Friday, 28 July 2017

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 πŸ‘. 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 :-)
  

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Manaiakalani PD day March

Today's session is quite different from the previous ones. We are part of Manaiakalani which is a large "Community of Learning". All the schools in the cluster are working in the same direction in slightly different ways - which are tailored for their students.

Use of Woolf Fisher Research data shared by Aaron is put to good use by all of "us" to plan for this year and the near future. That presentation by each school is quite interesting - different strategies employed by different schools across the cluster.

Sharing PAT data with students (with due explanation /interpretation) can help motivate them. "I thought I got a pass but..." Screenshot and share?

Accelerated reading - do we have the data to compare "before" and "after" to show what is working and what is not.

"Never delete a teacher from Google if they leave the school" We have unlimiteed memory and the resources are usually reusable.

Critical Literacy - using language that is not biased towards any "side" so that students are encouraged to think about the topic and take sides.

Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Insert a 360 video from you tube

open video - share - embed - control C - paste in html tab at the bottom - see video.


Swivel tablet to see 360 degree.

Insert you tube

Open video - share - embed - copy the link using control C = paste on post (in html tab) to see it.




Success!

Last week


A dinosaur at blogging, but I am trying :-). Trying to insert an image.
Last week has been challenging at school with a team member leaving and senior classes in need of someone to handle their assessments. I took over one senior class which lwaves me little time for other routine jobs. I could say I am struggling with some of my deadlines. It is short term (hopefully) and will get better soon.


Thursday, 16 February 2017

The beginning

I am getting started with blogging. The plan is to gather thoughts & ideas, share and revisit these at a later date to see what worked 😊and what didnt πŸ’₯