Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day One

Today was the first day of the Online Term 3 Cohort of the Digital Fluency Intensive. Our focus today was on ‘Core Business’.

This morning I really enjoyed increasing my understanding of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy. Something that really stood out to me was when we were looking at the visual of the Manaiakalani hook from heaven and thinking about that idea of hooking children into learning. Dorothy spoke about how engaged our tamariki are with technology, and how we need to utilise that engagement for learning. As a New Entrant classroom we don’t always use technology in the same way that classes with older children do, but this encouraged me to think about how we can use our iPads in a greater capacity, particularly for the share element of learning. We do a lot of talking sharing within our class, but given how engaged our parents are I would like to increase our digital sharing, as sharing with the parents (who are the main group of people checking our class blog), is very meaningful for children in our age group. Thinking about who the audience is and making connections is so important and I want to ensure we are considering that carefully, right from when children start school. 

I was very excited to learn about grouping tabs, creating profiles within chrome and personalising chrome themes. My facilitator Phil also let me know about Toby Mini which I am keen to explore, particularly as my team are always horrified by the number of tabs I have open! Being able to easily and clearly switch between my personal and professional content is brilliant, and learning tricks for more effectively navigating all my different teaching and planning tabs and tools will be a game changer for me! Using shift Z to create a link to have a document in two places on the drive will also save me so much time from not going in and out of different folders. 

Coming into today I felt fairly confident that I knew the basics of creating and using google docs, but there were certainly a lot of features I had never had the opportunity or time to explore before. The section of the day learning about headings, table of contents and voice to text was really great. Being able to use the table of contents to go to specific sections of long documents is an awesome trick to know about. As teachers I feel like we are always looking for shortcuts and things that save time, and all the little bits of time add up, so I’m very happy to have some things in my kete to go away and use. Being more efficient and confident in my use of the google suite will help me to accomplish more in the time I dedicate to work and hopefully then help with my work life balance. 

After spending some time making our different ‘creates’ in our digital bubble groups, we had a conversation about what is shared on google sites for different aged students. Phil spoke about how older students would be accessing a lot of their learning through their class google site and talked about how I could do this, but in a different way for my New Entrant learners. Anything that I would be putting up on the TV, such as stories, songs or videos, could be on the site, so that we are modelling to the children accessing content for learning from the class site. This has been my first year really getting into google sites and thinking about what content should be on it, so I am looking forward to seeing how we can grow our site into something that is really purposeful for the tamariki, rather than it being something more for the parents to access. 

I came away from today feeling inspired about small changes and easy tips, tricks and tools that I can use in my everyday practice that will make a difference. Bring on Day 2!