DFI Reflection - Day 9 - External Recognition

Our final session on DFI. I am going to miss it. I have learned so much over this past term and become so much more confident in my online teaching abilities.

We sat our exam for Google Educator Level 1 and I am pleased to say I passed! I am now looking to do my Level 2 exam. There are other professional certificates I would like to earn as well so will spend the upcoming school holidays working on these to continue to upskill myself.

I also added several Google extensions and started using them. I am loving Toby mini. I have all the pages I open every day at the start of the day set up - I now no longer forget to do the bus kids each day as the Google Form is up and running next to the roll. It saves me from forgetting to open things when I start teaching. Saves time and stress for sure.  I'm also using the Colour Pick Eye Dropper to keep themes within work I am assigning. So if we do a School Journey story, all the slides that come out of that for work match the colours of the illustrations. I don't know if the kids notice, but I feel more professional and set when it is coordinated!! 

There are still many things I want to dive into more as and when there is a need, or the time! Knowing there is so much more to do is pretty exciting and I'll be able to keep the kids engaged and active online with new things regularly. I now know where to go to find even newer things too. One tool I thought I would never admit to using but find amazing things for the kids is:  TikTok. Or #TeacherTok.  There are educators on the platform from all over the world that share tidbits of information, mostly digital, that help save time, engage learners and help teachers. It is where I learned about Eduprotocols which I constantly use in class as they have kids collaborating online and my kids LOVE them. I am going to blog about these resources in a separate post as just too much to go on about on this one.

Overall, the Digital Fluency Intensive course has opened up a world of skills I am glad I have now. A big thanks to Vicki and her team of facilitators which have shared their knowledge and steered us on our journey. A personal thank you to Jeremy Ferguson our Bubble Coach for his patience and humour in supporting our group with its learning. 

Gadgets - Online learning

Trying to deliver teaching solely online has made me hunt around for gadgets to help me deliver my programme. There's only so much one can do by sharing your screen and typing! It is not very engaging for the viewers and some things are just poorly done via text input from a keyboard.

The issue is/was: cost. There are some AWESOME things available but boy, they can really cost an arm and a leg, and as a fourth year teacher the pay isn't something to rave about. And besides, without being able to fiddle around and use it in a store (Level 4 lockdown) first, it was hard to choose something you KNEW you'd work for the money you could afford to pay.

I found that using my finger on my laptop touch pad was a poor tool when trying to handwrite numbers and equations on a virtual whiteboard. I stumbled across a writing tablet that was a) really cheap and b) worked really well!  

Huion Inspiroy H430P Osu! Pen Tablet

It requires no batteries, just plugs in the side of your laptop (for the price, no bluetooth!) and works a treat. Once you get your brain around the mapping from the tablet to your screen area, you're away laughing. Free software download. Quick to install and use. A bit of practice and my numbers started looking awesome. I got it on special from PB Tech for $59.00 although it normally retails for around $68.00. Rating: 5/5 for price/value/ease of use.  Link to PB Tech is in the title and the image. 

The next item I stumbled upon was after several attempts at finding a document type camera. They were from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Way beyond my budget and also any benefits. After going down the rabbit hole many times, I came across these:

IPEVO Mirror-Cam

These fold up, have a mirror on them and come in a 6 pack (plus a small whiteboard). They are placed over your laptop webcam (so will only be as good as your inbuilt camera) and they point down over your keyboard.  Downloaded software flips the image so you are presenting everything the right way up. I have ordered them from Amazon and I am eagerly awaiting their arrival!  If they work well, they could be part of our kit in the classroom or for kids at home to use. It would allow us to see what they are writing at home, maths work as they do it etc. In class, it will allow easy photo taking of hard copy work to upload online and to record themselves working out problems as evidence. Fingers crossed they are as useful and work as well as I hope!  At around $40 for 6 it isn't a lot to spend for what possibilities they will open. I'll update my blog with the results once they arrive. Link to Amazon is in the title above.

I bought myself a small microphone to make recordings clearer and less like I am in an area where the acoustics are rough, a ring light to make myself look more beautiful (ha ha!) and I'm sure there will be other purchases, partly to satisfy my need to BUY SOMETHING but also to hopefully make any distance learning easier for me AND my tamariki. 

DFI Reflection - Day 8 - Computational Thinking

Empowerment was the kaupapa for today's session. It is around making sure that our tamariki, who come from places of almost total disempowerment take back some of the control and have choices in life. From what they are learning, what they create as a result and taking in knowledge that gives them the ultimate power over their lives.

