Manaiakalani Bay of Islands Summit 2023

Fakalofa lahi atu! These holidays, I am here at the Manaiakalani Google Summit in the beautiful Bay of Islands, hosted by the Bay of Islands College.

The first keynote speaker was Edith Painting-Davis (principal of Bay of Islands College) and her journey of Te Reo Maori and the importance of relationships between educators and their students. This reiterated the Relationships First Navigating to the North East kaupapa of Russell Bishop.

The first workshop I attended was Creating animations in Photopea with Hannah and Kelsey from Pt England School. This is a great way to create animations and something that I will try to implement in my classroom with my learners.

The second workshop I went to was Creating a visual pepeha using iMovie with Migi and Sandy from Pt England School. Please see my example below.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of the summit and what I can learn and take back with me to use in the classroom. Fa'afetai to everyone!

DFI Week 8 Reflection: Computational Thinking

 

Dorothy shared about the fourth valued kaupapa word of "Empowered". Empowerment equals choice. Part of our job as an educator is to empower our learners. I hope that over the 18 years of my teaching career that I have empowered most if not, all of the learners I've taught in Digital fluency. The use of Digital tools is to empower our learners. 

This above quote from Matt has made me think of my practice especially online and how I can empower my learners to choose to do the work I set them. It's made me consider the idea of "Le Vā". The Vā (Pasifika terminology) translates to the space between us. If my relationships with my learners are strong then the space between us will be one where they would try to complete all set tasks online and if not have conversations with me, as to why or why not.

It's quite interesting to listen to Vicki share about technologies that are out there now. She started with the Jetsons (cartoon tv programme from the early 1980s). It showed a family that were talking via video chat/ FaceTime and had microwaves, flying cars, mobile phones etc. How cool is it that some of that tech was talked about in this show in now present. However, there are some bias and challenges of artificial intelligence (AIs) algorithms. 

Chat GPT and AI with Geoff Bentley from OMG Tech. He talked to us about what he does and some of the AI that we could use. We created a ChatGPT account. I'm a bit wary about AI but I've heard good things about Chat GPT especially how teachers can use it to generate report comments. He was very knowledgable and passionate about AI and how it's used and where it is heading in our beautiful country especially amongst our learners. I need time to explore ChatGPT.

Digital Fluency is a support required for effective, teaching planning, assessment and professional learning. Digital Technologies curriculum has been revamped because of the language it had been using. I think a lot of what we do in our classrooms and as part of the DFI programme covers a lot of the what the curriculum has already.

After exploring the TKI Technology site, I've noted I've taught quite a few of the lessons in my classroom over the years.

Donna shared the Hapara Hot Tip using the Highlights. I thought I was familiar with this function until I saw this slide for Guide Browsing. It can filter sites and you can do this for how long that students access these sites too. I didn't know you could schedule messages either. I thought this was very cool!

We were given some time to explore some coding sites. I haven't done any coding for a while. I am familiar with Scratch and Code Combat. They are very cool sites and I will have to explore these with my learners back in the classroom. You can find my example that I created today with Louise using https://studio.code.org/courses below.  

I've enjoyed my journey with DFI this term. Most of the tasks I have covered through my time at Point England School but it was great to connect and learn more about what others are doing and using in their classrooms. Thank you, Fakaaue lahi, Fa'afetai Dorothy, Vicki, Donna and everyone else that was part of the DFI programme happening across the motu (country). How awesome for our learners and our kaiako! I'm so glad I kept my professional blog too.

DFI: Reflection Week 7

Dorothy shared with us about the idea of Ubiquitous: A to the power of 4. The 4 As: anytime, anywhere, any pace and anyone. Learning takes place outside the original classroom. It's about removing the barriers.

At the beginning of the year when we (Auckland) experienced flooding and thunderstorms, lots of school including ours decided to close to keep everyone safe. During this time, I had a few children call or email me to ask for learning online. I was able to direct them to our class site and to activities that they could do at home.

Months later, I've had to remind my learners (inc. some parents) a few times, that if they're away for whatever reason, they can check our class site to see what learning we've covered. With the idea of being Ubiquitous, anyone can access their learning. It can be rewinded and students can cover their learning at their own pace. Students don't have to be absent. They can work on tasks at home too. 

Because our school is still new to Manaiakalani, one of the problems my students face is not having a device at home. Or if there is a device, it's a shared device among all the siblings in the house.

Being Cybersmart talks about empowering our learners and our whanau. As a teacher it is our job to help and educate our learners to be smart online. Smart Secure - policies and procedures, security etc I remember we had Watch Dog back in the day. I wonder if there's an aspect of: misinformation, disinformation etc.

I remember when teaching at Pt England and the first devices that came out were the netbooks. My son was Year 5 and had one.  I liked that the school gave parents an option to pay $3-4 a week. I was so excited about my son using a netbook. Then when he started in Year 7, I was very fortunate to get him a new chromebook when they became available. It's amazing to see how far the chromebooks have evolved.

