Day Four: DFI

Connecting with Dorothy-Share

I really enjoyed listening to Dorothy today and learning all about Share. I agreed with the sharing explosion during lockdown. Our technology skills increased and everyone was sharing what they were doing online. We got the children in our hub to share their learning via the Kākano Hub Blog site. It was fantastic to see what they had been learning about and creating at home from our Learn, Create, Shares and Googlemeets.

I enjoyed commenting on the children’s blogs using the positive, thoughtful, helpful structure. We also included a question so the children would write another post back to us to answer it. Some children/adults commented on other children’s blog posts. 

I liked the quotes “connected learners share” and “sharing has been part of human nature since time began.” These quotes got me thinking of all the ways we share and how sharing online has evolved and exploded recently during Lockdown e.g via facebook, apps like tick tock etc. It made me also think about how we share in the classroom especially through our Learn, Create, Shares. Are we making the most of the sharing time and sharing activities in the classroom. Are they hooking the learner in?

I thought about how important purposeful and authentic audiences are. At the end of the term we are going to have a showcase about our Matariki learning for Project Based Learning. Our purpose and authentic audience relates back to our driving question: “How can we uplift and empower our Whānau to celebrate Matariki as part of our identity in the future?” Sharing in real time is very important, which will be happening for our PBL straight after all the learning done in the term. 

Dorothy also talked about the importance of feedback and feedforward. This made me think of my student who has received constant feedback/feedforward from me in her placement this term. I have also received feedback/feedforward from an observation in Structured Language last week. We also as a staff have been discussing this in regards to our Professional Teaching observations that are coming up. I’m happy to receive feedback, I reflect on my practice often and want to action any advice to develop as a teacher.

I really like the idea of changing from “I’m finished” which I hear often in the classroom to “I’m ready to share.” A different mindset to put emphasis on how important it is to share, learn from others, receive feedback/feedforward to reflect on and take action to be the best you can be. 

Google Forms

I really enjoyed making a Google Form, I have made one before. I learnt how to incorporate an image or video, change the theme and change the settings of the general form. I’m looking forward to making some in real life contexts at school.

Google My Maps

I haven’t been on Google My Maps before. I enjoyed experimenting and am starting to think of ways I could incorporate this into the classroom. I like the idea of seeing where the children have all been on holiday during term breaks for a start. 

Google Sheets 101

I have experience with Google Sheets for work, we use them for our Literacy and Maths groups and the childrens progressions for Maths and Literacy. I learnt some great tips like how to freeze and unfreeze a column, how to make basic calculations for sums and averages, how to automatically fill rows with things like days, months, translate into different languages, sort data from A to Z and make graphs from the data. I enjoyed entering data from our Kākano Hub blog posts to create different types of graphs. 

Added extras this week:

I learnt that Google Drawing is not always compatible with Blogger but I finally got my Matariki Google Drawing up on our Hub site/PBL: Matariki.

I put up my Creative Slide background with links to Storyline Online on our Hub site, Independent Reading.

I learnt to view the Hub site via the phone, tablet/ipad, chrome icon to see what the audience sees.

I finally found where to add a new playlist on my Youtube Channel through the studio which I couldn’t find.