Google Sites

Today takes the cake as far as learning and clarification of how the digital world can work for our kids. I feel a bit like I had a bit of an "ahah" moment.
We started as usual with the www and then had a focus on the third part of the Manaiakalani programme of "Share"-Tohatoha. Some take outs for me from today's session included that fact that sharing is not something new- we have been born to share. Some people don’t like to share and others do.  Human instinct is to share and throughout our life journey we tend to share to some degree or another bth the good and the bad.

2005 was a special year in story of humanity.  Not so much the year 2000 as we might have expected. 2005 was the year it changed and many of us missed it ; youtube, facebook, bebo etc became mainstream in 2005. Each one of these platforms talked about sharing.  Through the use of these platforms, among others, the digital world has turbo charged sharing.

In the past we used some different and more simple ways to share our learning. Some of these may have included taking your book to the principal for a sticker, newsletters, assembly etc. While many of these ways of sharing our learning still have merit- the fact remains that all of them are constrained by time, place and people etc. the digital world eliminated these constraints when it comes to sharing our learning.

GOOGLE SITES

The other day, Mark set up a google sight for our Hub - and I was in awe of how amazing it was that someone could so quickly create something that we will potentially use to guide our planning, teaching and assessing and a place where all of this learn, create, share will take place.  I was so impressed, until today, when I realised how easy it is to get started.  I have created two google sites today and I actually enjoyed doing them.  This is a must do for the weekend- to have a play.  By the way- thanks mark- I do appreciate you setting up our site still.  

Google sites are a great place to keep everything for the children- all their learning can be accessed in the one place and all our planning can be there too.  Multi modal sites are a great way of ensuring the learner is hooked into engaging activities. 

A couple of tips for me to remember are that you need to be careful with the header- keep it the same- you don't want the children having to scroll down as we need to pack a punch on the landing page so you put all the engaging bits in the first view.

If you follow your nose and use the drop downs to with a logical mindset- google sites seems to be pretty accessible to all and it looks like it my be my new favourite.  here is one I had a go at today.

Garden with Science

Google Maps

Today was day three of the Digital Fluency Intensive.  We have covered a lot today.  We started again with sharing what worked, what didn't work so well and what we needed help with.  This is always interesting to hear how each other's week has been.
We then had a "hangout" with Dorothy in Auckland.  Last week we learnt about "learn" and this week we were looking deeper into the "create" part of the thinking behind Manaiakalani. It was interesting to have it confirmed that creating is such a vital part of the learning journey for  children.  We are "learning through play" in our Hub and lots of Dorothy's presentation confirmed that what we are doing is valuable for the kids.  A quote that resonated with me is from John Dewey who said " Giving the students something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."
The next session for today was about Google Forms.  Here was a section where I was feeling comfortable as I have used these a few times lately for various reasons.  I learnt that we can embed photos into forms and that possibly the easiest way to send forms is by the link option. I learnt you can have several forms responses  and send the information to the same spreadsheet.  The three dots are located beside the green box with the white cross.
A very cool part of the day today was working with Google Maps. We learnt how to put information from a google spreadsheet to a google map. This would be very handy in the classroom. Without thinking about it too much I thought we could used in the junior school this at the beginning of the year to display where everyone is from or to look at where children have travelled to in the holidays. There are several more sophisticated ways this could be used up the school as well. One example of this could be studying where refugees come from or using Maps to look at an area of interest in the world eg places New Zealanders fought in World War 1.
Google sheets was another area covered today. Who knew what information you could gather from using Google sheets. I learnt a lot of new information about sheets. My favourite thing ( which probably seems quite insignificant in the big scheme of things) was clicking and dragging the curser at the bottom right and making a pattern or autofill ( eg the months of the year). Turning the data into a chart or a graph was also valuable information to learn. Learning to sort data is also something that we will use in the future. All in all - a very busy day but another great day of learning.
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Today we have been learning to make charts from google sheets and then embedding them into my blog. This even involved some rearranging of the coding.  This information came directly from a blog of a child so this will be helpful in the future. 

DFI- DAY TWO

DFI DAY TWO

Google Keep

Google Keep is for  note-taking. Great for shopping lists, reminders.  A useful feature of Google keep is being able to photograph some text and then Keep will type it out for you.  You can organise your notes and colour code everything. I liked the idea of being able to collaborate with others and make changes to things like shopping lists so that others can contribute.  I think the reminder feature will also be helpful.

Calendar

I have been a bit reluctant to use the goggle calendar but now I feel more confident to set up events and invite people to things.  I also found it helpful to know you can send a link.  There are some very handy shortcuts to know:

y - year

a-agenda

d- day

w-week

c-create

t-time

g-date

n-next day, next month or year

q-create a new Event for that day.

G Mail

I am so excited because I now know how to get the predictive text ( smart compose) to appear and not disappear. You do this by using the tab button. I have also learnt tips for tidying up my Gmail.  The snooze and schedule button is also helpful to delay the sending and receiving of an email. There are so many clever tips we can use to make life easier

Hangouts

Today was the first time I have officially been in a google hangout.  I participated, set up a google hangout.  We had a hangout with Dorothy which was interesting.  My takeout from this was that “the affordances of technology mean that every child, every day , should learn in engaging ways that were simply not possible in the past. “

Other Useful Tips

Other useful things I met today included the WWW approach- what worked well? What didn’t work and what do you need help with?  A concise and easy way to assess and reflect.

Toby Mini and One Tab

This is a way of having less tabs open while still having easy access to everything- without the big mess on the tab bar!