New Learning - DFI Session 4

Today was the fourth Digital Fluency Intensive session.  We gained further insight into the aims of the Manaiakalani programme, with a focus on "share".   Research showed that there was a significant boost in students' sharing via their blogs during lockdown.  In 2005 there was a big change in sharing due to the introduction of social media, with there steadily becoming a wider range of platforms to share globally to a much wider audience.  An aim of the Manaiakalani programme is to "work with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning".  Sharing in the digital age goes well beyond your local community (global).  I gained an understanding of the purpose of using Blogger for sharing as this is a platform for being cybersmart.  It is secure and does not require new sign in.  Sharing is a vital part of the learning process as it gives a sense of finishing learning and can also be the starting point for new learning outcomes.

During the first part of the day we explored creating Google forms which was a lot of fun.  I created this Google form on "Sports" including a variety of different question types.  It was very beneficial having the support of our facilitator to guide us through this and to gain confidence with creating these.  These Google forms could easily be incorporated into my teaching programme, such as follow-up tasks for reading groups to interpret and analyse information in texts.  This would also be a useful way to gather information of students' understanding of a new topic (prior knowledge) as well as at the end of the topic to show new learning.

We then went on to explore Google My Maps.  This was new to me and I enjoyed the chance to explore this in our "digital bubbles".   Using information gathered from the members of this entire DFI group, I was able to create the map below which shows favourite holiday destinations:


I also explored creating another My Map of my own for the area in which I live, including places of interest in my community.  This is something I would like to get my students to do, perhaps with a favourite holiday destination and marking things to do and places to go in that area.

Another focus of today's session was exploring Google sheets.  This was an area that I wasn't all that familiar with so it was very useful to gain an understanding of how to create and manipulate data on a spreadsheet.  We had the opportunity to analyse data on a student blog, from which I created the chart below showing the results of that data analysis.  This chart shows the number of posts per month of a student in class from March 2019 through to May 2020.   This would also be a great activity to do with my class as I am sure by analysing this they would then want to increase the number of posts they are making!