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!