Waitara is a community that has a lot of poverty. We are a decile 2 school. Our tamariki often live with caregivers (usually their Nan) and sometimes move as the shortage of housing in our town gets worse. It is a community that has problems with alcohol and drugs such as P. The school for some of our tamariki is the safest place they have in their lives, and we as their teachers are their rocks in a stormy sea. To enable them to reclaim their Rangatiratanga is a game changer for these kids. To be a part of educating them, of empowering them, of expecting more from them, and making them believe in themselves, is certainly a privilege for me.

So how does Manaiakalani help to restore our communities? How does the emphasis on the digital world help? It allows more shared learning to occur with students enabled to join or create communities of learners that extend outside the classroom. It assists in creating supportive learning environments by offering resources that take account of individual, cultural or developmental differences. It helps by offering students virtual experiences and tools that save them time, allowing learning to be taken further. Often lower decile areas do not have the same access to digital technology that more affluent areas have. Manaiakalani breaks down the barriers to this access and lets our tamariki get as much if not more future facing learning.

Our school took the path of buying the devices for the students, so the school owns them. It doesn't really fit with the kaupapa of Manaiakalani and that is unfortunate. We didn't sell the "buy your own device through micro-financing" well at all. We haven't set up a trust to handle this. We are a step behind in this area, but we need to get onto it for our younger students so they can come through with that power of ownership lifting them.

This part of the kaupapa completes the puzzle. 

We dipped our toes into the future too. What should we expect from it? What jobs? What skills? I see a lot of commentary about future proofing our tamariki, but sometimes I think, hmmm, look at all the clips from old TV programmes now available which were predicting our future and how much of it didn't come to fruition. Things we use today were created by school systems that didn't turn out future thinking adults, yet they happened. I believe it just part of human nature, that we will always have creative people that will come to the fore, regardless of their schooling. But our tamariki may never be in a position to get to the front of the pack and we have a huge hand in empowering them to take the steps they need to get there, using the technology we CAN help them with today. It allows them equity in the system to enable them to take the next steps into the future.

Our create sessions were based on computational thinking and the new requirements in the curriculum. We looked at various online and offline learning opportunities and the delivery of ideas. I have attended a PLD on the new curriculum at a local high school and we learned to use Scratch and completed some offline activities. It was an excellent few sessions and really gave me confidence in this area. So when it came time to choose an activity type for our create session I decided on one that focused on binary numbers and using them to create outcomes. I never really understood how binary worked although knew it was fundamental in computers and the digital world around us. A few pennies dropped during the session and we discussed offline activities we could use in the classroom around binary options. 

Our create option was to make ourselves a name badge with our name in binary. Here's mine! It was a fun activity to do and one I can see myself doing the classroom. I have some students who would find it fascinating and fun. 

It was our last week "in class" so to speak, and I really wish the course could continue! It has been fantastic and I really feel that I have grown so much in confidence within myself. I'm a social media user across multiple platforms and now when I see a teacher sharing a digital idea, I'm all in - boots and all - to give it a go if I think it fits in with my pedagogical ideas. It has made a huge difference to the delivery of work to my tamariki and the sharing of ideas among Manaiakalani teachers is immensely helpful, time saving and promotes collegiality which is often sorely missing in the sector. 

If you ever get the opportunity to do this intensive, go for it. You'll never look back!

DFI Reflection - Day 7 - Devices

Ubiquitousness - part of the kaupapa of Manaiakalani. Learning must be ubiquitous. Everywhere, available anytime, anywhere to anyone. By having our sites and workspaces available online, with rewindable learning, our tamariki can partake in learning whenever they like, from wherever they like. This includes over long breaks.  We were shown the increase in good outcomes the Summer Learning Journey offering made to those ākonga who participated. Learning over the summer break for 30 minutes a day with engaging programme meant they were coming back at a higher level than they were at the end of the year before, no drop! This is exciting.

When we had our first lockdown in 2020, we had devices one to one for our students, but they were second hand donated devices, or very old. Some were in a very precarious situation! We looked at giving out the devices for use, but we discovered that a majority of our whānau did not have access to good internet, or internet at all. We ended up going with paper packs and letting those that had their own devices access some very quickly cobbled together google sites. We had little training in sites. Our tamariki were absent for most of our time in lockdown. My biggest regret after going through the past year and participating in the DFI is that we didn't start sooner. Our second lockdown (which we came out of yesterday school wise) was a completely different scenario. Over the past year our whānau had gotten themselves better connections to the internet and we had started on our Manaiakalani journey.

