Yay for becoming a Google Certified Educator! It was interesting hearing about the other opportunities Manaiakalani offers this morning, and definitely think this is something I should keep in mind for the future.

Reflecting on my time in the DFI overall, however, I realise I need to take some time to set up all these interesting experiences for my students – putting together Google Sites, working through Hapara and Google Drive with my students, embedding the Kawa of Care, and generally finding ways to leverage this technology to reduce reliance on an ultimately worksheet-based model of education (notwithstanding the ongoing UDL need for multiple means of representation). This has been an inspiring journey, with a lot of helpful examples from other educators as to how this technology can be embedded meaningfully, and the challenge will be to roll this out to this cohort who are often far from the digital natives we sometimes imagine them to be – growing up as they did in school environments with perhaps only a few ipads to a classroom. The whole pedagogy of learn-create-share has started to make a lot more sense as an overall structure and is definitely something I’m going to use for my planning going forward.

Just 3 years ago, my classroom had fewer devices than my own intermediate classroom did 20 years ago – a ratio of about 1:6, all of them aging Thinkpads that were promptly “borrowed” by other classrooms and often not returned. Now my class has 1:1 devices, but as was highlighted early in this experience, unless my pedagogy changes this whole effort is wasted. While I may be personally digitally savvy, this experience has underscored to me my responsibility to keep my students learning about digital technology, using digital technology and all of the tools that are available to us. In practice, this means I have a lot to do: that is, creating digital content that my students can use to learn, and developing lessons that leverage this technology and allow students to interact with the content. The DFI has given me plenty of oppertunities to test some of this in theory, and now is the time to put it into practice. It has given me ideas for tools I might use, and things that I might not use also.

Being able to share my own ideas with other educators has been valuable, and has helped me understand some of the frustrations with technology both my fellow educators and my students are likely facing. I think having the opportunity for release once a week to swap ideas with educators across the country, learn together, and reflect in general, is probably a really understated advantage of the DFI. In fact, I’m convinced that this should happen for all educators nationwide.

On the whole I enjoyed taking part in this experience and I hope to run into some of my DFI colleagues again in the future. 🙂

Most of today’s session was focused on exploring the technologies curriculum, which I am already quite confident with. It was nice to be able to share my tool for Logo programming with other educators. Mostly I focused my own learning today on looking at tools I could use to bring 3D design into my classroom program. I know our technology specialist teacher already does some work with students using TinkerCAD, but I figured there should be other useful tools my students could be using to create 3D content.

I’m no 3D artist (obviously) but I had a lot of fun creating this character using sculptGL:

I think compared with TinkerCAD this might give students more opportunities for artistic expression & could hook in well in subjects such as literacy, to design characters and objects from imagined worlds. The brush tool took some getting used to and I hope those of my students who don’t like art much will not be put off by this. The metaphor of clay was useful for me; it might be an idea to have students practice modelling the same or similar things with physical clay first, and then consider the advantages / drawbacks of using a computer tool.

I also took some time to explore CoSpaces EDU, which I was also new to. In some ways, it reminded me of a more basic, web-based version of Unity, which seemed intruiging. However, I found the coding rather limited, and I found it difficult to attach scripts to the camera. This might be a good thing to look at with students who would like extension in digital technologies. This is the program I quickly created:

I wondered if perhaps the paid version of this alleviated some of the problems, but at something like $200/year for my whole class, it seemed a bit much to find out. Use of 3D in browsers (natively, without those old Flash plugins) is likely to be a developing technology regardless & I’m very interested in how this develops.

On the whole this was a good chance to be creative & think about how some of these tools might be used in my setting; I’m actually looking forward to the exam next week, and feel like I’ve been given a lot of ideas to try. 🙂

The presentation that shared where students could explore the features of their devices was a useful resource, which I would probably use with students earlier in the year, but the most interesting aspects of today were connected with the tools of ExplainEverything and Hāpara. Screencastify looked interesting, but I suspect many of its features would not be necessary on non-Chromebook devices, and the cost for students to use it in an integrated way seemed a bit steep.

