Ninth Day of DFI- External Recognition

 Can't imagine! The nine weeks ended really soon. Today is my last day of DFI course which is an External Recognition Day mainly focused on the Google Certified Exam (3 hours exam). Yay! I made it, I cleared my exam and now I can say that I am a Google Certified Educator now😊. 

What to say! I extermely enjoyed this 9 weeks of DFI learning and making myself Digitally Fluent. I enjoyed each and every session of this course taking up so much of knowledge, connecting with each other. Working with Kerry's Digital Group was delightful. I found a digital teaching quite challenging in this first year of my teaching in New Zealand. Now I am quite confident developing these skills.

I found all the sessions with Google slides, docs sheets, forms, sites so useful and this helped me to develop my creativity and bought effectiveness in my teaching. My students are enjoying exploring their activities in different ways. I have started using Google forms as an Exit ticket for my students' understanding for their topics. I use to add the link of the Google form in hapara workspace, so it is easy for them to access as it is under the each topic they are doing. 

I still need to develop my skills in using Google sheet and coding. I definitely wanted to use these skills in classroom as I know my students would be really interested to learn this. I wish to continue my learning and looking forward more opportunities to connect with more teachers.

Waiting to receive my DFI badge and Google Certified Educator badge and certificate.

https://api.accredible.com/v1/frontend/credential_website_embed_image/badge/39151668?key=dc3ea87f15a91ec019881f77cd4e9ac9d2caae219877a7594ad64856e7944b01 https://api.accredible.com/v1/frontend/credential_website_embed_image/badge/39151668?key=dc3ea87f15a91ec019881f77cd4e9ac9d2caae219877a7594ad64856e7944b01 https://api.accredible.com/v1/frontend/credential_website_embed_image/certificate/39151668?key=dc3ea87f15a91ec019881f77cd4e9ac9d2caae219877a7594ad64856e7944b01

Eighth Day of DFI- Computational Thinking

 Today was the last session of my DFI course which was on Computational Thinking. I had a great experience of technology today where I could learn about coding which I have never done before.

As usual, today's session also started by Connecting with Manaiakalani "Empowered" session- empowering teachers and learners. This was a story from Tamaki. It is very difficult to meet up with daily requirements or feel empowered when your annual income is very low in the expensive city like Auckland. Many families manage to live in one room during winter without any social distancing even when someone is suffering from viruses or bugs because they cannot affort to run the heat pump. It is also found by the researchers that the academic performance of the children in low decile school is almost half a life behind their affluent peers. The Manaiakalanin Program, Manaiakalanini Partners and Supporters, the Manaiakalani Education Trust are all committed to support the learning communities to become empowered. We can actively support Equity and Access and remove barriers to empower people.

The greatest joy comes from EMPOWERING students to discover their courage and teach them to overcome any fear in their life

The next session was on introduction to the future of technology and what it means for our tamariki. It was very interesting to see how can our future job places, communities, and societies look like.

It is important to prepare students for jobs that don't currently exist. We should prepare students for a constantly changing future, the need to upskill and become lifelong learners.

Then we had an introduction to Computational Thinking- Digital Technologies Curriculum to make students know how technology works and how they can use it to solve problems. The digitally capable person can create their own digital technologies solution.

The Manaiakalani Program outreach to digitally fluent teachers and students. Teachers are supported to acquire digital fluency required for effective teaching, planning, assessment and professional learning to deliver the curriculum in a digital learning environment. It is important that students have opportunities to be innovative designers and creators of digital solutions.

Then in the explore session of coding I came across different coding programmes and games created by Minecraft, Scratch and others and later for which we had a create session on developing our coding for learning. I created a coding with Scratch and below is my created coding.

Seventh Day of DFI- Devices agenda

 Today was an exploring day of different kind of devices like Chromebook and iPad which our young learners use.

The session started Connecting with Manaiakalani- Ubiquitous. The main objective of this by Manaiakalani is accessing learning ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANY PACE by ANYONE. It is very important to allow students to continue their learning outside school hours which would be helpful for learners when they are not in class at that particular time. Rewindable Learning is making learning accessible to more learners with different abilities at their own pace. It was interesting to know about the Summer Learning Program organised by Manaiakalani where students learn new things everyday and then post their learning on their blog. This keeps their learning continue.

