I'm a Level One Google Educator!!!!

I had my doubts about whether or not I could achieve this.  The word "exam" always sends me into a sweaty panic but, at the same time, I continue to torture myself until completing what it is I set to achieve.

After missing Thursday's DFI due to illness, I decided Friday was going to be the day.  Vicki had always said it's hard to find a spare 3 hours and I knew the longer I left it, the harder it was going to be to motivate myself.  I took the approach of not psyching my brain into it, I just surprised it by sitting down and logging on.  And 3 hours later it was done and I passed and I was happy. Go me!

Week 9

Our last day of DFI today and I missed it!  Unfortunately illness has got the better of me this week and I just needed a bit of time out to keep the bugs at bay.  I was all set to go for the Google Exam. I have spent a bit of time this past week going over the exam checklist trying to remember how/when we covered certain things.  Google Classroom?!  Case and point.  Thank goodness for rewindable learning (and also google itself).  And I guess that brings me to "Ubiquitous" quite nicely... Challenge 1: Spelling it.  Challenge 2:  understanding its meaning.  After 9 weeks on this course, I can now honestly say I CAN spell it.  And I DO understand its meaning.  Hopefully it's in the exam!  Lol.

I think that when I started on this digital journey, my main aim was really to enhance the teaching and learning for my students.  Rewindable learning allows me to do this and it allows my students to access their learning anywhere, anytime using our class website.  I'm not a big believer in homework (having 3 kids of my own and many a tense moment at the dining room table after school contributed wholly to this) yet some parents don't share my belief, which is totally fine and understandable.  Which is where the beauty of a class site comes in.  At our recent parent/teacher interviews I was able to direct those homework hungry parents to our class site sharing that anything extra they want their child to be doing is all on here.  Go. For. Gold.  No extra worksheets, no extra time organising.  It's already there.  Yay!

In conclusion to this awesome PD - a huge thank you to Vicki and Makaore - it's been a great adventure and you two are legends who really know your stuff.  I'm so pleased I'll still be seeing you and you will still be there to help me Vicki!!!!

Good luck to everyone who sat the exam today - any tips would be greatly received.

It has been a pleasure meeting you all - keep up the great work on this digital journey!

Week 8

Week 8 of our DFI course and I am sad that it is coming to an end.  What a treat to have 9 whole days of Professional Development about a topic so relevant and exciting!  I think I will look back on this time very fondly and thankful to have been given this opportunity, not only to learn, but to also connect with other fabulous educators in our cluster.

After last weeks (deep breath) "experience", I made sure I came into Room 12 with a positive outlook.  I really enjoy starting each session with our WWW's, as it's a chance to reflect on what has been working - not only for ourselves, but also for others in our group.  Talking about these things also gives me a chance to remember things I may have forgotten I had done over the week - which is an easy thing to do when you squeeze in a million trillion things in a week.

Having a Hangout with Lenva  was fantastic as I feel as though I have only just touched on what Hapara is fully capable of, so this session really helped me to see how I can better utilise this in my classroom.  And I have!  I went away and on Monday my class had a huge "sorting session" to help tidy up random pieces of work that I thought had gone missing but were just floating around randomly in their drive.  Something small, but very significant for my current headspace of  'arghhhhhhhhhh!'

Explain Everything was a very exciting App for the ipad that we were introduced to.  After having a play on this, I feel this could be an excellent resource for my priority learners and I look forward to implementing a couple of activities using this next week.

An early finish for me today, as I'm heading straight from here to day 2 of parent/teacher interviews. I keep asking myself...'Are you really living if you aren't stressed and manic?' I'll let you know when/if I find the answer to this.

16th May 2019

Unbelievably, it's Thursday again!

Today we started our day by looking at empowering our kids.  What does empowered mean? "When it transfers the way we learn, offers us new, unchartered experiences and opportunities."  When I look  at HOW I can empower my learners, "think, create, share" is right there in bold, pretty colours reminding us all to keep doing just this!

I can't say I felt very empowered by my own learning today.  Very talk heavy and not enough doing.  Which meant my interest levels were not functioning at their highest unfortunately.  The topic was robotics and coding, which really didn't float my boat.  At all.  We had a go of Bee Bots and 3D pens and a coding app called "Scratch."  Scratch, I didn't enjoy, which then leads me to ask "would I use it in my classroom?"  I'm sure many of my students would enjoy this, so I will speak to my syndicate about their thoughts and go from here. 

I walk away with more questions than answers and less inspired than normal this week.

Week 6 of our DFI course today.  It's amazing to think how much we have been exposed to and learnt in such a short while.  Where I was at the  beginning of the year to where I am now, not only with my digital fluency, but also with my enthusiasm about teaching and learning - it really can't be measured.

Today we looked at creating forms.   I have used forms in the past but, like with anything, I used them a lot and then I didn't.  I will be making a point of using these again with my class as they really are a great assessment tool.

We also entered into the frightening and complicated world of Sheets which, before today, was less frightening and complicated as I  was incredibly naive about the power of the sheets document.  Thank goodness for rewindable learning.  There will definitely be some rewinding going on in my learning about this.  I currently use sheets for my planning, as I love the tabs you can move so you can see your current week right in front of you.  Using formulas I can see will be fantastic for seeing class trends with their learning and I look forward to having a play with this over the coming weeks.

