DFI Session 1

Today I was fortunate to be able to attend the first of 9 sessions on Digital Fluency at St Francis of Assisi school.

We all shared our introductions at the start of the day. This was my slide:

What did I learn that increased my understanding of

Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The pedagogy is ‘Learn, Create, Share’ 

Teaching and learning is essential for learning, Reflection by learners is an important part of this pedagogy. This pedagogy is a way to grow learner agency and achievement. 

I also discovered that there is little point in creating checklists of I.C.T mastery skills - due to the fact that in an ever changing world these checklists can become quickly out of data. The best thing we can do as educators is to equip our students with a toolkit of skills to enable

What did I learn that could improve my confidence,

capability or workflow as a professional?

I was amazed with the numerous short-cuts- I knew a few but I have learnt a whole lot more now.
I already organise my drive into folders. I am going to put all my reflections on blogger - because it is so
much more interactive and user friendly then Google Sites.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

I have learnt some great tips and strategies that I can take back to try with my learners. For example- the use of voice typing which I have tried but ceased because students spoke too fast which caused the sentence to jumble.

Photos; Teach students to use photos that have no backgrounds by using - lion.bg

Also by using remove.bg to remove the background of your camera photos.

Google Docs: The importance of teaching students how to create a doc, label it. Put a correct label on it by simply typing your initials and the description. Teaching students how to use the explore tool. 

Omnibox: The address / URL bar is now known as the Omnibox.

Other things that I learnt today at the first course was how to organise groups within Google. All groups within Google are set out like mail. Google.com or groups dot google.com or drive. Google. Com. Setting up a group like groups. Google.com can be very powerful for organising messages in one place and making it easy for everyone to access.

One thing that I take from today's course is the importance of sharing just regular tips and things to do using a device. This can be also shared with other staff members. I plan on continuing to share my newly found knowledge with my colleagues. Learning that the address URL bar is now known as the only box for me was my light bulb moment. the only box is so powerful for students. just think when they need to check a calculation all they need to do is type into the omnibox, 500 x 50 and Google will calculate the answer.

I plan on using the omnibox with my students for Simple tasks like typing in the Maori word for car or the Maori word for horse and letting them discover what the answer is. True self directed learning.

Another interesting thing I learnt was that the control key when + by the number of the tab opened will take you immediately to that tab. We all usually have so many tabs open as educators and this is a fast yet simple way of quickly finding the tab that you need to use.

Google Docs

When teaching students how to open a new doc it is important to teach them how to save their work so it can be easily found full stop by putting their initials followed by a description in the label, students have just saved their work easily.

Underlining in the Google Docs:  I have always usually taught children to underline titles. I learnt today that this is not good digital practice because an underlined title makes people think it is a hyperlink and as a result they will be trying to click on it,  therefore the best thing we can do is teach our students to make headings instead.

Once you have a piece of text you can make headings for each paragraph and then easily turn the headings into a table of contents. I wish I had known this when I wrote all those essays at university.Simply by using the explore tool within  docs you can easily search for research and Google will make a proper citation in your document.

One thing I will try  at school is to teach carefully voice typing to my students. I would like my students to practice their reading using voice typing and see how many words are correctly pronounced with their voice- we could even have a daily or weekly competition.

Another learning moment for me was we should all remember that...

Perfect practise makes perfect NOT practise makes perfect. So it is important to practise your practise.

Doc version history allows teachers to see original drafts even though the final copy may be entirely different.

When using Voice typing use a paper cup held to the microphone to help eliminate any background noise. Great idea which I plan on trying!

Learnt Short-Cuts:

Cntrl alt 1 for headings

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or work flow in my personal life?

I can see Voice typing being really useful in my digital world. Tonight I sat down with my mother

who is not a typer and showed her - well she was so amazed! What a wonderful function!

What am I going to do back at Belfast School?

Both Emily and I will share some of the useful tips during "Slam dunk" time each week.

I also think that a 10 minute slot could be put aside after each staff meeting to write a quick reflection for teacher's reflective blogs.

NOTE: Google Voice Typing has typed this for me!

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