Session Four: Dealing with Data

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? 

Dorothy told us all about the SHARE component of Learn Create Share.  We are born to share, it's an instinct or compulsion.  We share - food, fishing stories, successes, failures, wins, joys, loss, tears, ideas, friends, achievements, vision, goals...

The invention of social media in 2005 allowed sharing and communication to become more accessible.  Things went viral - Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, etc.

This was a great quote from Dorothy:

There is a magnetic attraction for our children to have an audience to share and this was then able to be used in education.  Before sharing had been constrained by time, place, people, etc.  Pre 2005 our audience was one another, the class, the school, and the local community.  Sharing in the digital age adds the ability to share globally.

Pre 2005 the audience was a compulsory audience.  After social media the audience became authentic - this is how we can share as connected learners.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional? 

A great Hapara hot tip from Gerhard on dragging a child to the top of the list so you can find them easily and monitor them.  In my team we use the group function to organise our 79 students.

The session on MyMaps was great - I can see it will be really helpful for things like measuring our cross country course around our grounds.  It would also be good to use at the start of the year as part of our Pepeha - where are you from unit.

Just this week I have learnt how to freeze columns and rows on spreadsheets, which has been awesome.  I have taught myself most of my spreadsheet skills so to learn some short cuts is helpful.  We use spreadsheets a lot as we use them for our planning templates, keeping track of our school wide PB4L reward tickets, and obviously assessment data.  Lots of useful hints and tips learnt with Gerhard - protecting sheets, getting the sparklines, cropping sheets, inserting check boxes, splitting names, and using a task tracker.  I love the idea of using a task tracker to track student blog posts or comments made on others blogs where they insert the hyperlink to the post or comment that they made.  I also will try the pixel art using spreadsheets to create art - the kids will love it, especially my gaming boys!

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

I have been using Google Forms in my programme during the Covid lockdown with a poem and comprehension activity.  Venessa has now shown me how to add the answer key and assign points for correct answers.  This will be a great time saver as previously I had to do that on the spreadsheet each time a child submitted their answers.  This one of the activities the students asked if they could continue to do now that we are back at school.

Here is the Google Form which I adapted today to make into a quiz with answer key and scoring.  Feel free to have a go at it!

Looking forward to trying the pixel art using Google spreadsheets to create art - the kids will love it, especially my gaming boys!

I love the notion of taking a screenshot of each student's blog overview stats for them to see.  This would be great at the moment after lockdown as the number of blog posts generally increased (for the majority of students.). Great ideas for how to do this and templates on these two links - a student and a teacher.  This would be great to do with our Year 6 students at the beginning of the school year as part of our Statistics Maths unit as they will have 2 full years of having their own blog and hopefully so good data on them.

I chose one of my Year 6 students and looked at their blog posts over the last 3 years.  Amazing to see the difference in lockdown.  This was a student who absolutely loved home learning, averaging 3 blog posts per day.




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

I will use lots of the spreadsheet tips in my role as Club Secretary for the local rugby club - for our database and registrations.

Session Three: Media

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Dorothy led us through a session on the Create aspect of Learn Create Share. This was great to go over just as we have come out of the Covid-19 lockdown as both our learners and many adults showed so much creativity. Whether it was family TikTok videos, school staff YouTube videos or students videoing themselves doing science experiences for their home learning. The digital aspect was essential to capture all the "Create" and it allowed it to be shared with whanau who were not in our bubbles.

The quote from the Life Long Kindergarten group website was very important to keep in the front of our mind. Their ultimate goal is - "a world full of playfully creative people, who are constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities." Surely, this must be our goal as educators!

Something else that stuck with me was the quote from Woolf Fisher related to the tasks provided by teachers whose students are showing accelerated learning - "The tasks were designed to generate thinking and allowed for student collaboration and choice in learning and creating."

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Gerhard's session on YouTube was really beneficial for me. I already had a YouTube channel with about 25 videos I have created over the past 7 years. So now I have tweaked all the settings. I was very surprised to see that I have 38 subscribers - who knew!? Now I know how to create playlists, I have created 2 so far - one for writing prompts (I like to use animated short videos for writing prompts) and one for our hub singing (songs with lyrics).

Interesting reflection, is now that I am in a digital class again I haven't used YouTube yet this year to do any "Create" - so that is a short term goal. This might coincide nicely with us wanting to record our hub assemblies this term (rather than a whole school assembly), as we could use YouTube live streaming and post it later on. I like the fact it would be going straight on to YouTube rather than me having to get it from my phone/camera onto my Drive and then onto our blogs.

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

I use Google Drawings quite a lot to make things for our learning site. Even though I am pretty familiar with it I got lots of little tips from Vicki's session. I usually download as a jpeg to put on blogs or sites rather than embedding, so I can try this now. I like the tips about changing the shape of an image and replacing an image. I also did not realise that if I double clicked in a shape I could type text, I usually add a text box and then group the two together. Great time saver!

My Getting Creative session with Venessa on Pick-a-Path stories was great. I am really looking forward to teaching my students how to do this. In my create time I quickly created a little quiz about contractions (which I will embed below). I am looking forward to seeing how creative my Writing group students can be with pick-a-path stories.

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

If I happen to go to school (out of school hours) I like to listen to music while I work so I will be able to create my own playlist of songs to listen to rather than listen to already created playlists from others.

