Digital Fluency - Week Waru

This is a short and unusual animation I've created using scratch. The session was useful in that we had a brief introduction, had a simple piece of coding from the tutor that we could use, not use or even take as a starting point and modify. I think this is a useful approach that I could take into the class. Make it short and snappy, leave all the students with something they can use to allow for success for all right away and then leave it mostly to trial and error.

Throughout my own recent learning journey being a student of coding (I'm learning so I can help start a Game Development club at our school), I've come to see the value in having some basic building blocks and then being left to figure it out. That's the beauty of coding, it encourages problem solving and logical thinking in our students. Game development is a highly motivating platform in which to teach coding, as students get instant, entertaining feedback on the code as their games take shape. I am a convert to teaching game development in the class and have seen my learners across all our curriculum levels excited to do it.

I loved exploring the different tools for teaching computational thinking today. Relating back to the Manaiakalani kaupapa of learning being accessible to all, regardless of socio-economic status, I love that these rich learning tools are free and accessible online. If teachers see the value of it, then school wifi and devices are all that are needed to tap into some incredible learning and set kids on the course towards creativity and even digital careers.

Next I'd like to take 'Compute It' into my classroom as a intuitive, problem solving challenge that I know all of my learners are capable of doing and would get value from.

It's been an intense and truly worthwhile journey on DFI...next step: study for the exam!

Digital Fluency - Week Whitu

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Ubiquitous learning - rewindable, accessible - can help to bridge the gap in educational inequalities. Our lower socioeconomic learners, who often enter school with less oral language (and as a result, at a disadvantage in early literacy learning) than their higher socio- economic counterparts, can have the chance to catch up and revisit new learning with the help of personal devices. I like to think of access to devices in this way, a strategy for combating inequality.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I am steadily gaining confidence adding creativity and functionality to the learning I share with my students online. Today I shared next week's learning on the site, embedding slides and sharing the slides directly into their folders via Hapara and adding Mote voice notes to go alongside written instructions. Feeling stoked.

With the added confidence, I am gaining efficiency in my work as I am less hesitant to give new things a go.

I have shared with my student the Digital Dive lesson that we completed - I learnt a lot about Chromebook shortcuts and I am going to use it as an assessment of my student's capabilities.

Check out this page on my site for a little of what I have done today:

Site link

Digital Fluency - Week Ono

Before:

After:

Site mahi above

Today reinforced the fun, creativity and learning value of sites. I really found the process of going through the exemplars and giving each other feedback on our own sites useful. I realise I still reserved some feelings that my sites was another box to tick. I am reinspired to get stuck in and revamp my site... it's not as user friendly (especially for students with dyslexia) as I would like it to be.

I have bookmarked some exemplars that I feel are achievable layouts to work towards, I feel confident in. my ability to improve my site and make my learning more accessible.

Next step: collect student feedback (Google form), in order to decide upon what I should change or consider.

Feeling inspired to improve the site and make it a place my students want to dive into.

Digital Fluency - Week Rima

A short screencastify of some of my mahi today (no sound)

I like the learning today that our class sites are like a store-front. I've got to advertise to my students, they need to be enticed by the window display to want to step into the learning. If I'm the same, why would they be any different?

That being said, I am now on a mission to make my site as appealing and intuitive as possible. Next steps - get some student feedback, set aside some site building time once a week, think of it as a creative outlet for myself!

I didn't realise that google sites can be configured into all sorts of layouts - I had thught it was somewhat limited and generic. I have picked up some awesome ideas from the high school examples, which I look forward to using in my own site.
I already knew what a time suck playing around on the site can be and I need to be careful to set a timer when I am working on it!

I feel that time spent adding to the site, however, is a meaningful and powerful part of my teaching practice. There is no double dipping, what I share on there is available to the students rather than creating separate documents that I then translate into kids speak and share with the class. I love the rewindable nature of sites, it encourages our students to jump on and catch up on what they missed. Love it.

Bit of a ramble here today, but long story short, I am seeing more of the value of sites and am inspired to improve mine even more.

Digital Fluency - Week Wha

 It's human nature to want to share - food, dreams, thoughts - and kids are no different. In reflection on this, I realised I wasn't giving my students enough time to share. I'm on a journey to creating with them a more dynamic space, but what use is create, create, creat, without allowing others to enjoy and input into it? I have made a decision to give more time and place more value on the practice of blogging in my class. Not an afterthought, but as an integral part of the day. I realise even through my own blogging here, it is a valuable way to reflect, seek feedback and celebrate our creativity.

I have learnt that sheets - understood and used well - is a great way to improve my workflow. The quicker I become with sheets, the less reluctant I'll be to use it. With my students I have realised that I can imbed sheets onto our site, which the students use to track their own mahi and I can easily display learning data e.g. Mathletics leaderboards with the students without having to create a whole other document, I simply download the data and insert in a sheet that I can share on the class site.