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Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Two

Day 2 of the DFI is complete and I am feeling really good! I was quite nervous coming into this PD that lots of things would go over my head, but I am loving the format and structure of the day, where we hear about something and then have a chance to explore and implement. 

I enjoy starting the day going deeper into the Manaiakalani pedagogy. I have been working at a school in a Manaiakalani cluster for a few years now, but already after two DFI sessions I feel my understanding of the ‘why’ is so much better. That in turn then motivates me to make sure I am putting it into practice. Vicki (one of the DFI facilitators) gave me some really good food for thought when asking us if we would be able to recognise and define what Learn looks like at our schools. I also liked what she said about effective practice: “good practice will still be recognisable as good practice” and the idea that we should be good at evaluating our teaching programmes and thinking “is this good and just needs tweaking or is it’s usefulness running out”? There was a great reminder too that technology is not just a tool; “otherwise we should find something cheaper to get the job done”. All of these statements were great for reflection, and continue to challenge me to think about how we can use technology appropriately and effectively in our New Entrant setting. My favourite thing from the Learn chat was this quote from Dorothy Burt: “The affordances of technology mean that every child, every day, should learn in engaging ways that were simply not possible in the past”. Pretty inspiring and thought provoking stuff!

It was fantastic having some time to tidy up our gmail accounts. Before today I basically had everything on default and hadn’t changed anything to suit me. That was really down to time, I feel like often I’m not using tools or apps to their full potential because I just haven’t had the time or guidance to know what I can change to make it more user friendly for me. I love colour coordinating and organising things, so am very happy with my reorganised email account with pretty labels to sort emails into different categories! It was also good to enable the promotions section, to filter out all those emails from my main inbox. I loved how we were encouraged to set up our email so it suited us. It was so interesting to see how different people’s brains’ work and how they like to use gmail in different ways.

I was already using Google Keep in a small capacity, but it was nice to see different ways you can use Google Keep. Being able to take a picture of and then grab image text is a really cool feature to know about. It’s nice that it’s like other google apps in terms of being able to use labels, colours etc. 

Vicki showed us some handy things for Google Calendar. It was useful knowing we could hide Saturday and Sunday from the calendar view, it makes all the events for Monday-Friday bigger and easier to see which I like. Using the shortcuts for day (D), week (W), month (M) and year (Y) are also awesome. Increased functionality and every bit of time saving is always welcomed! After today’s explore time I feel confident creating an event and using all the features within that (e.g. repeated events, adding a doc etc).

The taming tabs part of the day was great. Since last week I have been loving grouping tabs, so it’s nice to now also know about pinning tabs that I always need as well. I am looking forward to exploring TobyMini and making folders for bookmarks, those things will also be very helpful. I shared grouping tabs with someone from my team and they loved it, so I’m excited to continue sharing back things that I am finding really useful.

I think the thing I found most useful today was having a go at creating a google meet, practising sharing my screen and recording the meet. Google Meet is something I haven’t used a huge amount, and I always thought the idea of being the host was really daunting, so I’m so pleased we got to have a go doing it ourselves. I now feel like I would be confident enough to use Google Meet with my tamariki and families, which is fantastic. Here is a recording of the Google Meet I did with one of my bubble buddies Ronita, where we discuss a student’s blog:
Looking forward to Day 3 already!
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Comments

  1. Phil @ Ako HikoAugust 8, 2021 at 12:37 PM

    Ka pai Aimee. I'm glad you're enjoying the DFI format. I also love Dorothy's quote and made a note of it as a reminder on Friday. T, d, w, m in Google Calendar are some of my biggest time savers! Good job on being the host in your Meet. See you next week!

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  2. Julie's Manaiakalani BlogAugust 12, 2021 at 8:44 PM

    Awesome Aimee - I love the time you have committed to your reflection. It is great PD isn't it - love learning new things to take back to my classroom.!

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  3. GYENGTUNGAugust 13, 2021 at 7:20 AM

    Hi Aimee, awesome reflection! I couldn't agree more with coming into the session feeling that way but as the day goes by you realise time flies by because everything we are learning inspires us to trial new things and change others too in our teaching practice and little do we know we are actually putting the manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy into practice! So well done! Love that you are sharing your new learning with other work colleagues as well like why wouldn't you right? lol Looking forward to unpacking some more with our group today! 😊

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