Sharing with our stakeholders

Yesterday was the annual Kootuitui stakeholders event, an opportunity to bring together our fantastic sponsors and partners and show off what has been happening in our three strands of Education, Health and Homes (Whaanau). I had the privilege of working with a group of year 6 learners from Papakura Central School to put together a presentation of how they use their chromebooks to Learn, Create and Share. 

Each of the students had their own idea about what they wanted to talk about, and how they would share their knowledge. Through a bit of planning and conversation, we managed to refine everyone's ideas so they could achieve maximum impact in minimum time. We had a tight window of less than a week to be organised, and no more than 15 minutes total time. At our first meeting, we made a shared slide deck, where each person could take one slide to plan and develop their contribution. Because I was working in different schools, and the students had busy timetables, we used the comments function to communicate and keep track of progress. We spent an hour on Tuesday afternoon bringing everything together and making sure all of the bits joined up to make a coherent presentation. 

In the slide deck below, you can see what the students came up with. Arpit shared a screencast of accessing learning through his class site and the other apps and sites he uses, he chose to speak to the audience while the video was playing. Tara used a google form to ask her classmates how they use their chromebooks to learn, create and share and presented their responses as word clouds. Sam shared a blog post about a piece of work she had done, giving a commentary about how she had made it. Emily created an animation about how to write a quality blog comment, and we used screencastify to make it into a video (small Mrs Cameron cameo, listen out for it). I think I will include this in my cybersmart facilitation.

The students got a hugely positive response from the audience, with lots of people making the effort to come and speak to them afterwards. They were rewarded handsomely for their efforts with second, third and fourth helpings from the refreshments table. For me, it was a fantastic experience to work with learners who were confident and creative users of their chromebooks, as much of my work to date has been with students who are starting out on their cybersmart journey. Thanks to Keith and the team at Papakura Central School for hosting us, and for developing these awesome rangatahi.

Using Google Forms as a writing frame - Take 2

Following on from my previous post about using Google Forms to help compile profiles for new bloggers, I have a few updates to share.

I wasn't satisfied with using an add on that only had a limited trial period, and thanks to my mate Vicki, I have another tool called Autocrat that does the job for free. Yay! To get Autocrat, you need to use the add ons menu in Google Sheets. Helpful tip if you're going to use this add on is to make sure your spreadsheet settings are accurate: File > Spreadsheet Settings > General.

Fiona also suggested that it might be helpful to record a demonstration of the merging process, so I have done that too. Please let me know how you get on with this, if you use it. I would also be interested to know of any other classroom uses you can think of for this kind of 'form + template + merge = save admin time' idea.

Using Google Forms as a writing frame.

Our schools seem to be growing rapidly, which sometimes involves a few creative rooming solutions. This has meant that a few of the classes I facilitate in are now year 2, 3, 4 classes where some students need a lot of scaffolding to use and write on their chromebooks. With this in mind, I knew that I needed to do something to make creating a blog profile accessible to all learners. I was thinking about the literacy strategy of writing frames, that help students with the structure of writing. I wanted to try using a google form to collect personal information that students wanted to share in their profile, and then using mail merge to complete the profile. I put together this form, that asked students some questions and allows them to upload a profile photo. I then wrote up this simple writing frame, and used an add on called smartsheet merge to complete the mail merge, as this is something that is not available in docs (yet). 

   

Overall, I was pretty happy with the result as every student was able to share information about themselves and it was quick and easy for me/their teacher to transfer the information to individual student blogs. There are a few things that could be problematic however, as smartsheet is available for free on a trial basis, but then it's a paid subscription. Another thing is that the quality of pictures that students take with the camera on their chromebooks is pretty average, so they might need a redo. 

Any suggestions for other programs or add ons that could do something similar for free?

Reflecting on 9 weeks of DFI

When something is unfamiliar, there is a scale effect - things seem bigger, harder, scarier when we have never done them before. So it was for this course, the first journey to Manaiakalani HQ felt like a looooong way to go on a Friday morning. Now that the roads, faces and format are familiar the scale seems normal, the journey seems shorter and the course has passed very quickly.

