Maniakalani DFI: Day 7 Devices

Over the last 2 weeks I have been putting a lot of things into place. After the session on sites I went through our learning site to make sure everything was working as it should (links etc). I also created a NZ history page on the site that we will be able to add to and use as a resource in the coming years. I also began the process of my students organising their folders in Drive. During our learning conversations I showed parents our learning site and all of the resources that we have on there. I also chatted with my team about creating a Matariki page similar to the history page that I made. They liked the history page and I’ll do a similar one for Matariki.I also created a My Map of New Brighton landmarks for our students to follow on a walking trip we did last week.

This weeks session is all about Devices

As always we started with a check in on how everyone had been going over the last week. I was really interested in another teachers Matariki page they had created on their site, I got some excellent ideas for the page I am planning. Sharon helped me with the issue I was having with downloading photos from my iPad to my Drive, which was a lifesaver.

We then looked at the Maniakalani Pedagogy Ubiquitous

Vicki talked about how the learning we provide should be Ubiquitous and available anytime, anywhere, at any place by anyone. This is all about "Removing the walls of the classroom to allow for learning at anytime, not just from 9am - 3pm. I always refer to the learning during lockdown, but I think this is where the idea of rewindable and ubiquitous learning really came to the fore. We were able to connect with a lot of our learners through our site at anytime. My question that came out of this was "What about those students who are not connected at home?" We were in a relatively good position as we had been using our site and the students using chromebooks for learning. But over the lockdown it became obvious that we weren't really ubiquitous as a good chunk of our learners had to be sent the paper learning pack from the government and were missing out on the more interesting things that we were providing. At school we are lucky to have 1:1 devices, I suppose the question is "What do we do if there is another lockdown?". Do we loan school chromebooks out? Do we find other ways for whānau to get connected? Is the government responsible to find a solution?

Summer Learning Journey Success from Next Foundation

Research shows that providing Ubiquitous learning spaces accelerates the progress of learners that haven't been exposed to learning at home, especially in the lower decile areas. The only problem is that it is these families who traditionally struggle with providing devices and connectivity for the children. Technology allows us to remove some of the barriers and open up a whole new world of learning. In this respect when talking about chromebooks we need to remember:

In our Hapara hot tips we looked at Workspaces, which I hadn't used before. It was interesting to see that cards can be created where students can add resources, which would be beneficial for topic areas such as History, Matariki etc. These workspaces can also be embedded on our site so that is visible to whānau.

The Maniakalani 1:1 Devices Journey chat was interesting as we have found how much easier it is when our students have access to their own devices. The Maniakalani ethos of Partnership, Participation and Protection really underpins what we are aiming for:

"Providing the very best device for learning for EVERY young person"

I found the session on exploring Chromebooks (chromebook simulator) very informative as I often say to the kids "Yours is different than mine, how do you do that on a chromebook? The main thing I took away from this session was that chromebooks are a lot harder to use than my Macbook

We then got to have a session using Explain Everything (Manaiakalani iPad PLD Site ) we don't use this as our students are all on Chromebooks, but it's still great to learn how to use it if I need it in the future.

It was great looking at what students had created from other schools, to show me what our students could do.

This is my first Explain Everything project. I found it very easy to use and I can see how the juniors can use it and how usable it would be for younger children.

Things I'm happy with:

The session on Recording your screen through Screencastify showed me that I was ok with this. I did find out that my Screencastify isn't working properly, which I will get fixed when back at school.

I was interested to revise what I had done with Mark 3 years ago around the Cybersmart Curriculum. We have found over the years that this is a very important part of what we expose our learners to. Our students live in a digital world and they need to know what is appropriate and what is not for them to view online and the fact that their footprint will always be there.

I liked the following diagram which shows us as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cybersafety. We can show them how to be safe and encourage them and their whānau to be responsible online. What underpins us is the technologies that are implemented by schools, BOT's and the ministry (N4L, Hapara etc) to keep the students safe and are educated in the ways of the net.

This session was a good refresher as we have always implemented this with our students.

Things to look at during this week that I'm not clear about:

The afternoon session was to create a lesson using Screencastify, Explain everything of Hapara Workspace

I decided to have a go at creating a Hapara Workspace as I've never done this before. My focus was "Creating Quality Blog posts". This is where I got to after an hour, I was happy with this function and will definitely create some more for the students to use.

Overall reflection of the day.

I found aspects of today's session quite challenging, from certain apps not working as they should to using tools that I haven't even thought about (Workspaces). I will need to play around with this quite a bit to make sure I am using it efficiently before I introduce it to the students. I was also glad to have a play with a chromebook as now I feel a bit more confident in answering questions that they may have. Once again this has been an informative day where I have learnt lots of things I could bring into the classroom.

Thanks Sharon, Emily and Vicky