The session then was on Cybersmart Curriculum. The objective is to make students digitally smart and excellent and using positive language in digital environment.

Cybersmart Program is all about empowering "confident, connected, actively, involved, lifelong learners".

Today the Hapara Hot tips was on Workspace- how we can discover workspace of other educators  filtering by subject or topic. 

Then I came to know about Manaiakalani 1:1 Journey with Chromebooks. The main objective for this is Partnership, Participation, and Protection. Partnership included the huge crowd which is between whanau, community, teachers, and learners.

Partnership was to make sure every learner can participate and support teachers to become digitally fluent when they are in the class of learners all with same devices. Then the protection was to make sure all digital learning is visible and this was done by partnering with Hapara to design teacher dashboard.

The motto of Manaiakalani was also Equity and Access- providing the very best device for learning for every young person. Students started their learning with ASUS netbook from 2010-2012 and then from 2013 they continued their kaupapa using chrombook.

Then we had a explore session on knowing the different features and learning the use of different key tabs of chromebook.

The next session was on iPad which is used in junior classes and we had an explore session on iPad where I learnt use different features of iPad and created an image which is below.

Lastly, I had a create session on Hapara where I learned to create a new workspace by adding the images, title, description, and sections. We use Hapara workspace for Learn create and share the learnings in our school. So I am always interested to learn more about Hapara. Below is the workpace I have created in the session.

Sixth Day of DFI: Enabling Access- Sites

 In every session of DFI, I feel like I am enhancing my learning and skills. In this lockdown learning I am getting some time to do some work differently for my students though I am not able to use much of those learnings at school currently. We had a wonderful session today on Enabling Access to Sites.

We were introduced to how Manaiakalani works for the objective 'Connected'. Manaiakalani is working to connect between schools, community, nation and world and the cluster has grown up connecting different schools around the nation. Manaiakalani program has created multiple layers to connect for teachers and tamariki as connection is very important to keep sharing our learnings.

Leading Learning using Google Sites: 

Using Google sites to empower visible learning for our Digital Learning Environments has a great purpose. Learning should be accessible anywhere, anytime, at any place supported by a rewindable learning. Making planning and teaching visible and personalising learning via multiple opportunities to access content and the learning process is very important.

My goal was then to work on my class site making my teaching and learning visible for everyone, making my site more visual appeal to hook my learners and making all the contents easily accessible. My work is still in progress and you can have a look on to my site I have created so far by clicking on to the image below.

Fifth Day of DFI- Collaborate Sites

Today I had a fantastic session on Collaborate Sites, which can help me to add some creativity to my sites to get my students engaged. 

We started connecting with Manaiakalani 'Visible Learning'. In terms of learning, it is difficult for students to success if they or their whanau do not know where their children are going or what they need to do or what is happening. So it is very important that every part of students' learning should be visible right from planning, process, outcomes till assessment. That is visible teaching should be accessible, available, and advance- should not be a surprise.

Then we had a Multi Modal deep dive session- Engaging the learners by empowering them.

The priority goals are engagement, personalised learning, accelerated achievement, and empowerment. It is very important to create a hook which helps to students get engaged- this can be a Multimodal design for behavioural engagement and Multi-textural design for cognitive engagement.

The I got some Hapara hot tips on the Sharing tab. It was interesting to know how teachers can keep a track on students' learning by checking unshared, public, external and all docs drive on teacher's dashboard and also how teachers can have a quick search for particular topic by using magnifying tool.

The next part was knowing about Google Sites. I got to know about different features like adding a title to home page, changing background, adding additional pages to it with subtitles, inserting button with hyperlink, and adding youtube or google forms in it. 

Then we gathered information and resources to begin with creating our own site. This part was quite interesting and gave me a different perspective to think how I can make my site look creative to engage my students.

Lastly, we created our own Google site with the gathered information. My Google site was created for Smart Media- Fake or Real? Below you can see my created Google site.

Fourth Day of DFI - Dealing with Data

 Today's first session was 'Connecting with Manaiakalani' where the main focus was on SHARE.

