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.