Dorothy began by speaking about the share/tohatoha pedagogy of Manaiakalani. Since time began we have been sharing, but this has been constrained by time, place and people. Around 2005 we were introduced to sharing videos digitally via YouTube and other social media platforms like Facebook, Bebo and Twitter. Sharing in the digital age allows us to expand our audience beyond one another, the class, school and local community to a global audience. Dorothy reminded us of how often it was that students didn't actually finish tasks. One of the key messages was that finishing a task and then sharing/posting on a blog with an authentic audience was far more valuable rather than putting work in a marking box only to get some red pen written on it. Posting on a blog is a way for people to interact in a positive, helpful and thoughtful way and it peaks your curiosity so you go off to new learning. It's a linear process - you can learn, create, share or you can share to learn.
Gerhard then gave us a few quick tips when using the Hapara teacher dashboard.
The next session Venessa took us through a Chalk 'n Talk on Google Forms. I could potentially use Google Forms with the parents of my students e.g. when gathering data about organising transportation for class trips or when requesting parent help for the school gala. In my digital bubble group I created my own Google Form which I have shared below.
Today's deep dive was by Maria about using Google My Maps. This would be fun to use with my learners at the beginning of the year when learning about each other. I could use Google My Maps to show where the students in my class were born or to show how far my students travel to school. Other ways it could be used is when studying a famous expedition or journey or highlighting important places in your local community. I couldn't get over how easy it was to import data from a spreadsheet into My Maps. In our digital bubble groups we made our own My Map. I have embedded my own map below.
Today's deep dive was by Maria about using Google My Maps. This would be fun to use with my learners at the beginning of the year when learning about each other. I could use Google My Maps to show where the students in my class were born or to show how far my students travel to school. Other ways it could be used is when studying a famous expedition or journey or highlighting important places in your local community. I couldn't get over how easy it was to import data from a spreadsheet into My Maps. In our digital bubble groups we made our own My Map. I have embedded my own map below.
Gerhard then gave us a demonstration of some features of Google Sheets that are useful for school. Then we broke into smaller groups based on our level of confidence to learn how to take data from Google Sheets and create a chart from it. This knowledge is going to improve my capability as a professional when recording reading, writing and maths data on my students during the year. My chart is embedded below.
The final session of the day was presented by Kerry who spoke about blogging tips and labels. Labels are useful for both bloggers and their readers as they enable posts to be viewed and searched by label within the blog. When labels are created they appear in the labels gadget in the sidebar of the blog. When you click on a label this creates a unique URL that displays all the blog posts with the label. I have started adding labels on my own blog and I know this will be really useful when showing evidence of teacher practice for Registered Teacher Criteria.