In our WWW this morning, I said that the name, 'Digital Fluency Intensive' is an undersell of what this course involves. It is far more. We are all familiar with the time poverty experienced by teachers; one of the effects of this is that 'new' resources, ideas and practices are not able to be capitalised on or are understood at a superficial level. Dorothy reiterated her stance that the devices are not JUST a tool. I would add to that, Kootuitui, as a Manaiakalani outreach, is not JUST devices. The quality of teaching is crucial to our learners' success and the learning needs to be at the centre of decision making. Yes, we can increase engagement with digital devices, yes we can increase engagement with creative 'doing' but if this engagement isn't leveraged for learning, we are not making the difference our learners deserve.

Most of the day was dedicated to future thinking, facilitated with fantastic skill by Zoe and Vivian from OMG Tech. My thinking was really challenged, and there is a lot of good stuff percolating in my brain that I will make sense of over the weekend. Sometimes big ideas need to float around for a while before they become clear. More to follow...

The bigger picture of an exam

Today was exam day, the culmination of our learning over the last few months of DFI. Murphy's law would have it that this is the week that I'm stuck at home with a cold and had to miss the exam... except that I didn't. I made my own little DFI at home and did the exam here. Note the extension cord and multi-box for authenticity 😉.

My virtual DFI set up

I had been feeling a bit apprehensive about doing the exam, thinking it would be much more demanding than the level 1 exam, but in truth it wasn't a huge step up. Some of the tasks were more involved, but I think the practice opportunities that we have had through the deep dives and sandpit time were really good preparation. Those who have done the level 1 exam today should definitely challenge themselves to take this next step and consolidate the learning we have done together. Go on, be brave!

The thing that was demonstrated for me today wasn't necessarily showing off my techy skills, but putting the Manaiakalani kaupapa into action. I was able to participate, even when things didn't go according to plan. Even though I was sitting by myself in my kitchen, I knew that there was a roomful of other people who were sharing the same experience (Thanks Dorothy for the Viber photos!)

Yay, the exam is finished!

Congratulations to all of my colleagues who have taken the time and the risk to improve their digital fluency. Your students are lucky to have people like you, who believe they are worth it. Looking forward to catching up with everyone for shared lunch and OMG tech next week.

Digging into Devices

I love the feeling of being introduced to something that I can immediately see will have a positive impact for me learners. That 'something' for me today is the Manaiakalani blog app. I have been feeling a little apprehensive about introducing students to blogging where there is a huge desire to share their learning with the world, but the technical skills and understanding are still at their early stages of development. This app features a much simpler user interface and gives students immediate access to the drive in order to share their DLOs.

One of the things I have been pondering, as I have been planning for facilitation, is how to differentiate my instruction and support learners to take greater autonomy in their learning. This is a great scaffold to ensure that the learning will be shared with the world while it is fresh and the enthusiasm is high. As students gain digital fluency, they can step up to the full blogger app. I plan to use this in the coming week - results & reflections to follow!

Connected Learners Share

This morning's session looked at 'Connected' from the Manaiakalani kaupapa. The power of connectedness is something that we probably take for granted in this day and age, until we find ourselves out of range or in a power cut. Thinking beyond the wifi zone though, connectedness is hugely important for our wellbeing as individuals, communities, and society.

Listening to Dorothy this morning, I was reminded of the idea of social capital, a concept that spans the fields of economics and sociology. By fostering connections for our young people, we increase their social networks and broaden their fields of opportunity. My hope is that the digital connections gained in class lead to human connections through life. 

Looking at other class sites, what's working, what's not. My wondering is - are we too quick to abandon text? I know that I am privileged to be a competent user and producer of text, but the idea of minimising the amount of text on our sites to make it 'more engaging' kind of pains me! I understand age appropriateness, but perhaps rather than avoiding text, we need to be developing digital texts, i.e. sites that follow similar conventions to those we teach our students to read, and then explicitly teaching those conventions through the sites. 

Another thought that occurred to me as we were evaluating class sites was the lack of student generated content on the sites. I understand that this is often found in the class and individual blog, but if I was a parent, that would be what I would want to see first. I thought it was neat that some of the sites had a specific page for whānau who were visiting the site to explain how it worked and convey the information specific to them.

Manaiakalani Kaupapa - Visible

Visible learning - can you see it? Visibility allows family, near and far to be involved in their children's learning. It also means that the students doesn't have to play the game of 'guess what's in the teacher's head'. One of the key ways we can make our learning visible is through our use of sites. The 'new' Google sites is much more user friendly, and can be a great way of creating multimodal learning experiences that learners can navigate in their own time, in their own way.

