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: