5. Sites (Digital Fluency Intensive)

 This week we learnt about the Visible part of Manaiakalani and Google Sites.

Tips

• You can add protections to globally shared docs so that they cannot download or forward the doc on
• For docs with multiple editors you can restore previous versions via the editing history, and you can name different versions (to go back to them)
• There is a way to split your screen by dragging off a tab
• Switching off Grid view in Meet allows you a bigger view of the presentation
• Hapara - Sharing folders should be empty. All students docs should be filed in Hapara created folders.

Visible

The resources we create, and the planning we do, should be visible not only to our students, but also to their whanau and our colleagues. In the last two weeks I have made my planing and resources much more visible (to the world) but my students work and their voice is still invisible. (I presume this is where students having their own blogs will fit in).

At school I was the one who could read the teachers' minds - and the exam writers!!! It is not fair and does not give equality of access. Students need a One Stop Shop without any password barriers.

I wondered how I would add a folder into each of my student's drive - and this question was answered later - by using Hapara.

Multi-modal

I agree that neither the process of learning nor the prospect of learning appeals to secondary students today. A site needs to attract students into it (like a shop window), it needs to be inclusive, and they need to see themselves in there.

The visible teaching I have just made (my first attempt) looks like the first Point England School site (on slide 17). I have been wanting to make it more visually appealing and I think Sites is going to be where I do this.

I explored a wonderful secondary school's Maths site: Algebra. I found resources I want to use and ideas for my next site. I also filled in the feedback form and gave Aimee my email address.

T-shaped literacy

Wide and deep. I had not heard of this before. I like Dave's two quotes:

1. Reading is faster than listening
2. Reading doesn't create noise

My sites

I have created two sites today:

1. Year 9 Maths: Maths
2. Lest We Forget: ANZAC

Blogs

I have added multiple new labels to my Blog, and will go back to earlier versions to add DFI to them.

4. Dealing with Data(Digital Fluency Initiative)

 Today we learnt about the Share stage of Manaiakalani and Google Sheets.

Hot Tips

• Polyline - I was admiring Barry Huhu's profile picture and comparing it to my attempt via Drawing and he said he used Polyline, which is apparently easy for kids to create with.
• YouTube - I missed this tip from last week - that you can set a video to start at the point you want it to.
• Mathsweek.co.nz - first I have heard of this week or site.
• Blog - the best way to show my doc in my blog may be to embed a video of me talking about it (either through screen castify or recording a meeting with someone). Towards the end of the day we embedded a Google Drawing of our data analysis, which can also be done with slides but can it be done from a doc?

The embedded slides below show the difference between Slides and Docs when it comes to Download and Publish to web:

Hapara tip

Teachers can use Hapara to monitor posts and comments, particularly the red comments as they are from non-Google accounts. Dorothy said their was a "3 Check System" - what are the three checks? Is there any automated checking for inappropriate language (for example)? Or is the teacher the only safeguard? And does it even matter if students are on other social media? Possible answer below.

Share

The key take-away point for me from today's Manaiakalani kaupapa was that we are teaching students to be good digital citizens. We use Blogging to teach our kids to be Cyber-Smart and that they buy into it because it is similar enough to the other popular social media. So best they make all their mistakes under our watch (in Blog) and become safe and informed users of all social media.

Second point - Share has two aspects. 1) It is where you finish the learning (and learning to finish is important) and 2) sharing can also be the starting place of new learning.

Form

Tips:

• use a blank form (not a theme/template)
• personalise the acknowledgment (Settings, Presentations)
• Import videos etc (embedding html codes is for blogs and sites only

Possible uses for me:

• Import a video and ask questions about it
• Use as a digital worksheet - shuffle question order to encourage own work, or lock mode (only works on managed CBs)

My Map

I think a few of us chose Paris - so you can't see my name in the centre:

Sheets

• Yay!!! - I have Freeze Panes now!
• Note you can start typing the formula directly into the worksheet if you know its name - I find this faster than using the menu.
• I found the 1dp custom format today (thought I was restricted to 2 or 0)
• Dave showed us the list of keyboard shortcuts
• The slides for this topic had GIFS in them (wee videos of how to, no sound just animation) - I want to make some of these for my students.

Blog Data Analysis

Blog Comments

Positive - Thoughtful - Helpful (eg question).

Html code to insert a link into a comment:

<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>

Wish me luck - I'm off to comment on another's blog.

3. Media (Digital Fluency Initiative)

Today we learnt about the Create stage of Manaiakalani and we learnt to create content with Sight, Sound and Motion (SISOMO).

Create

Give them something to DO!!! People learn through doing. Think about Kindergarten - the walls in my house and my parent's house are filled with pictures drawn by my daughter. When I was 5 I wrote a story (at school) about making hot cross buns and it was published in the Gisborne Herald! My mum has just published a dozen poems that were written by my grandmother in primary school and were published in the Christchurch Press!!!

We don't do that now - but Manaiakalani is suggesting we embrace the Internet as a place to publish student's work and that this is key to motivating them to engage with the content we want them to engage with.

Ideas that came to me during this session:

• Measurement topic - get students to draw rectangles for other students to calculate the perimeter and area
• Get students to lie on the ground to make shapes and take photos of them
• Last year another Maths teacher at our school got students to trace around their feet, cut them out, measure them, then stick them on the classroom wall to make a dot plot of the distribution of foot lengths in the class - a great visual creation!

SISOMO moments that blew me away (not necessarily in chronological order):

• SIGHT - The Matrix - wow! I wanted to be Trinity! Surely we can all run around the walls of a room if we just launch ourselves with enough speed.
• SOUND - Surround Sound in the home lounge with Sub Woofer (circa 1996) We watched Twister and the booming went straight through our chests as a physical feeling.
• SURROUND SIGHT - Dragonheart in the Cinema. When the Dragon flew over us and the sound traveled from the back of the cinema to the front and before the shadow appeared on the screen (while the dragon was over our heads) they flicked on and off the houselights so it felt like the shadow was going over us!

So YES - I get the emotional effect Manaiakalani and Saatchi & Saatchi are talking about.

You Tube

Teachers can post to You Tube, or we can just create a channel so that we can collate others' videos through Playlists.

Students, however, should only post to Google Drive and their Blog, which is only set up by the approved Admin person at school and has all the protection of Manaiakalani, Hapara etc

I have today created a channel and have started making some Maths playlists.

Draw

Tip - double click to crop an image. 

Can use draw to make buttons for web site.

To paste as a picture - Download as png

To insert into Blog - Publish to web - Embed - Small - Paste url into HTML part of blog, as I have done below. (Uses  ColourPick extension).

Hot tips

Te Reo

Mahi - work

Kaimahi - worker

Kaiako - teacher

Kairiwhi - reliever (spelling?)

Hapara

Use Items to change the amount of detail per student:

• 1 for the latest work
• 25 for learning conversations with individuals

Sort - drab students' boxes to the top of the page .

Hover over a doc for a quick look.

I had a problem with students teaching in a recent maths test. They were allowed to use a simple calculator on their chromebook, but I caught 3 googling extra help. If I had had Hapara up and running - could I have prevented that?

Have just sent my class lists to our IT person to get my classes created in Hapara.

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.