I found the Deep Dive that Kent ran informative, although fast paced. In my live outside of school I am involved with the local rugby club and using live streaming is something we have talked about as a committee but not get ventured into. I am also a passionate sports/action photographer, and I would love to have a drone, and a gimble for that matter too.


This is my About Me that I created when we looked at Google Draw.

Session Two: Workflow

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today we began by looking at the pedagogy underpining Manaiakalani - Learn Create Share, with our focus today being Learn. Learn is defined as accessing and engaging with existing knowledge.
Dorothy talked about:
Recognise
Amplify
Turbocharge
Effective Practice (in the digital world for our learners)
I really liked the phrase in her slideshow Great Teaching + Digital Affordances = Acceleration

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Much of today's content (Google Meets, Gmail, Google Calendar) I felt pretty confident with already. I have very very fortunate to have had some great professional development in the past and some great Manaiaklani facilitators (Mark Maddren and Kelsey Morgan) at my school making sure that we are all up to date.

I found the session that Dorothy ran on Google Keep as I had only really had some sandpit time with this before and haven't really used it yet. I particularly like the grab image text function. That will certainly change now.

One of my colleagues who was in the Term 1 DFI cohort had already shared Tobi Tab Manager with my team, and although I set it up at the time, I haven't got in a regular habit of using it.

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

I am already enjoying using the Chrome Extension Nod - where the students can raise their hand, or give a thumbs up in the Google Meet. I have had this pushed out to all our students chromebooks late last week. I am interested to look into the Dualless Chrome Extension, where you can see your grid view while presenting. Usually I use a split screen so that I can see the students.

Something that has become evident during our Covid online learning is that we need to spend some time with our students focusing on blogging - making a quality blog post, commenting on others' blogs and replying to comments people make on their blog posts.

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

Love the notion of using Google Keep for shopping lists and sharing it with the other people in my household so they can add to the list. Also love the fact that you always have the list with you - I have lost count on how many times I get the the supermarket only to realise I have forgotten my list.

Loved the little timesaver that Gerhard shared - when you enter Google document names into the omi bar and you can open them without having to search for them via your Drive.

Today's Create Task:

We needed to choose a student blog post to use for our task. Venessa then put myself, Ravina and Gemma into a small group. We created a Google Meet on our Google Calendar and invited the others in our group. When then held our Google Meet one at a time to discuss the student blog we had chosen. We needed to present our screen to the others in the meet and record it.

When discussing the student blog we focused on these 3 questions:

1. What was the teaching design behind this post? (Deliberate act of teaching)
2. What was the learner's response? (Post content)
3. Who responded to the post and how did it support the learning experience or contribute more to the learning of the child?

I chose Joshua's blog post about making a smoothie - http://tpsjoshuan.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-josh-smoothie.html

During our Covid online teaching I am holding 3 Google Meets per day, so the Google Calendar and Google Meet aspects were very familiar to me now. We record each Google Meet and post on our learning site for rewindable learning for our students to access. I just hate my facial expressions I have on the thumbnail of each posted video!

Here is my recorded Google Meet.

Session One: Core Business

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

I have been very fortunate to have been on the Manaiakalani journey for about 5-6 years so it was good to refresh my knowledge and understanding around the history of Manaiakalani and reflect on how far we have all come since the beginning (no matter at what stage you became involved). When I reflect on what we were doing at my school 5-6 years ago when we began with 2 digital (single cell) classes with 1 to 1 devices and look at where we are now in a brand new purpose built modern learning space, it is mind blowing to see our growth as a school and as individual teachers (with amazing growth mindsets).

We have been perfectly equiped for online learning in the nationwide lockdown as what we do on site is pretty much the same as what we are doing from home. When I talk to many of my friends who are teaching at other schools (in high decile areas) what we are able to offer due to our involvement with Manaiakalani is phenomenal. Our students are benefiting hugely and we are able to offer support to staff to ensure our online learning is successful for all.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Although much of the content was revision for me personally it was good to learn a few new tips and skills today. The Deep Dive session that Dorothy facilitated on Google Groups was new learning for me and I have already been working on it in our breaks today. I also gained some new tips on organising my Drive.

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

I love the tip from Dorothy on getting the students to name their document with their initials before the document name so that when I have lots of tabs open you can easily see whose document each one is.

Another tip I will teach my students is to paste without formatting. This will be very helpful when they are copying and pasting their writing from their Google Document template onto their blog and it ends up going right across their screen (and I need to fix it). This will save me a lot of time!

I will also teach my students to use the Voice Typing tool - for both writing and for reading fluency. I didn't know until today that there was an English - New Zealand voice option.

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

I am the Club Secretary for our local rugby club. One time saver I have learnt today is that I am going to create Google Groups for sending out emails to the whole committee group and executive committee group. This will be a great time saver. Although I use Google Drive for meeting agenda and minutes, I had never really thought about what aspects of Google that I use at school could be transferred to use in my role as Club Secretary. I am still working on encouraging the other committee members to up skill themselves. I have been very impressed with our ability to move with the times and have online meetings during the lockdown via Skype and Zoom.

Something I created today on a Google Document. I want to mention that Google Documents would not be my first choice for creating something like a poster, newsletter, infographic or CV. I would prefer to use Google Drawing, Google Slides, Google Sites or Canva. (Also impossible to share Google Documents on a blog post unless by screenshot.)

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