Digital Fluency Intensive 2021 Day Seven

It was nice today having the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of our learners, in terms of the devices and apps that they use. 

Before we got into that we looked at an important aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa: ubiquitous. This is the idea that learning should be able to take place anytime, anywhere, at any pace, for anyone. Of course this is extra relevant now that we find ourselves in distance learning situations, but it is an important principle all the time. Vicki spoke about how ubiquitous learning means that learning can take place outside school hours for those who would like to access it. For some children who don’t necessarily have parents driving or supporting learning at home, being able to access their class site if they want to continue learning, is really powerful. These quotes really stood out to me too: “If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth capturing.” and “If it’s worth learning, it’s worth capturing.” That helps to inform the ‘why’ of rewindable learning. Thinking about myself doing this DFI, being able to go back and rewatch or re-read content is so useful, for things I’ve missed or not understood the first time. It’s good to remember that our kids are exactly the same and won’t always get something the first time. For the kids in my class we mainly capture the ubiquitous principle in the way whānau, who we always acknowledge as being our children’s first teachers, can access learning on the site to support and encourage their child at home. We have had good feedback around this particularly during lockdowns so it is nice to see children and parents engaging with what we are putting on our site.

When I think about the Manaiakalani kaupapa in light of the lockdown I’m proud of the fact that we have reviewed and added a lot more to our site and that we made sure our parents knew how to use the site by taking them through it when we had our Google Meets. The tip today about adding our class site and school website as a link list for the blog was great - I’ve added that now but wish I had done that earlier! It’s always good to have many points of access for those things for parents, just like we have multiple ways of accessing things for the kids. I had heard of Screencastify before but have only just downloaded it today. I would like to make a video of me navigating our class site to put on the homepage so parents have a greater understanding of how to use the site. (Particularly for parents who don’t come to the Coffee Morning where I go through it). Then the site would have rewindable learning for the kids and parents!

I found it really interesting doing the Digital Dig using a chromebook today. I haven’t taught seniors before so had never really used a chromebook before. I think it’s great for junior school teachers to see what is ahead for our learners, so we can consider what we can be doing from when they start school to support their learning journey. I also learnt some handy new keyboard shortcuts I didn’t know, like control + backspace (option + delete on my Mac) to delete a word and control + l (command + l on my Mac) to select the content in the Omni Box.

The time we had exploring and creating on Explain Everything was also really good. I’ve had some exposure to Explain Everything but it was good to have a refresher at the different features and to have a go creating an activity that would support my learners with the components of Cybersmart that we would cover. I made a basic Kawa of Care project slide, (screenshot below), where the children would insert pictures of themselves using the iPads in the correct way. It was great working out how to add audio, since my children wouldn’t be able to read the text independently. Because we are a New Entrant Nest we don’t have the children for very long, but we do try and prioritise doing a Kawa of Care, so the children understand how we treat our digital devices at school from the get go. My next step is getting my head around the workflow of creating and saving and sharing and saving again when we are not 1:1 with our iPads. But good to have an idea of how it all works!