Part of the session was spent on the Digital Dig. If you click on the picture above, you can see what I have done. I had to make this using a chromebook. I must say it wasn't as easy using a chromebook compared to using an Apple Mac. I also took a screenshot of a slide that I was stuck on and shared it with my learners to ask them for help. They happily obliged.

Next session was on using iPads in the classroom using Explain Everything. This is my project  using the whiteboard.explaineverything I created using my laptop.Hopefully you are able to see it! Above is a screenshot of my example. But I recorded a voiceover to my whiteboard. See the above. I managed to find the code and embed it. I won't be using Explain Everything with my class because my learners are on chromebooks.

I created my first task on Workspace with Matt Goodwin (an old colleague of mine). I have published it and shared it with my learners, only so I can see what they think and get some feedback from them next week on Monday. This is new learning for me. I found the workspace quite dull compared to the class site but it was good to see what Workspace is all about. Here is the link to my Cybersmart activity for Smart Relationships. I tried to use screencast using the Quicktime player but wasn't successful ha! This is probably something that I'll explore more.

I find the reader function in Edublogs probably the most helpful part. This is because I can see all my learners posts that is from the most recent. It's also handy because I can leave comments on my learners blogs without having to click on every single link etc. 

DFI Day 6 Reflection

Connected - Rangitāmiro what brings us together? Connected learners share. Digital has enabled us to keep in touch with others. Shared language enables us to make connections. Connections happen as a network when there are structures in place. 

Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Fiona Grant spearheads this for Manaiakalani. As a school that is part of Manaiakalani, we keep in touch with other schools in our cluster via our class and student blogs. My class leave comments for a bilingual class Room 4 at Otahuhu Primary School and the Tuatara Class up North. We try to leave blog comments on their posts fortnightly. It's been very cool to see learners connect via blogs.

Leading Learning using Google Sites - I've been using Google sites since my teaching career at Pt England School. However, there was a time when I didn't because at one school didn't use them - they used Hero. For me personally, I enjoy using sites with my learners. However, I feel that it's a bit of a mess at the moment. I need to tidy it up and make it better. I don't think my class site is visible on our school sites page.  I have also reflected on how I need to get feedback from my learners and what they think. I liked how Vicki said that there's a 3 click rule for learners to access the sites. Here is the link to my current class site (apologies my site has now changed).

In my class site my goals are to: 1). jazz up my buttons. I will change these when I take photos of my learners and stage it that way. 2) Fix up the navigation so my learners have 3 or less clicks to access their learning. 3). Make sure my slides and work I've created and shared is visible to visitors. I also added a very brief statement about myself and my picture at the bottom of my site so people know I am the kaiako (teacher) in this class site. I created a banner for my class site and changed it. I checked all my pages and checked the view. I tidied up my writing page for our spellathon. I've also changed the theme from the greeny blue to a charcoal grey. Here are some pictures of the changes that I've made.

I'm happy with the changes I've made to my site. I am going to design a form to gather some feedback from my learners about the class site and hopefully make some changes accordingly. I learned a few things from looking at other sites and hope to implement some of the changes on my class site. Here's some very kind feedback from a few students from my class.

DFI Day 5 Reflection

Visible Learning. Making Teaching and Learning Visible. 

Can others see it? I often forget to make sure that my slides etc are all shared. What is visible to learners, whanau, teachers and colleagues?

People may have a mindset of not wanting others to see what they have planned or made online. However, since my teaching career started at Point England School, I've been very open with what I have planned and shared with others. I admit, not everything is perfect but I do look back and reflect to see what I need to change for next time. I welcome positive feedback and I don't mind others using what I've created. However, it would be nice for people to acknowledge others on their work.

What do I do to hook and engage my learners?

I remember when teaching at Point England School at the beginning of every term we would have our Immersion Assemblies. This would be a chance for teachers to share what the inquiry is through a short play, quiz, skit, dance, drama etc to hook learners into the topic. It was also a lot of fun for teachers but also great to see our learners faces light up!

Watching the Universal Design for Learning reminded me of trying to do things differently with my learners to capture engagement. For example: homework and how one sheet just doesn't cut the mustard. The video talked about how learners need lots of different modes to engage in learning. What works for one learner, doesn't always work for others. This has challenged me today. Can we change what we do to help engage our learners? Yes.

Creating a site for our learners. We were given a chance to look at some other examples of sites. I liked this one here. It had both English and Samoan activities on there. Here is another example for Matariki.

CyberSmart with Vicki reminded us about Smart Parents. Do parents know about their child's individual blogs? Do they know how to leave them a comment on their posts? I created a QR code for my learners blogs and shared this with parents.

