New Learning - DFI Session 8

The focus of today's session was computational thinking.   It was great to have the opportunity to explore coding and I am really looking forward to exploring this further with my learners and learning alongside them.  This is something that I have not really had any experience with in the past, though I know that some of my students have and are quite keen on it.  I also have a number of students for whom coding will be a new experience so it will be useful to have several "experts" in the class for them to call upon for additional support (for me too!).

I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore "Scratch" in our breakout groups and to have the facilitator to call upon for support.  I had a lot of fun creating this "Ballerina" animation using "Scratch".




I have added a page called "Digital Technology"  to my class site and have added a link to studio.code.org for the students to explore the Minecraft coding, which is something that I think they will really enjoy.

I am planning for us to also do a session on "Scratch" to give the students an opportunity to explore this and to gain more confidence with coding.  These will be added to the students blogs.  On Friday mornings we meet with our Junior buddy class so early next term I will organise for them to use what they have learned through exploring "Scratch" to introduce to their Junior buddies.  We have done this with other digital technologies and I have found it to be very beneficial for the students to use the skills they have learned to teach others in order to consolidate their learning (a good way of using the learn/create/share model also). 

New Learning - DFI Session 7

The focus of today's session was familiarising ourselves with using Chromebooks and iPads and putting ourselves into "the shoes of our learners".   It was beneficial to have the opportunity to do this as it highlighted the near to allow opportunities for students to familiarise themselves with these devices and their features also.

The first session involved completing several tasks using a Chromebook.  I found this very useful as I have in the past found Chromebooks quite frustrating to use as I wasn't used to the different "pad" without the left and right click buttons.  Today's session helped me to feel a lot more confident with using a Chromebook.  It was also great to have the opportunity to learn and familiarise myself with the range of Chromebook shortcuts which will be something useful to take back to my learners.  I have added these shortcuts to my Class Site in order for my students to have these to hand throughout the day to refer back to when they are completing various learning tasks.  We will go through these together as a whole-class lesson.

The second session involved completing tasks using "Explain Everything" on an iPad.  I did not have an iPad to use as we do not use these at our school apart from in the Junior classrooms.  Instead, I used the online whiteboard.  I really enjoyed familiarising myself with this and completed these tasks.  Completing these activities highlighted the importance of allowing students time to explore these learning tools in order to become familiar with the different functions and to develop their confidence and independence with using these.  Without the teaching and time to explore the students are less likely to use these and certainly not to their full potential.

The last part of the day was spent on screen-castify.  I was pleased to have the opportunity to extend my confidence with using this extension.  I completed the assigned task and then created a maths-based screen-castify (see below) which I then put onto my Class Site as rewindable learning for my students based on our current learning - Geometry/Transformations. 

New Learning - DFI Session 6

Today was the sixth DFI session.  The main focus for today was evaluating sites created by others.  It was beneficial having the opportunity to view and critique other sites as this was a great way to get ideas for my own site and also gave me an insight into how to navigate a range of different sites.  This highlighted the importance of ensuring that the Site is easy to navigate and is not made confusing with too much detail/content on the page.  We then looked critically at our own Sites using feedback from others in our "digital bubbles".  It was incredibly useful to use this approach to viewing our own sights as I found that it enabled me to clearly identify what I need to work on to further develop my Class Site.  It was also useful to have the time to set goals for what I wanted to achieve today on my class site.  This helped me to prioritise what I wanted to focus on and set realistic and achievable goals.  It was great having our facilitator to call on at different stages whilst working on my site whenever I needed assistance with doing something.

So far this year there has been more of a focus on using the Syndicate Site, especially in view of the Remote Learning which occurred to ensure consistency across the 5 classes in my Syndicate.  I have now set a goal for myself to utilise my own Class Site more effectively.  The aim is that the students will access the Class Site first thing each morning as there will be a link to the plan for the day.  Within that plan for the day I am going to add links to the various activities we will be engaging in during the day for ease of access for the students.   It was evident from today's session that it is of utmost importance that the site is easy for students to navigate.     The two important features of a learning site are visual appeal and functionality.  These are the aspects of my site that I aim to focus on.

I have a classroom "movie" theme which I have today begun to incorporate on my site by adding buttons and updating my homepage.  I really enjoyed today's session and having the opportunity to experiment with page layout and creating buttons that tie into this theme.  I think this will make my learning site more visually appealing to my students as well as making navigation easier for them.  I have also ensured that there is consistency across the site in terms of layout, fonts etc and that these are also consistent with the format of the Syndicate Site which the students became very familiar with over the remote learning period.

I am aiming to spend more time today and over the weekend continuing to add to my learning site in order to add to the visual appeal and functionality.

Check out my Class Site to see the changes I have made.

The Hapara hot-tips at the end of the day were very useful also.  I have a designated time in my class on Friday afternoons for students to upload content to their blogs as well as to post a comment on another student's blog.  I will also incorporate time for the students to tidy their Google Drive to ensure that all work is in the appropriate folder for ease of access.

New Learning - DFI Session 5

Today was the fifth DFI session.  The main focus for today was developing an understanding of the features of Google Sites.  The deep dive session which was run by Venessa was very informative and I gained a good understanding of how to use some of the additional features of Google Sites that I was unsure of, such as adding "buttons" and selecting the layout/format of these.

It was great having the opportunity to plan out and create a Google site based on a particular theme.  The group that I was working alongside focused on "Smart Media: Real or Fake?"  I created a multi-modal site which focused on this theme.  It was great to have the opportunity to develop my skills and confidence in this area and to also be able to use some of the teaching from earlier in the day in order to add additional features to this site such as adding the schoo logo to the home page, adding "buttons" on the home page with links to subsequence pages, adding youtube clips and Google slides directly.  This is going to be very useful for me as last year I created a class site but did not feel overly confident with using this and making it engaging for the students.  During the time of lockdown and the need for remote learning programmes, my team and I created a syndicate learning site which hugely boosted my confidence with creating and adding to a learning site.  The knowledge I gained from doing this, along with the tips I learned in today's deep dive session, will now enable me to revamp and update my class site and to use it more effectively and to also make it multi-modal and engaging for the students.

We also learned some good blogger tips this afternoon such as being able to personalise reaction buttons by adding our own selection of comments/reactions to blog posts.  We were also shown how to email a post to someone.  This will be very useful for me to be able to email students directly if something relating to them has been posted on the class blog and also email this to their parents for them to see their learning and comment.

I am looking forward to the further Google site sessions where I will hopefully gain additional ideas to include in both my class and the syndicate learning sites in order to make them more engaging and easily navigated by the students (something which I became aware of the importance of today).