We were shown some great examples of multimodal learning and then challenged to create our own. The idea of myself as the default in planning was something I hadn't explicitly considered before - it was quite interesting. I had a play with using an image I created in Google Drawings as the base of the learning menu, with various aspects of the image containing hyperlinks to learning experiences. Obviously today was about thinking about the presentation of the learning 'window dressing' rather than the actual content of the activities - you may notice a mismatch between the age level the image is pitched at and the content of the links!

I added a feedback function at the bottom of the page to make the site a bit more interactive. As the new sites doesn't have a comment function, this is a bit of a workaround, but I think could be quite useful and reasonable simple. Click on the image below to visit the 'sandpit site' I was playing with today.

I was reasonably confident using sites coming into today, but it was nice to have some time to play, and to think about the way we design learning to cater for a range of needs, preferences and skill levels. My next step is to play more with coding script, as I really would quite like to push what I can do in that area.

Digging into data with blogger & sheets

Today's theme has been dealing with data. Blogger and sheets are great tools to investigate what might be happening with our students. Blogger collects data about the number and frequency of posts, the number and origin of views and comments, even the type of device a post was viewed from and the browser that directed the traffic. If students are using labels effectively, these can also be useful to dig into. 

I have learned how to use sheets through a process of trial and error, googling, frustration and eventual progress. If I have seen someone else do something with sheets that I want to do, I generally find out a way to do it. The cool thing about coming to something link the DFI is that I find out the things that I didn't know that I didn't know about. I made this chart using the 'Explore' tool in Google Sheets. It is amazing to me how much spreadsheet software has improved over time, it really has become way more intuitive. What I like about the 'Explore' tool is that it places the emphasis back on the 'so what' of the data by allowing users to ask questions, picking out correlations in data and automatically generating charts that might be useful. 

I wanted to have a look at the blog data for those students who had been top bloggers in the SLJ 2017-18, to see if their strong summer blogging had been maintained throughout the following year. What I saw was that the students who were the most frequent posters over the SLJ also posted regularly throughout the year. Some of the students who participated in SLJ look to have left their Kootuitui school, or stopped blogging early in the year. Something that I have taken from this exercise is the importance of teachers incorporating blogging as an everyday activity in the classroom.

As I was working on this, there were all sorts of other questions coming into my mind, and possible applications for blog data. How could would it be to have a blogathon? Is there a way that we could get people to sponsor us for the number of posts we make, or the words we write? It could be great for competition between classes, clusters etc.

Tōku pepeha

Creating a digital pepeha was quite a fun activity, but it brought into focus the importance of language and culture in shaping our world view. The way a pepeha is constructed demonstrated the idea that we are all connected to our physical environment, and that wherever we go, our tūpuna are with us. As a first generation New Zealander, this has been difficult for me to connect with, at times, as my experience of growing up in many different places, with only my parents and my siblings as family, has not aligned with this. I think the 'western' perspective is also more individualistic and focused on the present day (even the future) with our attitude to the world around us often being one of ownership, development and wealth creation, rather than one of kaitiakitanga.

Connecting with others is probably one of the most rewarding aspects of a career in education, and engaging in an activity that allows someone to see the world from another perspective is so valuable in forming authentic connections. 

Live streaming to YouTube

Kent came in this morning to share his knowledge and experience with live streaming. Although much of it went over my head, I can see how this would be an incredible tool for community engagement, with community being defined in its broadest sense.

This also built on the thoughts I had during our WWW session this morning, about how Hangouts could be great for connecting with Whānau to share in collaborative goal setting, celebrating successes etc. 

Capturing our thinking by recording a hangout

This afternoon we did some real growth mindset learning, as we practised using quicktime and google hangouts to capture our discussion about a piece of work. In our group of 3, one person was the screen recorder (Janish), one person was the conversation MC (Susan) and one was the technical troubleshooter (moi).

On the surface level, the activity was to discuss a student's blog post from the 2017-18 Summer Learning Journey, to tease out the teaching and learning that were visible. We had a rich conversation about what we thought was the learning intention, how the student's post demonstrated the learning and how the comments had supported and extended the learner. We thought we had captured this rich discussion with this screen recording:

As you will quickly realise, we caught nothing with out first screen recording. We were upset that our conversation had been lost, but keen to figure out what gone wrong. We then went back through the process so that we would be able to do a better job next time. Our second recording captures sound and the blog we were looking at. Unfortunately our first conversation is not rewindable though!