We all completed a website challenge at the end of the day.  Dorothy had set us up with a slideshow with instructions and we had a 5 minute time limit to complete the task.  Historically, I don't perform well under test conditions, so with sweaty palms, the timer was set.  And I surprised myself!  My biggest fault that due to panic setting in was that I didn't read the instructions properly in the first round.  A good lesson for the upcoming exam. 

Another great day of learning.  Bring on next week!

Thursday, 2nd of May.

Today's main message for me (and a valuable reminder) was about making our teaching and learning visible.  Our planning, our processes,  our outcomes and our assessment.  We were asked to think about...
Is it visible to the learner/whanau/teacher/colleagues? I answered "YES" to most of these...so I must be doing some things right.  Win!
Something to remember...If you don't know where your learning is heading - it can be confusing.  Indeed!

We looked at others' sites.  Fantastic to have the time to do this as it's awesome to get some new ideas, but it also reinforces that I'm actually on the right track with my own site.  Some great food for thought and I'm looking forward to further my tinkering.

I put on my my "Things to do" list to put my class timetable onto my class site.  Great news!  I achieved this and I think this will be beneficial to my students, especially as reminders for upcoming events - I'm sure it will be helpful to parents also.

I have loved having the time to work on improving my site after being inspired by today's events.  I didn't finish, but that seems to be the common theme of a classroom teacher.  I live in hope.

DFI - Week 4

A big part of the day was looking at creating a website.  Although I already have my own class site, it was a fantastic chance to have a bit of a play without feeling the time pressures that comes with having a class and a family.  I learnt a few new tricks today (Google forms! How exciting!) and I feel inspired to organise my site a bit differently to make it more visually appealing (the "hook")  for my class and for me!) for Term 2.  Seeing some examples of what other educators are doing (multi modal learning) was awesome and has given me some great ideas for some playing over the holidays. Being able to access multiple texts on these pages are key for engagement and I'm looking forward to creating this on my own page.












I discovered a new extension today...colour picker to find the perfect matching colour/tone.  Will definitely use this.

Happy holidays everyone - I'm looking forward to the next 5 days of learning!

DFI, 28th March 2019

A Fantastic learning day!  I'm so excited by what I've taken from today and I will definitely be using some ideas to take back into the classroom.

A key message I took away from today's session was: Create! Motivating our learners to engage with the curriculum. Never such truer words spoken and it's something we can so easily forget when we have so many boxes to tick.  This is my focus from here and beyond.

Live streaming - Hmmmmmm...seems like we are a long way away from this at Waitohu School.  I really see its benefits, but not sure if it is for me/us...yet.

I learnt a new shortcut today.  Ctrl K - insert link.  I will use this ALOT!

I signed up for my own Youtube channel today!- What a great way to embed playlists of certain things to make it safe for our students to watch without them clicking on something they shouldn't. Vicki showed me how to embed a music playlist onto my class website, so my students will be very excited to see this on Monday morning! I'm really looking forward to embedding more amazing things - like my animation below!

DFI - Thursday, 21st March.

DAY 2

My brain was working hard today!

Today was another day full of great learning.  Not necessarily stuff I would use myself as it's hard to break organisational habits of 41 years, but I'm willing to make at least one change with how I organise my week.  Google calendar.!  Who knew?!  I didn't realise that information sheet we get each week at our administration meeting was readily available to view.  Google calendar is now bookmarked (but not in a folder...yet).  Google Keep looks like another great organisational tool.  Not really into lists, but good to know it's there in case I get the list making urge.  How do I work?  I tend to put everything that's on in my week on my weekly plan, so I feel like anything extra would just be doubling up and increasing my workload.  I might be wrong.

A couple of shortcuts I learnt today were ctrl shift t and ctrl w.  Both have proven their worth today, as the first one restores any tabs you may have closed that you now want back and the second one closes down the tabs you are no longer using. Life changing!

We were introduced to TOBY today.  What a star!  Toby is an extension which can organise your browsing into one folder that can then be shared with others in a link.  This will be very helpful when getting kids to research specific topics as you can monitor what they are seeing.  No random google searches!  Win!


Google hangouts.  I'm excited by this.  We take part in Chapter Chat which is a national primary school reading program focusing on a book a term. This term it is Wonder. Each week we have a series of activities to complete, based on the allocated chapters we are reading.  On Friday, we tweet and share what we have completed over the week and the kids get to comment on other kids work.  This term there are over 200 classrooms throughout NZ taking part.  I would like to contact one of these classrooms and hold a 'hangout' with my class, so they can share their learning and activities  from the week that was.  LEARN, CREATE, SHARE!

Today's Learning

Today I am continuing my digital journey.  Week one of my Digital Fluency Intensive program and it really is just that!  INTENSIVE! My brain is full.  Lots of great learning that I can take back to my classroom next week.  Things I am going to try next week:

- Voice to text for a couple of my Priority Learners in Writing.
- Comment and tag in other learners for a reading comprehension response.
- Reinforcing the need to initial their documents.

I've tidied up my folders and my planning into curriculum areas which will improve my workflow and ability to find things with ease.  I will continue to do this and also reinforce this with the children in my class.



Our group of digital learners.