not be using underlining. I sometimes underline on slides that I am presenting in class for emphasis. I sometimes alternate between underline and bold or I use both sometimes. So it was interesting for me to learn that the protocol with writing in the digital age is that underline is saved for hyperlinks, which makes sense.

 I have used the built in styles titles and headings. These are familiar to me because I have used Word documents in that way. I was very excited to see how easy it was to make a table of contents and how it could be updated as you added or removed headings from your document.

The thing I was most fascinated with was voice typing, which I am using now to write this blog. I was incredibly surprised that voice recognition could correctly type the name Behrouz Boochani.

I loved the Explorer option because the pictures were free, legal and cited and I love that you could copy and paste text and automatically get it cited with a footnote. However, as I created my Google documents, I tried copying and pasting text and I didn't notice an option for citing the source when I did that. So if anyone can help me with it that's one of the things I still need to learn.