Reflecting on this experience, I can see how the technology will enrich and enhance the learning. My worry is that when the focus was on learning, but we were experimenting with the technology, we were unsuccessful with using the technology. When we were focused on the technology, we were less focused on the learning task. This reinforces to me the need to build experience loops into learning programmes, and the importance of teachers practising the skills that were taught during facilitation so that students are focused on deep learning.

Preserving Sanity with Google Keep

This morning's 'deep dive' was a Google Keep session. I have used Evernote for years, but have only just started using Keep. Some of the highlights for me are:

• accessibility from all devices
• ability to jump between two accounts on mobile (work & home)
• taking pictures then converting to text
• voice memos
• collaboration on notes
• notifications on notes
• integration with Gmail

What would be ideal is notification if collaborators have added to notes, hopefully this will come in the future.

Google docs as a creation tool

Our challenge this afternoon was to create a poster/infographic using docs. 

I failed

Miserably!

Although I could see the thinking behind showing off some of the untapped potential of docs, I got super frustrated with the limitations of not being able to layer content, and started trying to 'cheat' by doing work in google drawings that I could input... which I guess kind of defeats the purpose...

So I gave up. 

It's the end of day 1 of the DFI, I have a lot of ideas to percolate between now and next Friday, and I'm looking forward to reading through everyone else's posts to get the different perspectives.

Google Docs 101

Investing in effective routines at the beginning of the year doesn't end with lining up, naming stationery and ruling red lines down the centre of their 1E5 books. Setting up effective digital routines will reap similar rewards in terms of managing the learning environment.

Some things to remember:

Rather than a simple copy and paste, adding the shift key into the mix will remove any underlying formatting from the source 

 

Using formatting styles will allow easier navigation e.g through table of contents or document outline. Make links powerful by focusing on particular sections of a document when sharing. This can also make student work more manageable. Why have a new doc every day for each learning activity? Using heading styles for Docs can allow new work to be added every day, without having docs all over the show.

 

Voice typing can be used for a number of classroom applications, and can overcome some of the pain points in student work flows.

Workflow with Chrome & Drive

Stand out for me from this session was Shift+Z which allows a user to add to a folder, within drive and from shared with me. This could be a great strategy for teachers who struggle with sharing permissions for their class site, as adding items to the 'class site' folder will adjust the sharing settings. It could be quite a shift for some of us to move our default from private to 'anyone with the link can view'. I see this as a digital version of 'deprivatising our practice.'

Google Groups

Communication is so important for getting things done, and keeping everyone happy and feeling included. Creating a Google group allows everyone to stay in the loop - essentially an automatic reply all. Group members can adjust their settings to avoid 'spam syndrome'. Really good for sharing settings and keeping everything seamless.

I want to set up a group for my lead teachers, and think that it could be helpful to create a forum for teachers in 1:1 classes. First I need to get admin settings changed to allow Google groups for business.

A question I am left with is, how do we make sure that we are communicating effectively and efficiently? Are there rules of thumb about when we have a 1:1 private communication and when we need everyone to know? Where is the balance between inclusion and overload?

Learn, Create, Share

By using digital technologies to share learning, we give our tauira a forum to have their voices heard. This is especially important in communities that may be overlooked due to multiple disadvantages.

In 2005, web 2.0 launched, allowing connection and creation. 

The device is the pencil, not the book. If the device isn't the book then where is it? In the cloud. This allows the learning to be ubiquitous. This learning becomes visible using sites.

Deliberate acts of teaching - this is at the heart of the kaupapa. It's about the learning, not the technology

Manaiakalani Origins

Google Certification

Today I sat at my computer for a few hours and worked my way through the Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam. I was a little nervous beforehand, not having sat an 'exam' for quite some time, let alone one that was entirely dependent on the internet working. What I realised, as I completed the tasks, was that I was gaining recognition for stuff that I have been doing for years, that my colleagues have been doing for years, and that are so well integrated into the way we work that we hardly notice them anymore. In saying that, I did pick up a few new tips and tricks, and I had the opportunity to 'zoom out' and look at the whole picture of how GAFE supports teaching and learning. 

If you're keen to learn a few new skills, or get recognition for the ones you have, head over to the Google Teacher Centre and have a go! Leave me a comment if you're keen for the challenge 😃