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.