I enjoyed exploring ExplainEverything as it reminded me a lot of interactive whiteboard tools I’ve used in the past. This is a recording I created in a few minutes:

One major issue I had with this tool was using it with a trackpad. I used a mouse to try to get better control, but I still feel like the tool would be most useful with a stylus. Given this resource I could imagine it replacing the whiteboard table to provide better access for students to their learning. I have experimented recently with creating rewindable videos just using the whiteboard, but could imagine doing it this way could allow me to pull in better resources & be clearer on the footage.

I still have some difficulty thinking about how to make Hāpara not just “another tool” when Google Classroom provides much the same functionality. While there are some things both tools do better, I overall feel like the formatting tools recently introduced to Google Classroom give it something of an edge for the kinds of things I’d imagine my students most often doing. Having said that, I enjoyed the process of creating tasks in Hāpara a lot, especially because of the pretty layout of the cards as opposed to the walls of text Google Classroom can sometimes produce. It would be nice if a tool combined all the features of classroom with the visual appeal of Hāpara.

Within the context of exploring Hāpara, I also had the opportunity to properly explore the Cyber-Smart curriculum. Using this as a base and an idea I took from Google Applied Digital Skills, I created this “workspace”:

I didn’t find it particularly challenging to create something easy for students to follow; however, I found the concept of group submissions a little confusing when students were in multiple groups (it would be useful to be able to create groups of groups, like creating a copy of a file for submission for all my maths groups) or when I wanted all students in the class to contribute to a single document. I also had trouble assigning an existing document from my drive and having students create copies individually before submitting them through Hāpara.

This led me to some thoughts about how UDL can be best applied to platforms such as Classroom or Hāpara which expect fixed modes of assignment, and to what extent this can be hacked to provide options for students to differentiate their learning. I’ve seen this done in other platforms to some degree, but it’s really hard when there’s so many tools out there and students are struggling to keep up. The best I could come up with is having the students submit a Google Form that has several options for submitting their work, but this has its own usability problems and doesn’t seem to be trackable by Hāpara (at least in any obvious way).

Nonetheless this is something I’d like to explore further. I really liked that Hāpara has a library of activities created by other educators and I’ll be sure to spend the week exploring some of these to get some idea of how I can use this tool most effectively in my context.

Overall this was another really interesting week with a lot of ideas to mull over for me; I feel like it’s coming towards the end surprisingly quickly and will probably leave me with a lot to think about when it’s over.

Although I had a class site previously, the site had very little content on it. As such, I decided to redevelop my site from the ground up, bearing in mind the principles we’ve been discussing over the past weeks.

I spent most of the day considering how I can most efficiently organise my information on my class site to support all my learners, including those perhaps less fluent with digital technology, to easily access their learning. I am concerned about the number of sites and tools that my learners need to regularly access and feel like consolidating much of this on a class site is a good idea – however, if the class site is overwhelming, it could end up making the situation even worse. Seeing some of the other websites was useful information, but it was still a challenge adapting this work to my program. In the end, I focused on creating a “shell” website with an efficient layout for students, which they could quickly find key information on. My initial attempt at this is linked here:

I was a little confused by the relationship between cluster sites, school websites & class sites, and feel that once Manaiakalaani is a little more established in my cluster, this might start to make more sense. For the most part, I was going off the content I found on other class sites, trying to organise things in a way I imagine would support my program while transitioning to a digitally-enabled curriculum. In any event, the site is very much (and perhaps will always be) a work in progress. As my own planning also transitions to allow students to work this way, making my planning more transparent would also be easier.

