Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Three

Today was another great day of learning at DFI. As always we started the day with extending our knowledge of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. We were focused on Create. Vicki spoke about the soft skills students need including creativity, collaboration and critical thinking and the importance of giving students opportunities to develop these skills. Being in a New Entrant learning space we spend a lot of time doing hands-on activities and learning through play and doing, so the children are beginning to develop these skills right from when they start school. I like to think that because of this the children do have high levels of engagement and enthusiasm at school. Only having our tamariki for about a term means we don’t have a lot of time to introduce them to making their own DLO’s (digital learning objects), but what we have learnt about today has certainly got me thinking about how we can at least expose and model different DLO’s to them and use them in a whole class context. This hopefully will then set them up well as they move through the school and have more opportunities to use digital technologies independently.

Our time looking at Youtube was useful in terms of thinking about what settings we should have. Youtube playlists are something I have used in the past but not so much recently. I didn’t know you could embed playlists on class sites so that was a handy tip to know about that might bring me back to using them, particularly for all the songs we listen to!

I really enjoyed learning about and having a go using Google Drawing. It’s something I pretty much hadn’t used at all, so I was really keen to see how I could use it for teaching and learning. The explore tool for finding public domain images is great and the mask tool for cropping images into specific shapes is awesome. It was great being shown how to use ‘publish to the web’ to embed drawings and I love that if you edit the drawing later it will update to where it is embedded automatically. So useful!

I use Google Slides all the time, but it was great seeing how else I could use them. I was so inspired by the animations that were shared with us, so much fun for me as an adult to look at, so it would definitely be fun for kids! Phil suggested creating a whole class animation for something like shared writing with children this age, which I thought was a great idea. Being able to share something like that on our class blog at the end of term would definitely make the kids feel really proud. 

When we split off into groups I looked at making a pick-a-path on Google Slides. I keep being pleasantly surprised at finding authentic ways to use things like this in a junior context. I created a pick-a-path to help my children think about how they should be treating others at HEART Zones, which is our learning through play time. I’m going to try it out next week with the children, I think they’ll find it really engaging and I actually really enjoyed making it. (See slides at the bottom of this post).

What I’m finding in general with the DFI is that it is definitely helping me feel more confident using the Google apps, which is helping me save time and be more efficient. We were talking at our school this week about growth and fixed mindsets, and I feel that being a part of this professional development is helping me to have a growth mindset and I am enjoying the challenge and satisfaction of acquiring new knowledge and skills. It’s really good to be put in the place of a learner again, and to remember what it’s like for our students!