Google for Education Certification Exam Level 1 (Week 9)

Today was the big day. All our learning and creating and sharing was being assessed, and at the end of it we were expected to get a Level 1 badge. However I cannot show you what it looks like because
of this:

The excuses are:

• umm...
• it was...

No not really - I just needed more time. It took me longer than usual to get started. The questions were not too hard, I might say some were easy and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps I took too long enjoying the exam and eventually ran out of time. I got 20 multiple choice Q's and 11 scenarios and am guessing that the others got something similar. When the timer alert was on the "last 10 minutes" I still had 5 scenarios to work through. That alert sort of "woke me" up and the tasks were done faster. Clearly not fast enough as I was working on scenario 9/11 when the exam self terminated since it was 3 hours since I started. It does not help to note that only one person in the group got through today.

Note to self - 

• Google "Hangouts" and "Meet" are different and not interchangeable. 
• Youtube "watch later"  and "playlist" are also different.

What next: we have to wait 14 days to repeat the attempt so I will register some time after a week so that we can give it another go. 

STP's and Image mapping for sites: Week 6

As is the case every week, we learnt a lot of things in today's session. The best one for me was image mapping - I had seen this being used on a few sites but was not sure what it is called or how it was done. But having done it I can say with confidence that is is fairly straight forward. You just have to follow the logical steps, If you try to change the order it wont let you; and of course the feature wont work.

Here's a screenshot of my home page with an image of the 6 Standards of Teaching Profession. The area on the picture allocated to each standard acts as a link to a new page which has more details for THAT standard. To go to the page for standard 3, you click anywhere in the area of "Professional Relationships"on the image and this takes you there. Its that simple!

Getting this effect is not too hard either.

Step 1 - Map the image with (x,y) coordinates using pixlr as below. Notice the "plus" at the top left corner of the gold biscuit picture - the coordinates of the point are displayed at the top right corner of the screen. By moving the plus around the boundary we can get the coordinates for the entire boundary. Be aware that the boundaries should not overlap - potential problems!!

Step 2 - Enter the coordinates of the boundary and the corresponding url into the code (HTML)

For example: <map name="map1">
<area coords="162,58,254,15,333,4,440,16,533,56,422,225,346,207,272,225" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-1" shape="poly">

<area coords="534,62,425,229,471,281,484,343,688,344,676,251,647,181,606,125" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-2" shape="poly">
<area coords="688,351,485,347,473,409,417,467,518,642,590,590,655,497,680,428" href="https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/mh-stp/home/stp-3" shape="poly">
</map>

Step 3 - SAVE, ofcourse you want to check that it looks fine and also that it actually works. That's it - done! finito!!

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...

Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 1 Term 3. The basics...

Yay its Friday! We had 11 teachers from Schools around Auckland come together and start a journey. Todays "to-do list" included things like Google Chrome, Drive, Docs, Save and Blogger.

Google Save is something of a boon for people using drive - it helps add tags to whatever we save. This makes looking for the docs much more easier - here's how. When we use multiple tags, e.g. topic, NZQA standard, student's name etc we can find files with any parameter since each tag works as a search parameter. This is similar to blogs in a way.

We learnt some word processing shortcuts & tricks. For instance using (Ctrl+shift+V) instead of (Ctrl+V) helps us paste using the current documents format rather than the format from the source document. This saves valuable time & effort when tidying up the current document specially if you are copying from many documents and/or websites.

Voice recording to share a story was a good activity. Now I can leave the keyboard aside when typiong long documents/reports 👍. Adding headings and sub headings and "Table of Contents" was my favourite. This is really useful for navigating long docs. It is similar to adding bookmarks - but in bulk.

We also learnt how to find and use addons.  Mind Meister for mind mapping, WebSequenceDiagrams & Lucid Charts for flow charts and/or circuit diagrams etc.

And finally we made a poster in Google Docs: Not using draw, but tables to organise images etc. The font used is "Raleway". Found some images of our Y13's senior students when they were not taller than us :-)