I liked the idea of trackers, as introduced by other teachers in my bubble, for handling student work / progress (seems like a great use case for protected content), as well as learning to use the Hapara workspace feature more efficiently for this. It would be nice if these two things could be integrated (or exported) to make this pathway more seamless for students, as currently one issue I’m thinking through is that students have to go through too many hurdles to share their work. Another teacher in the bubble shared the idea of using aliases for students when sharing their names in planning (especially for those students whose names need to be handled sensitively) and I thought this sounded like something students would enjoy.

Overall, I feel like my session, while practical, is still incomplete. I have a long way to go to make this site work for me and my students, and I imagine this journey will be ongoing even after finishing the DFI.

Today’s session was mostly interesting because it had me reflecting on the content for next week’s session.

The concept of multimodal texts in general was nothing new to me, but the concept of using multi-modal design to create UDL experience was. Using this together with the guided browsing (Hapara hot tip of the day) seemed like a natural combination for mixing visibility and focus for students. During the initial presentation, I had some concerns about the amount of time required to collate all these resources for students, and while it is good that other educators have shared some examples in the past, it does feel like quite a bit of setup is required. It would be difficult to incorporate these kinds of texts organically in the middle of the term without prior planning around this. I feel like collaboration with colleagues might alleviate these concerns somewhat. Sometimes I can do this kind of planning “just in time,” so that’s another thing I’d need to work around.

When we created our own multimodal text site, our group facilitator gave us a text on Ocean Health to launch with, which I used with some texts of my own to create this site:

I spent some time getting the theme colours etc. the way I wanted them, but on the whole I’m really interested in this structure.

I did a lot of thinking today about how I am using my Google Site with my class. Seeing my digital bubble leader’s example of a Google Site from last year for her class was extremely inspiring and made me want to challenge myself to make my site more useful for my learners. I was especially interested in how content for each subject area was laid out week-by-week, creating a sort of digital workbook that students could refer to with videos, links to exercises and other useful things specific to those subjects. The layout, too, was very clear. I imagine I should use the same structure & would be very interested to hear my students’ opinions on this.

This session overall has made me very excited for the next one and I’m sure I’ll be spending some time over the next week exploring other examples of how I could make my Google Site work more effectively. Once this is more established, creating pages for things like inquiry topics should make more sense for me and my learners.

In today’s session, I thought the comment that a classroom or a teacher is not usually an authentic audience was really interesting. One common criticism of mass media has always been that the more “massive” the media, the less you’re really targetting an audience at all. Social media does allow more granular control over the audience of posts (despite the various problems with these features), but of course this isn’t the point of blogs. What I’ve found in class, and other teachers have also observed, is that students are often just motivated by having a moment in the limelight in front of their peers; commenting positively on peers’ work seems to fulfil this criterion. But it does raise lots of interesting questions for me about how we teach “audience” in a literary sense for the modern world.

I like the idea that “finishing stuff” is a “life skill”, and using the prompt “ready to share” with my class as opposed to “finished.” I do a lot of passion learning in my class and I think this kind of language is really important so students have a clear goalpost. I definitely will be using this idea.

I had a lot of fun with Google My Maps. Below I have a comparison of my usual running track (in black) and the school’s cross country track (in yellow), as viewed on Google Earth. I really should use these tools more & had ideas while I was doing this for how to bring them into English to tell stories.

It was also interesting from a teaching perspective completing a Google Drawing based on data from a Google Sheet … my attempt at this is shown below. I think most students would use Slides as a layout tool for this, so explicitly linking different tools as part of my program would be a good idea.

When we were in breakout groups, I was inspired by my group’s suggestion of using Sheets to produce individual student timetables based on Google Forms data (so students can make choices for their learning & assessment can be integrated to this). It was good being among other teachers who understand formulas & felt working in these ability level groups worked well for me.

My group seemed particularly impressed by how I use Sheets to produce my school reports. I find this a helpful technique because it allows me to automate all the legwork of making sure my reports conform to my school’s style guide for reporting, and eliminate the possibility of mistakes.

