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.


These are my professional inquiry posts.

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.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

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:

These are my professional inquiry posts.

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.
These are my professional inquiry posts.

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



These are my professional inquiry posts.

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.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

Using Google My Maps

I had a really great time with three classes showing teachers and students how to place a pin on a shared map and then writing smart information and posting good images. This was done in the context of smart digital footprint.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

Kootuitui unconference 2018

The Kootuitui leaders and I organised this year's unconference. It was very good to work together as a team to get the elements together - workshops, kahoot, prizes, organisation. We also had some outside presenters which was good, although we need to remember to tell them that we work in Google not Microsoft.
I did a short workshop on 7 Top Tips for Google Drive, which was a practice run for ULearn, as I have submitted a workshop on 10 Top Tips for Google Drive and have yet to hear whether it's been selected.

Here is also a photo of a few of my attendees after my session.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

Staff meeting term 2 2018

The term 2 staff meeting has been focussed on the subject of 'create'. I asked each Kootuitui school leader if they would like to meet with me before the meeting to go through the content and adjust for the school's specific needs. I really like to have the opportunity to use 'ako' as I don't want to be the person who is always 'delivering' the content. I have asked leaders whether they would like to co-facilitate but that has not been taken up - yet.
This staff meeting is not all about digital, but has major elements of create which are focused on using hands, eyes, paper, pens, scissors, glue etc. It is good to be embracing create outside of digital. This was proven worthwhile when one school had a powercut on the day of the staff meeting and we couldn't use devices.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

Ko Au

During term 1 I have been teaching digital footprint in classes. Part of this was to ask students to write an introduction about themselves for their blog. This would be a smart piece of writing in that they wouldn't use any information that should not be shared online.
I started this with my year 3-4 classes in two schools and then decided to use it with the year 5-6 classes in some schools. When I thought about Kereru Park, I considered that many students there could speak Te Reo quite well and might prefer to write this in Māori. I mentioned it to Jason and he gave me the phrases on slide 2. Then, I went to class and asked the teacher, Whaea Horiana to help me with the correct phrases in Te Reo for slides 1 and 3 and this is the result.

These are my professional inquiry posts.

Collaboration + Cybersmart in another school Term 1 2018

This teacher had had six months of cybersmart facilitation the previous year and I came along for her second six months in January this year. Initially, she wanted me to  work with students on what is a good blog post because her students were in Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu (cross-cluster blogging) for Term 1. I wrote a few starter sentences to help students make a reflective blog post and looked at their blogs. The teacher showed me that students were writing raps which they were setting to music and rapping aloud. I showed them how to put their raps on a few slides and use animation (on the click) to roll the slides through with the music playing in the background. Added to this, I used screencastify to get a video. I did my own poor attempt and shared it with the class. Some of the raps the students made were really great. I upscaled it by showing them how to add their own created gif, using giphy.com to their first and last slides for a more impressive result. A couple of weeks later, the teachers showed me that the students were using a Powtoon template for a book review and wanted to see how it would look in slides with animation. I read the book, got the template from Powtoon, created a review of the book in Google slides with animation and then put it on the class site for students to see.  Just before the end of term, I created a slides, book review template and also added that to the class site. The DLO's I created for this class are below.

Staff Meeting Term 1 2018

The theme for Term 1 was 'Learn'. I took the staff meeting template provided by Manaiakalani and with Jason's help, designed a staff meeting for the cluster. I presented this staff meeting at four schools, with Jason largely doing the presenting at the high school. One school had many new staff and wanted a staff meeting centred on Learn Create Share, so I co-created a staff meeting on this theme and co-delivered it with the school leader. Both staff meetings are below.

Toolkits Term 1 2018

I offered a Toolkit each round during Term 1 of 2018. They were both on the subject of New Google Sites. The first one was for beginners and I used a screencast that Jason Borland had created on my laptop. I took participants step-by-step through his screencast, stopping for each part. The second Toolkit, I created a slide presentation for participants to pick and choose which parts they were interested in to work individually. The two resources are below. I also organised these Toolkits with the help of school leaders.

Digital Citizenship and Safety Badge

I completed this online course so that I could be up-to-date with the information I give in class around the correct messages regarding digital citizenship and safety. I completed five modules and then passed the quizzes. Following this work, I was also able to download the corresponding curriculum which links to the Google Be Internet Awesome online game.

Cybersmart plus Collaboration with class teacher

I created three weeks' of resources to fit in with the topic study that the class were doing on the Commonwealth Games and elements of the Cybersmart curriculum such as:
- searching for the right type of images online
- using Google drawings for creation
- adding gifs to a slide creation
- using Google maps
I think that these lessons went really well. They began with a short introduction and looking at some of the creations (on students' blogs) from the previous week, answering any questions and then the students using a good 40-50 minutes each time doing their creative work.
Here are the resources I created and loaded onto the teacher's class site for students to access there.

