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Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Four

Our focus for today was Dealing with Data. I was a bit nervous about this day but have picked up some really useful tips and having time to explore and have a play was helpful as always.

I had never created a Google Form before, so I really enjoyed having a go at creating a form, using different types of questions. It was great learning how to look at and analyse responses and knowing what settings to be aware of. I particularly found it useful to know about making an important question ‘required’ so it has to be answered and checking that the form isn’t on the default of only allowing users from your organisation to fill it in. Our digital bubble had some fun forms to fill in that created good conversation and it was nice to see a variety of uses for forms.

Google’s My Maps was something I hadn’t even heard of before, so it was awesome seeing the potential uses for students. For older students it has great applications for mathematics such as working out area and distance. Maybe not so applicable for my New Entrant learners, but I did think when we do our where are we from learning that we could collaboratively make a map of the different countries we are from. The children always enjoy looking at the globe and finding their country so there are still potential ways to use this authentically with my tamariki. For today I had a play around with creating a map that had places in Christchurch that are meaningful to our families or that would be a good place for them to go for family friendly activities. Was great to play around with adding images and descriptions and changing colours and icons.

 

Google Sheets was the thing I probably came into the DFI with the least confidence about, but already in one day I feel I have picked up so many handy hints. Google Sheets is not something I will use with my New Entrant learners, but with my leadership/management hat on, I know these tips will be really useful, particularly for when we are analysing data. Knowing how to freeze columns or rows, increase or decrease decimals places, change the date format, filter data, change to alternating colours for rows and use the auto-fill function for things like months or days are really great to have in my kete. Similarly to our children, I always feel like the learning becomes embedded for me if I have a go at doing it myself. Doing the activity where we analysed a student’s blog posts was great. I was able to take the data off the blog, put it into sheets, create and edit a chart and then insert that chart into a Google Drawing. It took some support and playing around but I got there in the end and it was fantastic following the process the whole way through.

 

Our focus for the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy section of the day was on sharing. Vicki spoke about how the human compulsion to share is not new and how using technology allows for greater sharing capacity. The idea that sharing with purpose requires an audience is really important and that it all comes back to the importance of making connections between people. I thought it was really powerful thinking about sharing to learn, rather than just sharing to finish learning. It’s a great reminder to provide opportunities for sharing the journey, rather than just the outcome. Our sharing in our New Entrant space is often not in a digital capacity, but it is great being reminded of the value of the sharing that we do do on our class blog. We have definitely seen the value of whānau commenting on and celebrating the learning of our tamariki; it is something that is very meaningful for both our parents and children. 

Grateful that we were able to safely complete Day 4 of the DFI from our Level 4 bubbles!
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  1. Phil @ Ako HikoAugust 21, 2021 at 12:25 PM

    Ka pai Aimee. I know what you mean, Sheets still make me feel ever so slightly nervous just because there is so much you can do with them! Class Blogs are such a powerful tool and a great way to introduce blogging to younger students. I think you just need to change your permission settings on your MyMap to make it visible.

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