Google Tour Builder

I have been learning about Google Tour Builder. Firstly I looked at a sample tour provided and then I started creating my own tour. Here it is here. I look forward to seeing how students use this to create their own imaginative tours.


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Simple Stop Motion

As term 4 is now upon us I have been thinking about two classes I work with the teachers in that are in their third year of using Chromebooks even though their teachers are new to 1:1. I want to use this term giving outlines to students but not spoon feeding content, as I would like to see them generating their own original ideas with the knowledge that everything they post will be visible forever. I am going to test this simple Stop Motion Animation app to see what they are able to design, create and share.

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Google Certified Educator - Level 2

Another step in my learning journey has been recently ticked off. These exams are useful guides to Google's expectations for their educators but not the 'be all and end all' of my professional learning.

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Kootuitui Whaanau video using Adobe Spark

Finally, after many hours, I got the final version of the video saved and ready for sharing. I decided not to do a voice over as I didn't want to have more issues with it that would affect what I'd already achieved. The other decision I made was to use a square format as it is easier to view on a phone or tablet. The major learning has been to keep the number of slides small and to wait each time I uploaded an image so that the programme had time to save as I made it.

Then I uploaded the video to my Youtube channel and here it is there:

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Spark Adobe slides to video trial

Looking for ways to enthuse and engage students and teachers, I created a simple slide presentation into video using Spark Adobe. This was my second attempt and it only has 5 slides. This is because I started with creating a video of about 25 slides and discovered that the programme saves EXTREMELY slowly, so I decided to use a much smaller number of slides and the result was much better, especially if I am thinking of trialing in a class next term.
Using the programme was also quite 'buggy'. I got a few error messages and it was very slow to make any changes, download and get the embed code.
When my first attempt finally saves, I will also post it to this blog. It has a work focus and the purpose I was creating it was for the Kootuitui website as an artifact of the work our whaanau have been doing over the course of the year so far.
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Critical thinking and fake news

During the Developing in Digital Worlds workshops, I observed many teachers creating learning experiences for their students based on collaborative reasoning and argumentation. I considered how, as a facilitator, I could create some engaging learning activities along this line. Classes were studying 'digital footprint' and had been assessing sites and emails for signs of phishing. They were learning how to detect lies and stay true. I considered some of the topics that we had covered in the DIDW sessions and thought about how these could be incorporated with lie detection and came up with the activity above.

It was quite challenging as it required students to read the information on the site I had provided with respect to the statement in blue and then find two other different and reliable sites that corroborated that message. When they could do this, the 'Rule of 3' can be assumed to mean that the statement is true. It was difficult because students had to read the whole texts that they were given and also that they accessed. Sometimes the heading or title made a statement that wasn't actually proven by the text. Often, the crux of the text was right at the bottom of a fairly long article and students had to persevere, scroll down, by-pass adds etc to get to the end.

Some students made a very good attempt. I also learnt that allowing students to do this with one or two others helped them all to complete it. Have a look at:
Hailey
Brianna



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Collaborative Reasoning

Here is the PHS staff collaborative reasoning around the Mellinarks texts. It is very interesting to listen to as individuals state their case with their reasons and listen to the opinions and reasons of others. One of the teachers changed her mind about which figures are Mellinarks and others didn't. This conversation was between six people, I'm thinking how would it go with 26? That may be difficult, so smaller groups could be a better way to approach this kind of activity.

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