EdTech AKL Summit 2018 Presenter Badge

EdTech Google Summit April 2018

Baruk and I presented at the EdTech Google Summit in Auckland, April 16th 2018. Below is the link to our presentation. We were placed in the final session slot of day 1. 

Following the session we did a quick review of what we judged as our performance and planned how we might better appeal at uLearn 2018.
1. The main idea of our presentation was collaboration and how collaborative efforts can build programmes and assist schools, teachers and students in a cluster. We considered that the main audience for this would be school leadership, heads of departments etc, however everyone who attended was a classroom teacher. Therefore, we considered that maybe individual teachers wouldn't have been that interested in our story behind the tools. There weren't any questions about this aspect. Our learning is that for uLearn to make sure we choose the right conference strands and presentation type so that we have a better chance of attracting the right audience.
2. This summit was a very techie, play-with-tools, type of conference. Our presentation had an opportunity for attendees to create using tinkercad, and we used half the session for this. Our approach was to show attendees the website and then let them freely explore and attempt to build their shapes, rather than to take them through how to design in tinkercad. We chose to do it this way because that is the experience that the students have. Some attendees found this very hard and didn't persevere. We were put at the end of the day, so maybe part of the reluctance to play was tiredness. We decided that at uLearn we would give attendees the choice to play or be coached through. We also thought that we could offer a choice for attendees to try tinkercad or MBlock. The title of our suggestion suggested coding but we didn't do any. The 'cracked the code' part meant figuring out this programme together.
3. We decided that we need to plan our storytelling better so that attendees understand Kootuitui and Auckland Libraries, understand our shared vision and describe the Papakura community.
All in all, it was a worthwhile experience to practically have a run through should we be accepted for uLearn.

Facilitation and LCS - Google slides animation

I have been working this term with a teacher who is in his first year in a year 5-6 hub. His students are in their second or third year using chromebooks so I have been thinking about how best to support him. He has an advantage of being in a hub with two other teachers who have both had facilitation and are therefore intermediate users of Google.
My early lessons with his students revealed that as usual, there were a range of abilities in the class. Some were very engaged and very productive; some were very engaged and not very productive; some were not very engaged and no very productive. I discovered that some students presented as being a lot more capable than they were.
In my inquiry focusing on the use of Google apps, I started with Slides animation and asked students to create a 3-slide animated presentation of how to look after chromebooks. I decided not to give them any guidance on how to do the animation because I wanted to see what they could produce. The next week, I asked for a few volunteers to show their work to others. Some of the presenters showed slide presentations of many slides as they had used the multiple slides move-objects-a-little-each-time type of animation. We practised giving feedback of two types:
- what we liked
- suggestions for improvement
Then students were given another lesson to complete their animation and blog it. I had put some sentence starters for their blog posts on their class site. Here are some results:
Dorothy
Jensyn
Then, the activity was scaled up by asking students to use screencastify to record themselves presenting their animations. Here are some results:
Aween
Emma
These posts show that there are a range of different capabilities in the class. Some students were able to complete both parts of the task well and others couldn't even complete the first part expertly. This means that there is plenty of scope for me to work with these students over the course of the year. I am thinking about using Google sheets to make graphs which can then to added to a slide presentation.

Acrostic Poem in Te Reo and English

My professional inquiry this year is how to better use Google apps (G-Suite) to engage and motive learners - which apps provide which functions and how these can spur student creativity within Learn Create Share. That is rather than 3rd party apps that might look like they have the bells and whistles but which can be difficult to use because the free components are few or they are removed, there are issues with having to have an account, signing in etc.
So here is a piece of teaching and learning that I co-constructed with the class teacher. In the first instance, I have only used the acrostic poem part because it was quite difficult for the students to do the animation well. The expectation was that students would do two slides - the acrostic poem in Te Reo and in English. They had been working in class on the types of words that could be used, particularly the Te Reo words. Then I worked with the students to encourage their creativity with their own animated poems. The DLO above is my model which I showed to the students. I also semi-created a second identical DLO in class while I was showing students how to manage the technical aspects of using animation.
I think that the first page giphy will be useful for later in the year when the students are a little more experienced with devices.
Here are some links to the blogs of students who posted their acrostic poems online:
Nathan
Tawhiri
Vera

First professional blog using new Standards for the Teaching Profession

'It is understood that high-quality practices will generate naturally occurring evidence that can be used for discussion and analysis. For the purposes of appraisal, it is not expected that teachers would need to identify evidence of individual elaborations; however, the evidence of the quality of their practice would need to be sufficient to reflect the standard." Our Code, Our Standards, Education Council Matatuu Aotearoa
As I begin this blog I have just had my teacher registration renewed for another three years. My status remains 'Subject to Confirmation' which means that I didn't have sufficient classroom practice to grant me full registration status.
As I have started doing a lot more facilitation in 2018, I consider it worthwhile to track my teaching/facilitation against the professional standards so that I can use this evidence for my annual appraisals and with the expectation that when my registration is next up for renewal, I would be eligible for full registration once again.