Manaiakalani works with learners to raise their achievement outcomes by making them share their learnings. Blogger was chosen as a platform to share. The reasons for Manaiakalani to choose Blogger are it is multi purposed, can be used by learners and teachers, able to provision this legally, systematically and securely, and also it reaches to the largest audience via Google. Sharing is to finish learning.

Then we moved on to Google Forms, where I learned to create my own Google form adding questions and images to it. I just did some basics today, but I would like to explore more with the Google Forms as it would be useful for me and my students in different ways. Below is the image of Google Form I created.

The next session was on Google My Maps, which I found very interesting as I could make my students do some Maths learning of Perimeter and area of the shapes formed by joining different places in the map. Below you can find my learning of Google My Map.

Then we moved on to learning different features of Google sheet which would be also useful for me in my profession to organize with different data of the students. I learned to change the format, add different formulae, filter view, and conditional formatting. I also learned to explore charts for my data set and move it to own sheet which was very interesting. Some additional features then I learned was adding spark line, text wrap, and adding check box.

Finally, we ended up learning how to analyze the blog post on spread sheet. Below is my analysis.

Third Day of DFI- Media

Today's session started with knowing Hapara hot tips- how to view folders and files by sorting out by names in chronological order.

Then I got to know about Manaiakalani Create- Developing creative skills in students can make them better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators. It is very important to give students an opportunity to do something rather than something to learn and doing this increase demand in thinking and results in learning naturally.

Then I got an opportunity to create my youtube channel and my playlist. I then learned about Media- that is how to make a video, where I got to know about some video making tips for a good quality video- using proper light, tripod, clear sound, and videoing in landscape mode. Then we had a session on Google drawing where I learned to insert image, add shapes to the image, insert wordart and change background. And then this is now embedded to my blog page on the right side.

I then learned new things in Google slides which I found would be very useful in my teaching. The below post is the small part which I did for this session.

Lastly, I worked with some shapes- aligning it, changing the colour, rotating them, changing the boundaries. Below is the post for that learning.

Second Day of DFI- Workflow

 Today in second day of DFI course I learned about Manaiakalani working on "Learn Ako". I understood how Manaiakalani is supporting the learning community move from analogue world to the digital world via Evidence-based programme and also increasing teacher effectiveness and accelerating learning outcomes.

My school site has an access to Akoranga Learning Hub where we have an access through all the subject resources link shared by the teachers in school. This means "Learning is to continued". If the students are not able to attend school for some reason, they would always have an access to their learning. Also, this learning in our school is not limited to only students and parents, even the people from outside community can access the learning.

Today I learned about Google Meet, Google Keep, Gmail, Google calendar, and controlling different tables. I really liked an idea of labelling emails with different colours which is helpful to sort out the email I am looking for and also giving a colour code to different events in the calendar and viewing the events by sorting it out by labels. 

I also learned to create a Google Meet invitation. In this I enjoyed recording the video of Google meet with Anusha who is in my bubble group of DFI course. You can see my first Google Meet recording below.

First Day of DFI- Core Business

 My First Day  Learning in DFI

I am glad that I got an opportunity to do a DFI course right in my first year of teaching in New Zealand which is quite different from what I used to do in my 10 years of teaching back in my home country India. I never did digital teaching before, so this was quite challenging for me when I got my full time teaching position in NZ. Preparing and managing different slides, documents is very time consuming for teachers like me who never did this before. Right on the first day I am so satisfied that I am going to learn a lot from this course to make my life easy.

I have always heard about Manaiakalani in my school, but never got to know more deeply about it. So it was a good opportunity to learn about the journey of Manaiakalani from 2006 which is still continuing. It was great to know how the Manaiakalani made an effort in progress in educating young learners and motivating them to engage with curriculum and also providing a model for 21st century teaching and learning.

Getting busy with my full time teaching and never using Google drive before, I never got enough time to explore the features in google drive or google doc before. Learning the use of different features of google drive like organizing your drive and using different tools in google doc was very helpful to me saving my time in my lesson plans and searching my slides and documents. 

Finally, making a blog was an interesting part where I tried to make an invitation. Dance is my passion and I am a trained Bharatnatayam dancer who is looking forward to organising a dance program in future.