Most of the day was spent working on creating Multi Modal resources in groups. I chose to go with Ocean Health with Amie. Here's my planning template.

The last part of the afternoon was spent creating a site around the theme of Ocean Health. Click here to see the site that I created. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like. I had a lot of fun making it. It was my first time using and making an image carousel and dividers. Now that I've started this site, I can't help but continue editing it. I'll share it with my learners to get their thoughts.

DFI: Day 4 Reflection

Dorothy Burt spoke to us about "Sharing" today. Sharing has been done since the beginning of time. It's also about building relationships with others and getting to know people. The only thing that has changed is how it has been done as time has passed. Social media has heightened a form of sharing. Sharing requires an authentic audience. 

When I taught at Point England School, I'll always remember Mr Russell Burt (our tumuaki - principal) and how he encouraged the positive rather than the negative. Instead of anti-bullying (using the word bullying) as a school we encouraged the behaviour we wanted like: Kindness etc. I remember Max Jacobsen writing songs about kindness and how we sung them in our school assemblies.

There had to be a space for our learners to share. Manaiakalani went with blogging. I've been privileged to have been part of the blogging journey since the beginning when I taught at Point England School.

ChalknTalk with Amie talked about Google Forms. I thought I knew a lot about it but after listening to her today there's a lot more that I could be doing with forms especially in the classroom with my learners. I will try to do a better job with this and go back and look at the slides that were shared today. I created a google form for this purpose of DFI (see link here). 

However, I would really like to learn how to use google forms for spelling tests with my learners. I would prefer to use a ready-made template though. Donna also spoke to us about Escape Rooms using forms. Here is her example. How cool! I would be very interested in using this with my class too.

Google My Maps with Vicki. I remember my students learning this activity with Maria Krausse last year as part of our Manaiakalani Facilitation session. This is something that I could do with my class but I'm not confident. I'm still learning about how to use it effectively before I show my learners. Here is my example of what I created in Google My Maps. I just wanted to show my travel journey as an educator of the places and schools I worked at during my teaching career. I didn't include the schools that I have been a reliever at in the past.

Spreadsheets with Vicky was a Deep Dive and it was very full on and fast paced. But I managed to take down lots of notes and tricks of how to split cells and names etc and to add sums of columns which I thought was pretty cool and something that I could use in my classroom. My breakout session with David Clarke went well too. It was a bit advanced but it was very useful. I used to work with David's mum Jenni at Pt England School. David was Year 6 when I started at Point England School. He is now at Data Analyst and works for Manaiakalani. How cool!!

Hapara Hot Tip #3 with Donna was about how to view and manage our students blogs and comments.  I like how you can hover over the comments without having to click and open each comment.

Part of the session was "Creating with Sheets". I used this blog as an example to collect data from using Spreadsheets and created these graphs here. In 2020 Finau had published the most blog posts at a whopping 654. I suspect that this may have been due to our country going into lockdown. There were no posts in January due to the school holidays. And the most blog posts were published in the month of August. I wonder if this was due to the winter season. Here is the data that I have collected.

As a professional, I'm going to try and get better at using Spreadsheets to analyse data.

A couple of things from today that I could use with my learners are: using create, google forms for spelling, Google My Maps to incorporate Maths and Geography. I will also look at Smart Money from the CyberSmart snippets that Vicki shared.

Writing Quality Blog Posts comments was the last part of our day. Blog comments should be: positive, thoughtful and helpful. We covered quite a bit of this with Maria Krausse last year when she was our facilitator.

This week's session was very helpful and I've taken away so many ideas and things I need to do. I'm looking forward to next week.

DFI Day 3: Media Reflection

Our 30 minutes session with Dorothy this morning was about Create - Hanga. This was about the concept of using Create to hook our learners into learning. It has challenged me to think about how I have planned for my learners in the classroom to create, to be curious and explore to create. I liked the following quotes:

I agreed with the idea that suggests 'Creativity is something people do'. Over the week, I will look at how I can carry out Create in my classroom? I've been thinking about provocations and STEAM lessons with my class.

I learned a lot from Louise about how to use Google slides. I liked how she shared about SlidesCarnival that has templates that are free for us to use. I'm going to use these for the slides that I create to share with my learners or if I have to do a presentation next time.

I also learned a lot of great ideas to use in Google drawing which Donna shared. I will go back to these slides and check out the links so I can use these with my learners in the class too.

Our main theme today is about Media. We talked and learned about YouTube. Being part of Manaiakalani, there are protocols for online learning. I've learned a lot today and there's lots that I would like to try out in my classroom with my learners. One is animations and the other is pick a path both using Google slides. This afternoon we were able to opt into the workshops to learn, create and share. I chose Pick a Path with Makaore. Here is what I created and I am still working on it. 

Please view my 'all about me' insert that I created today using google draw then downloading to a png in the right side bar.