Delving into Devices - DFI Session 7

Today's session kick started off with Fiona Grant (aka the Cybersmart Queen!) sharing the importance of empowering our learners to be positive and proactive. She highlighted the importance of making the "positive" the norm. Using positive language - when we're creating or exploring content online, the words and text that we interact with and use should be positive, thoughtful and helpful.

Cybersmart is a behaviour that we want instilled in our learners. Just as we would explicitly teach classroom behaviours in a positive way (think PB4L - Positive Behaviour for Learning) so should we teach cybersmart values. With that being said cybersmart lessons should be specifically taught, as well as embedded into other curriculum lessons, AND retaught when there is a need. (Particularly at the start of a new school year, or even once we've moved back into alert level 2 and are all back at school!) A good starting point would be to revisit the Kawa of Care by reframing it as a positive question: "What will I see you doing?"

Another of the key takeaways that I took from Fiona's session was that anything we share is personal - we need to help empower our learners differentiate and make decisions about what personal content they share.

I've also picked up some questions to ask learners (both students and teachers) to stop, think about and reflect on their cybersmart behaviours including:

• What is the power of creating your own content here?
• What does our digital footprint convey about us online?
• If I googled you in 10 years time, what would I see?

I briefly explored the cybersmart copyright lesson under smart and legal as I've noticed some learners copy and paste content and try to pass it off as their own (knowing your learners well means it's pretty obvious when they do try this!) Below is a brief reflection on what I thought about this lesson and how I think it could be used in my classroom.

We also explored the basics of Hapara (Teacher Dashboard). This is a great tool that makes teaching in a digital environment SO much easier. While I'm pretty familiar with the basics, there were some tips that Dorothy mentioned to help me improve my workflow.

Tip #1: Don't get students to share their work with you - it will end up staying in your drive (I already have enough trouble finding what I need!) so this will definitely help minimise the files I search for.

Tip #2: There should be no docs under "Unshared" in Hapara. Get learners into the habit of filing everything - it may even need to be built into our SODA tasks (Start of Day Activity). At present, 26 out of 27 students in my class have more than 25 files that are in that unshared space. Eek!



I've always looked at other schools who are not part of the Manaiakalani programme and wondered how on earth teachers cope when students can BYOD. I look back on my own journey with a switch from a PC to a Mac in 2012 when I began teaching at May Road School. It was a huge learning curve to get my head around how to use software like Pages and figure out how to change the settings so that they worked for me. I can only imagine how teachers cope (or don't!) when they have to deal with technical issues for a multitude of different devices that students have brought from home. It really is a Bring You Own Disaster scenario and I am grateful that all my learners have chromebooks.

It was interesting to learn why Chromebooks were the preferred option for Years 4-13. These devices allow for the three principles of the Treaty of Waitangi:

• Participation - ensures equity for everyone
• Partnership - between google, fusion, students, whānau, schools
• Protection - through a cybersmart curriculum

I found completing the digital dig was a worthwhile task in today's session. Quite often I forget the shortcuts or keys for how to do things on a chromebook and will often ask other students in my class to support their peers. It was great PD for me and it will be something that I will be getting future classes to work through at the start of every academic year. It will be a great refresher for those who are in the second or third year of being in a chromebook class, as well as being a great way to upskill students in their first year as well as providing them with their own resource for rewindable learning. 

It was also great to have a play around with Explain Everything. While this is an ipad based app, it was interesting for me to get an insight into how teachers utilise it in their 1:1 ipad environments (Years 1-3).  Here is a recording of my second attempt at creating using Explain Everything.

A lot of great tips and tricks in today's session as well as some food for thought around how I can support other teachers with enhancing their teaching and learning programmes using digital technology. I will be highly recommending the DFI to all teachers at my school! 

Enabling Access - DFI Session 6

The theme of today's DFI session was enabling access through visibility. Particularly fitting as we are three days into term 2 where students are learning from home and teachers are teaching from home due to our nationwide lockdown!

While the Ministry of Education have put in place supports for those students who don't have access to devices and internet connections (such as home learning packs and Papa Kāinga TV), I feel confident that the majority of my 27 learners will be able to utilise the class site access their learning for as long as they need to be at home.

