Today is the final day of DFI...Yay, I survived! We began by breaking into our digital bubble groups for the last time to discuss our WWW. I was feeling the best I'd felt in the whole 9 weeks...calm and confident that I'd done all I could to revise for this exam.
Dorothy began speaking about today's Manaiakalani pedagogy, ubiquitous learning; learning that can take place anytime, anywhere at any pace from anyone. In essence, what this means is that learning can take place outside of the school day - digital technology turbo charges the learn, create, share.
The next part of today's agenda was sitting the Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam. I have to say that this experience was one of the more stressful experiences of my life! I was so thankful to have the support of my colleagues Michelle Neki and Venessa Davan in the same room with me to keep me calm. I'm very happy to say that I passed my level 1 exam.
At the beginning of DFI I came with very little experience in the "Google world". I had dabbled in Google Drive, Gmail, Meet, Forms and YouTube at my current Manaiakalani school, but I had not even started posting on my professional blog. The Covid-19 lockdown experience forced me to upskill VERY quickly as my knowledge of using a class site was also limited. After feedback from my DFI colleagues I set myself quite a significant number of goals to improve our class learning site (which is a collaborative one) and over time it has been improved both visually and with ease of use. I am now moving towards sharing my long term planning with my learners; so far I have included my timetable and weekly plans in reading, writing and maths. I was also fortunate enough to have Manaiakalani facilitator, Donna Yates in my class once a week to teach me and my learners how to use the "Explain Everything" app which I am now using in my reading programme. These are all things that I am very proud of. My only regret is that I hadn't done this earlier so that I was more prepared for what happened when we went into level 4 lockdown. I am now feeling so excited that I am able to take all this new learning into my digital classroom so that I can deliver the digital technologies curriculum to my learners effectively.
