Three Years on - 2023 PLD

A great day as our first day at College for 2023. A new focus and coordinated approach to PLD here - and a focus for me emerging around continuing my digital fluency as a way of enhancing my teaching in 9SST and 10MAT. Yesterday we had a Manaiakalani Day in Taipa and I heard again about using Mapos, Earth and My Maps in class - great potential for my SST teaching. I had a conversation with Kerry today as a first step towards engaging with her help to get these tools going in class.

The end of the DFI has come around fast - started with three face-to-face meetings and then we were all in lockdown and this group continued online.  It's been an excellent course, supported by the daily immersion in digital technologies while teaching, meeting, socializing, shopping - all online.
I think we have a great opportunity to re-invent schooling for our secondary students.  Many have thrived online.  They have experienced access to resources, teacher feedback, and choice over their work time that is not always available on site at school.  There are others who need face-to-face guidance and perhaps less time seated in a classroom.  My future hope is see a mix of online learning, seminars, work-experience, mentoring and personalised guidance with the College as a hub of learning and development for our young people, not simply corridors of classrooms, bells, reluctant attendees and disengaged learners.

Today we sat the Level 1 Exam, and I passed so that is a bonus to finish an excellent nine days of learning with wonderful, patient facilitators and focused, generous classmates.  Thank you all!

.......   oh well, my "Scratch" was a fail!  I didn't embed the one I made - live and learn.   I had my cat jumping down, meowing, getting bigger and then jumping back to where she started - it was awesome!

Day 8:  DFI online.  The day started with a focus on Empowerment - the way our digital technologies empower students and teachers to learn and communicate.  Dorothy highlighted the low-decile community where Manaiakalani first began.  I teach in a disadvantaged community in the Far North and in recent days we have pushed for our students and families to get the same benefits as other schools from the MOE's provision of devices.  Our families have previously worked very hard to provide their students with a device, and it's great to know they can be relived of that financial burden - equity of access is vital.  Once the device and connectivity is provided our students have the same access to ideas and learning as any student in NZ, or the world.

A quick overview of potential and existing new technologies from Gerhard followed.   Like him I often refer back to the Jetsons as I see and use the communications technology we have at our finger-tips today - especially face-time and other video-call tools we now have and rely on while we are all in lock-down.  ( I come by the Jetsons reference more readily perhaps, having been a TV-watcher in the 60s.)  The moral challenges of choosing who should die when a self-drive car malfunctions were troubling.

Kerry introduced and discussed the new Digital Technologies curriculum, an area that I am not familiar with.  I was able to view some of the resources that are in place to help us teachers understand the concepts of computational thinking. 

And in the "create" part of the day, I produced by first "Scratch" project - see below - I love cats!

Oh - and I registered for the Google exam next week - certainly not feeling very confident about that!

Day 7!  A great day at DFI again - focusing on Devices today.  Great to see again a little of the history of Manaiakalani, and the progression that brought us to CBs in our College.  As a device user I am certainly in need of improving my shortcut skills, and the Digital Dig is an excellent lesson structure to help our students get the most out of their devices. 
Today I really appreciated Dorothy's clear and concise walk0through on Hapara dashboard.  I am not a fluent user of Hapara and I am beginning to see more and more uses for it.  So, later in the day when we were getting into the session on ipads, which are the devices used in Yrs 1-3, I carried on with exploring and learning a little more about Hapara, with Kerry's and others' help.  Every DFI I have gone away with more than one practical, doable addition to my digital skills and today was the same - I now know how to place files directly into student folders through Hapara, a really useful thing to know for me.
Our Chromebook Digital Dig session also led me to learning how to use the snipping tool with a shortcut, and I took the time to practice this. 
The last session was about using screencastify - luckily I have been using this a lot since we have been teaching from home, but the add-on for me was exploring the Cybersmart resource, lessons, resources etc, as I prepared for my screencastify video.
So an excellent day - and another small step up the fluency ladder, with direct benefits to my daily distance teaching work at the moment.  Thanks everyone!

Day 6 on Day 22!
Very much in the thick of online teaching and very glad to be in the middle of DFI at this time.  Getting great practice with some of the skills we have learned - hangouts, screen-castify, hyper-links etc.
Connecting was the key Manaiakalani kaupapa word today, and I enjoyed Dorothy's reference to the huge importance of face-to-face connecting, including the addition of our photos on our websites, having cameras on in our hangouts, students seeing their faces on our presentations etc.  Something that I have still to develop is responding to blogs - as we heard today, connecting is a two-way thing.
Today we focused on creating and developing our own websites - I worked on creating one for our Learning Support Centre at BOIC, in my SENCO role.  This is a skeleton site at this stage but I think it will be worthwhile as a resource for teachers, whanau and students once I learn more and make it more visually apealling and functional.
Sites will definitely help our students, and are the centre-point of learning at the moment as we teach online.  I would like to develop the student page of the LS Centre site with useful and fun activities for some of our students who are absent from time to time with health or access issues.
As for my personal google life - I am looking foward to having a weekend away from screens! - but at the same time I am relying on all-things-digital to keep in touch with family at the moment, like we all are.  Thanks everyone for a great day - my apologies for my multi-tasking, although I am managing my mic well enough  :)

Day 5 of DFI and Day 9 of the lockdown.   Thanks for a great day everyone.  Great to have the round-up of gratitude as the opening session of the day and to hear that nature is sustaining many of us.   
My memorable take-away from this morning's presentation on visible teaching and learning was that without visibility a student's success depends on their ability to read the teacher's mind.  I think visible can also mean transparent learning - students and families can see what is going on, where the learning is going and what is expected - our technology can help us bring LIs and SCs to life.
The discussion about engaging multi-modal and multi-textual learning was great to have as we moved into learning about building our own websites.  I have some experience of using websites in the old form - they have been a great place to outline units of work, provide detail of the progression of the learning, and to give students the nuts and bolts of learning activities with the added value of a variety of modes in a rewindable format.  I really enjoyed the ease of use of the new sites tool, although I have a long way to go to make engaging websites. 
So yes, a tool that is directly related to improving my students' engagement and experience of learning.  My life outside of school includes making art and music - of course a shareable website can be a tool for finding an audience for these endeavours too - although I am not quiting my day job!
This the website from today's playing in the sandpit :)