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.