Working with sites, blogs - DFI - Wk 5.

Cross curricular topic site collaboration.
We were tasked to make a site based on the story of the Lion and the mouse. There were 3 groups who worked on a specific range of year levels, the highest being Y7 to 9. We used this padlet to collect the ideas from the team.

We also made a one page site. Since I do not teach year 9's I just made one which includes what we learnt but will not yet be used this year. Some of the links are not live. I used a video of my Y11 Physics class on the site. This is something I intend to do on my class sites...

Finally we learnt to network by linking our blogs "link love". This can be used in a class situation to ensure all (or most) blogs are read by a wider audience. Here's what mine looks like after this gadget "Blog list" has been added.

Need to practice so that I can recollect all this when needed...:-)

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 4. Cyber Smart, Explain everything video, screen castify

Explain everything video is something I have not used even though I have used Explain everything in project form for senior Physics classes. Here's an example of how it is used in junior classes.

And here is another one of how I intend to use it in my Year 11 Physics class: topic for this is waves and students are learning how to solve some numerical problems from past exam papers.

Here is an example of the screen castify video. We can cast multiple screens (entire desktop) or just the tab if we need only that tab. We also have an option to cast our video in a corner if the device has a camera and if we need to show an object. Here's my brief video on how to comment on a blog post.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 3. Email Calendar Hangouts.

Today we had an interesting session learning about the details of gmail and calendar. This was - get into the settings and try various combinations - some of which change the GUI, some affect the functionality and usability. The idea was to make these tools more efficient and more "attractive".
Here's an example of a hangout video chat along with screen capture. We picked a student's post at random and discussed their learning from the pak-n-save trip.

Some cool tips for gmail are:

• If we happen to accidentally hit send on an email [guilty as charged :-) ] then depending on the situation a certain level of panic will set it. Did you send it to the wrong Nicki? Did you send confidential docs to ..... Well not anymore! You can setup a "time bomb" arrangement. This gives you upto 30 seconds to UNDO - phew!
• You can arrange for your inbox to have all the unread (or any other criteria) emails displayed at the top.
• Spam control - you can hover the cursor above a name and delete ALL the emails from that address. 
• Gmails can be labelled like blogs
• Filters can be setup with yor criteria so you get to what you are looking for quickly
• and finally yes you can translate an email by selecting the language in the dropdown menu from the arrow next to the reply arrow.

Calendar:

1. we can change the view - not just day/week/ month but we can select the number of days
2. we can also choose to hide morning and evening engagements - if you are like me and keep your personal and professional lives totally separate
3. calendar apps are available for iphones/ androids

Hangouts was fun because we were told to have only ONE mic active, all the others on MUTE. If there was more than one mic we would get a lot of feedback. And in about 5 minutes there was a LOT of feedback. Most of us missed to mute our mics after our turn and.......

Now the challenge for me is to have the time to use some of this in the classroom for us all to be able to Learn Create Share. The journey continues...

Vector Class Trip - Week 2

This week is Engineering week and FutureInTech is working with the schools to promote "Engineering as a career option" for today's students. Today 2nd August we got an opportunity to visit the local Vector power substation on West Tamaki Road. The invite was for 18 students and 2 teachers and we choose to take our Y11 Physicists. We got ready to leave the school and a phone call informed us that hte trip would have to be cancelled due to an incident at the station. The class was disappointed but we went to plan B. And within minutes we got another call that they had fixed the hazard and could host us - Yay !:-)
One school van was available to us and SD offered to drive us in two groups. Once we got there we were all given PSE (personal safety gear - hardhat, safety glasses, hi-viz vests).
Once we were all "kitted" and briefed on the safety precautions, we went inside.

The first thing we saw was a large battery stack pictured here. There are 12 stacks in a groups, two groups making a total of 24 stacks. Each of these stacks has 16 "power packs" which store 800 KW of energy. These are similar to the AA cells we use in our devices - just bigger. The entire storage capacity in here is able to power all the houses in Glen Innes for upto 3 hours in case of a power outage.

A lot of heat is generated in this part and the temperature need to be controlled. Notice the door of the stack has a cooling system filled with a green liquid, this is similar to the one used to cool car engines and serves the same purpose here.
The DC power is converted to AC power using an invertor (indoors) and then the voltage is changed from 400 Volts to 11,000 volts using a transformer (outdoors) pictured here.

                        

This is then sent to consumers for use.
The students enjoyed the learning experience as it brought real life experience into their learning. Thank you Vector!