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 :)