First I create my own bank of generic comments which I can reuse time and again; I use uppercase keywords for key pronouns or names in this bank (like NM for name, HE, HIM, HIMSELF etc.). A small excerpt of my comments is shown here:

Secondly, I use the checkbox feature and for each student, I create a checkbox for each comment. If the comment could describe the student, I check the checkbox. This way, rather than writing the report for each student, I am ticking the comments I want and Sheets writes the report for me from these comments. I also include a checkbox for “female pronouns” … in future I’ll probably change this to allow gender-neutral pronouns also but this works for now. To fit my school’s style guide I also include each student’s curriculum level (which I’ve taken automatically from a tracking sheet I have).

To actually create the reports, I used to use a very complicated formula with like dozens of substitution commands and so on. As this became a bit unweildy to work with, however, I converted this formula to App Script so it’s clearer how it works and what it does. I find App Script really helpful for these kinds of things and try to teach my students at school at least some of the basics – there are some very easy to follow tutorials on Google Applied Digital Skills. One version of my script is shown here in the hopes it helps some other teacher understand this approach:

function REPORTGEN2021X(cx,cr,sl="") {
  //cx = cells containing student data
  //format is name, surname, level/year, female?, then tick boxes for each comment in the bank
  //cr = cells containing comment bank data
  //codes - NM/HE for name/pronoun, HIS, HIM, HIMSELF
  //sl - name of the subject the report is for eg. "Mathematics"

  //first we read some basic data about each student
  var name=cx[0][0];
  var surname=cx[0][1];
  var year=cx[0][2];
  var female=cx[0][3];

  //create a variable to hold the comment about each student
  var output="";

  //show a curriculum level if appropriate
  if(sl!="") {
    output="In "+sl+", "+name+" is working within level "+year+" of the New Zealand Curriculum. ";
  }

  //then we load the appropriate pronouns
  var he_pronoun="he";
  if(female) he_pronoun="she";
  var his_pronoun="his";
  if(female) his_pronoun="her";
  var him_pronoun="him";
  if(female) him_pronoun="her";
  var himself_pronoun="himself";
  if(female) himself_pronoun="herself";

  //next we load the comments from the comment bank
  for(var i=4;i<cx[0].length;i++) {
    if(cx[0][i]) {
      output+=cr[i-4][0];
    }
  }

  //do some basic pronoun replacing
  output = output.replace(/HIMSELF/g,himself_pronoun);
  output = output.replace(/HIM/g,him_pronoun);
  output = output.replace(/HIS/g,his_pronoun);
  output = output.replace(/HE/g,he_pronoun);

  //every second NM is replaced with the "s/he" pronoun; the others with the student's name
  var cnt = output.match(/NM/g).length;
  i=0; output = output.replace(/NM/g,function(m){ i++;
    return (i % 2 == 1) ? name : he_pronoun;
  });

  //this bit capitalises the sentences correctly
  output = output.split(".");
  for(i=0;i<output.length;i++) {
    output[i] = output[i].trim();
    output[i] = output[i].charAt(0).toUpperCase() + output[i].slice(1);
  } output = output.join(". ");

  //send it back to the spreadsheet
  return output.trim();
}

I thought this week’s content was really interesting because it had a lot of practical ideas for how we could bring creating into our classrooms. I really enjoyed hearing the variety of ideas that students could use to create things. Some of them were ideas that I’d had myself, such as using video, but through Manaiakalani I felt there were opportunities showcased that allowed students to practice creating on a much grander scale, such as through film festivals. I’ve had groups of students enter film competitions before, but taking the students to the cinema to see their film on a big screen just seems like such a fun idea.

I was also very inspired by the likes of using Google Slides to create stop motion stories for learning languages, and creating simple “apps” such as a fortune teller. I thought it was interesting when I was tasked with creating my Google Slide version of a pepeha (or what I was able to finish thereof…) and ended up massively overcomplicating the “create” part of the task. This was a very practical lesson for me in using the correct tool for each job. I have attached the slides I ended up creating at the end of this post.

