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