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.