I’m still not so sure about how I will use YouTube with my class. I feel like recording actual lessons would create classroom management issues; using pre-recorded content on a playlist could also risk confusing students as the content covered throughout the year is rather vast considering the range of levels of students we’re targetting. So I’ll need to think on how I’ll best manage that; in principle I think the idea of a sort of “classroom TV” is cool, but in practice the execution might be tricky.

I think the reason why I found today’s content so stimulating overall was because “creativity” sort of has several dimensions. I first read about this in a study a few years ago and did a lot of reflecting on it today. There’s a subtle difference between teaching creatively, offering creative tasks, and teaching students to be creative in their approaches to tasks. Arguably, there might be some correlation between these ideas. I’m not so sure about Ken Robinson’s implied idea that the third comes automatically to every student; you need to know the rules of art to be able to purposefully break them after all. I feel like today’s session gave me a lot of ideas to involve learners in creative tasks, but there’s almost so much to cover here that it’s going to be difficult manage as just one-third of the learn-create-share framework.

I liked the analogy to a “lifelong kindergarten” brought up today, and wonder to what extent that is practicable in a school still reporting to National’s standards (and testing students in these subjects very frequently). Perhaps the secret is to spend more time establishing at the beginning how to create, which is a bit of a paradox as last week I had a lot of thoughts about spending time establishing how to organise. I’d be interested to see how the DFI develops over subsequent weeks and whether I’ll still be following the notion of prioritising organisation, which has a certain logic to it also.

Nonetheless I really enjoyed the session overall and am looking forward to the next one. 🙂

 

Today’s session had a variety of ideas, but as with last week the most interesting part for me was Dorothy’s discussion of the Manaiakalani pedagogy, which concerned the “Learn” component of “Learn – Create – Share.” I thought there was an interesting tension between the focus of Manaiakalani in establishing a “common idea of what works” while acknowledging that school context often defines effective practice. On another level, at my school I feel there has been an acceptance that effective practice may also vary slightly from teacher to teacher, and sometimes, from student to student. This ties into my thought from last week about what technology is really replacing in the classroom, which Dorothy alluded to with her “baby and the bathwater” analogy.

For me personally, this has occasionally been a roadblock to “amplifying” effective practice. While I often find myself drawing on the ideas of other teachers, because I like to make things hard for myself and come up with my own crazy ideas for how to teach stuff, it’s sometimes harder for other teachers to just run with. I’d find it interesting to observe some schools (like those Dorothy mentioned) where teachers can articulate exactly what their schools believe about the way students in their community learn, and how these schools manage differentiation. There’s probably a good balance to be struck here somehow, and I’d be interested to know if there’s research that defines exactly where this balance lies.

There were several other interesting ideas that came out throughout the day:

• The fact that only 20% of computer users knew the CTRL+F shortcut stunned me; I feel like getting students to create posters in Docs of common keyboard shortcuts might be an interesting activity. I also liked the idea of students sharing maps and songs, and think this could be a good “getting to know you” type task.
• We had an interesting discussion about Google Calendar in our bubble, and how we might use it with students. I think a lot of this depends on whole-school buy-in which is tricky when not all students are 1:1. Currently at our school most communications are through a daily newsletter which is read to students daily, and I think it would be interesting to think about how we can transition away from this long-term to support students to use technology to organise their learning. The main thought I have, though, is that this would require something of a whole-school approach to publishing and updating events in a digital way.
• The discussion about Google Keep got me thinking about the workbooks that students generally use. I think it would be a worthwhile holiday project to create digital notebooks that my students could use, customised for each subject. The amount of time we spend getting students to rule up their books correctly etc. is sometimes a bit of a nightmare and being able to link directly from there to tools that might be useful for particular tasks, like Google Keep, might be useful for students also.

For our “create” task, I worked with Kerry from our digital bubble to record this Google Meet. We reviewed some learning done by Hannah from Marshland School during the lockdown together.