Over the school holidays I had been tossing between how I was going to structure my class site so that it would be visually appealing and user friendly (particularly for my Year 4 students who are in their first year of being in a chromebook class and have had their devices for less than 7 weeks!). I made the decision to have a page for each curriculum area so that I could get as much relevant learning content out to students... needless to say it was an epic fail! There was too much content and the feedback that I received from some parents was that they weren't sure what their child needed to complete. Judging by the number of students who completed tasks, I think it's also fair to say that even they were confused about what they needed to do too!

Yesterday I explored some of the class sites from other teachers at my school. Interestingly enough I found that a first year provisionally registered teacher had achieved in her site exactly what I wanted for my own class site. It was both visually appealing and easy to navigate - both for her Year 2 & 3 ipad learners and their whānau. I emailed her to praise and acknowledge her efforts, as well as give her a heads up that I was going to revamp my class site using her one as a model! Her response was that she had looked at my class and initially borrowed some ideas from it - evidence that making our class sites visible and being open to sharing what we are doing helps enable all of us to be highly effective practitioners.

Taking the time to examine my colleagues' class sites during today's DFI sessions was a worthwhile task as it provided me with some other ideas for how I can create make my site visually engaging. It is also challenged me to consider the functionality of the class site (no more than 3 clicks), the nature of tasks (using the SAMR model, providing multi-modal and multi-textual resources, student choice and opportunities for collaboration) and ensuring that rewindable learning is available (the latter being incredibly important right now while distance learning is in place).

Gerhard's slide (from the Chalk'n Talk session - Leading Learning using Google Sites) sums up nicely what it is that I want to achieve with my class site.

My goal for today was to create a specific distance learning page for each week. It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty pleased with how things are shaping up. I even managed to create a button so that it's super easy for my learners to access this week's and next week's content. I use bitmojis a lot with our start of day activities (SODA tasks) so thought this would be a fun visual for my learners.

I wish I'd had the foresight to take a video of my site before I started making the changes. Here's a short clip of the home page of my class and how it's currently looking.



My next step for this home page is to tidy up the buttons at the bottom of the page. At present I think they are really clunky looking. I'd also like to add an introduction video for those kids who haven't engaged with our google Meet sessions this week. Once we're back in the classroom I'd also like to get some photos of my learners and use them as a backgrounds for the learning area buttons.

Over the next week I'd also like to get some feedback from learners about how the site is working for them. The site still has a long way to go, but I have a clear vision and "recipe for success" which will help me to design a site that is relevant, engaging and easily accessible for my learners and their whānau.

Stay tuned for an update on how everything turns out!

Visibility using Google Sites - DFI Session 5

Today's DFI session focused strongly on the concept of visibility. Making the planning, learning process, outcomes and assessment all visible and in the process, removing barriers to learning.

Visible for learners so that they can access their learning and next steps, visible for whānau so that they can participate and be involved in their children's learning, and visible for our teaching colleagues so that we can share our knowledge, ideas and resources. This is something that I aim to do with all my learning and teaching with my class, however I could extend it further with my own professional learning journey. Moving forward after DFI I think I will need to schedule time into my week that is designated for blogging.

We also examined the terms multi modal and multi textual as part of T shaped literacy and were challenged to consider how we can engage our learners so that they begin to take responsibility for their own learning. By personalising learning, we are empowering learners to become confident and competent. But we need to engage and entice them first!

As term 2 approaches we need to consider how we can utilise google sites and different media to engage our learners, particularly as some of them will not have the same adult support usually available to them during this lockdown.

Creating a multimodal site around a theme or big question for learners was a challenge for me today (possibly too many distractions at home, I struggled to focus and stay on task!) I know the basics of google sites and can definitely see the benefits of mapping out a site using good old pen and paper prior to building it. I found that I had way too many tabs and it was difficult to select relevant, appropriate and engaging texts and then arrange them on the site in a user friendly way!

The landing page of the multi modal site that I created for sustainability.

All a great learning curve and definitely a work in progress. I'm sure the more I create, the faster I will become!