When we hit our second lockdown, by then our school had purchased enough Chromebooks for the seniors (three classrooms) and one of the middle school rooms. These were sent home to the tamariki for them to use for school. It made a huge difference to engagement. They were used to using our sites and the work we had online. It was gratifying to have so many at our Google Meets each day and to have interaction online with the students. It was completely different! It showed how far both the teachers and learners had come.  We still issued hard packs as we knew our kids enjoyed worksheets (!!) and sometimes they needed a break from their devices. They included some cutting out and gluing work and mindfulness colouring too. A real mix of activities to do.

On my site I included screencastifies of how to do a few things as some kids had forgotten - and I wasn't there 24/7 to help them. It helped those that were slower picking up changes I had made too. My class has a wide range of abilities, from reading at a 4-5 year old level, to reading as a 14 year old. It is essential that I offer work and learning opportunities for everyone and rewindable learning makes more opportunities available for my lower achieving learners. It allows my high achievers to continue ahead also. 

We have dedicated relievers for our rooms for pre-booked days, so we avoid too much disruption for our learners. They do not cope well with change in personnel so we do our best to reduce the number of relievers they have to ensure their well-being comes first. Our relievers are therefore well known to the tamariki and they have great relationships with them. They arrange all their own work for these days and dovetail the learning they plan and present into what we are doing. They use our sites and add their own content to them. It would be great if these long-term relievers could be trained in the Manaiakalani pedagogy also. We share as much as we can with them but that is not the same as attending a DFI.

We completed an exercise on iPads with Explain Everything (EE). Awesome app! Our school does not have the licences for the paid version though which is a pity.  

A teacher created activity I completed on EE:

And another activity with a recording. Click on the image to hear my thoughts on EE:

During the last part of the day I completed a Workspace in Hapara which I have looked at for two years now and didn't know how to use.  I am going to make the work I completed today available to my class next week with it linked on my site for them to use to access. Exciting! I like the ability to put completion dates on the work as sometimes I'm sure some in my class think the work I assign is optional. I will definitely be using this tool more. This lesson is based around use of our chromebooks. My class was unfortunate to have me not participate in the DFI until term 3, but they received their chromebooks in term 2. We have done some work on how to use them, but not to the degree the classrooms with teachers who have completed the DFI have done. It will be good to see their faces when they find out how much more than can do - in a far more easy manner!

DFI - Reflection - Day 6 - Enabling Access - Sites

Connection. A fundamental part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa. It feeds into our need to share with others about our lives, and our tamariki sharing their work. Our look at sites today brought together the individual skills we had gathered so far and looked at the overall purpose of having a site:

• To be a one stop shop for learning
• To have learning be able to be accessed from anywhere, anytime and at the pace the learner needs
• To allow rewindable learning
• To make our planning and teaching visible to everyone
• Weekly plans, timetables and overviews are available
• To allow personalised learning
• and most pertinent to the past couple of weeks, it is available for learning from home during lockdowns

We studied various existing sites from around the country and analysed them for their visual appeal (for the learners), their usability and functionality.  We looked at engagement, navigation, creativity, effective teacher practice and organising the sites.

I created my first website early in 2020 ready for what we knew was coming, a lockdown. I knew nothing about sites and it was a big learning curve. My site was basic but helped deliver learning over the few weeks my tamariki were working from home, but a lot did not have devices or internet to access it. When we came back, we had made the decision to deliver classroom work online also and we stepped up our efforts and our sites. But it wasn't until our school embraced Manaiakalani and started DFI professional learning that we realised what more we could achieve.

I have now created sites for my Guiding roles as well as my classroom. I feel a lot more confident after the past two sessions of learning to do more complex things and how to use the tools in the Google Suite.  I had a goal of achieving three things today on my site: add my weekly timetable to the home page (tick!), add a notices section (tick!) and to use some photos of my tamariki to create buttons. I was annoyed to find that although I had a lot of photos, none of them were suitable! That will have to be rectified when we get back. I can't wait!  I did manage to tweak some other things and get onto next week's learning too.  Have a look and click on the image below:

But the connectivity is more than just sites. It is about connecting with colleagues, not reinventing the wheel, sharing ideas and pedagogy, making connections with our whānau and our tamariki. I've only worked at one school; this is only my fourth year of teaching. I have kept in touch with most of my study cohort and they have all commented on the competitiveness and lack of sharing in the profession. We all studied as mature students and were all over 40 when we started. We had mostly worked in the corporate world (this shared history may be why we were drawn to each other) and had experienced people keeping things to themselves. For some reason we believed that teachers were more altruistic, and in some ways they are. However, the competitiveness is still rife with not many sharing their ideas or insights, their lesson plans that worked or their wonderful classrooms. Things are very much held close to their chests. With Manaiakalani it seems to be the absolute opposite of this situation and I welcome it.