DFI Day Nine

Today was our final DFI session of the course. What an amazing nine weeks we have had. Starting in the classroom and transitioning into online learning, just as our students have had to. It has been so great to connect with so many different teachers across the country. We have had teachers from Uru Mānuka, Ōtaki, Te Ara Tūhura and the West Coast. I have thoroughly enjoyed following everyone's learning journeys.

Some highlights of the last nine weeks for me include...

• Understanding how I can work more efficiently and manage my workflow through the use of google apps. Google calendar has become my go-to planning tool. Linking in resources needed for each lesson, getting reminders in advance and sharing an event with teachers that I am collaborating with are what I really enjoy about google calendar.
• Using google keep and google tasks to manage all of those 'bitsy' tasks that need doing - it is a much better way of organising and prioritising. I also love that I can add subtasks under each main task if I need to.
• Google sheets have made my life so much easier. I have changed the way that I am using these. Before DFI I mainly used them to store data/assessment information. Now I am using google sheets to analyse assessment data, sort student information, monitor attendance and track students' blogging to name a few.
• Spending time making a new site and modifying current sites to make them more user friendly and visually appealing.
• Explore the new digital technologies curriculum.
• Developing a multimodel site from scratch.

Some of the things I would like to explore more include...

• Coding - I thoroughly enjoyed learning about coding and experimenting with different coding apps such as Toxicode and Scratch.
• YouTube - this is still quite new for me, but I can see the value in utilising this. Little hacks like how to create a channel, adding to a playlist, ensuring videos are unlisted etc have been really useful.

I cannot wait to get back to school next week and continue to implement the exciting new things I have learnt with my students. It is nice to be able to say that I have finished the DFI course a Level One Google Certified Educator. Such a good feeling!! I will definitely be going for Level 2 in the very near future. It feels like such a long time ago since we started DFI - we have come so far and learnt so much!

Below is a picture from Day One.

DFI Day Eight

Kia ora!

The focus for the DFI Day Eight was Computational Thinking.

We began by delving deeper into the 'empowered' aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa. It is really important that we are very selective about the vocabulary that we choose to use. I hadn't really thought about it before, but the word 'agency' can have negative connotations for students and their whānau. We want students to have the confidence to take charge of their own learning and approach new learning opportunities with a growth mindset.

I love the Pat Sneddon quote that was shared with us today:

Before our session today, I was not very confident in discussing computational thinking. I have a much better understanding of it now.

A question that was posed to us was, what makes a digitally fluent person?

A digitally fluent person is someone that can decide when, how and where how to use certain technologies. Computational thinking is not about learning to think like a computer, but learning to think like a computer scientist.

We had some explore time after Kerry's 'Chalk 'n' Talk' to look through slides 19-22 on this slideshow. Here are some of the cool things that I discovered:

• I had already registered my school google account on the kia takatū ā-Matihiko website, I just need to spend some more time exploring this site.
• On the TKI site, I found a glossary of terms. Definitely, a good idea to familiarise myself with these - some of them I have not heard of before. Here is the glossary.
• I had not seen this doc before, so I spent some time reading through this.

Deep Dive: Future of Tech

Following the deep dive, we had some coding and computational thinking explore time.

Things of the interesting things I explored were:

Minecraft: Voyage Aquatic

Flappy Code

Toxicode

For our create time, we had some time to make meaning of the content we had been given and had a go at making our own code. I have not really done any coding before, so I choose to start with a few Scratch challenges and then had a go at creating my own Scratch project. Check them out!

10 Block Challenge

My own Scratch project

There are still a few things I need to figure out including how to save a project and how to share a project, I had a few issues with this when I was trying to create my own Scratch project.

Once I am a confident user of Scratch, I would like to explore this more with my learners. This was a really useful session and I certainly felt challenged at times.