Digital Fluency Intensive Session 1

Kia ora team,

Today we had our first DFI course with Dorothy and Kelsey from Manaiakalani. In my first year of teaching (years 4-6) I gathered a good understanding of Chromebooks and blogging. I was able to learn through Cybermsart with Kelsey ways to teach my students how to use their Chromebooks and their blogs. But I was looking forward to learning new things this year. This year I am teaching in a year 3/4 space where the year 3s are on the ipads and the year 4s are on the Chromebooks.

Take a look at my Screenshot below of everything that I learned on the first day. One thing that I believe has improved my digital fluency and confidence is the use of Google Groups. This allows to streamline our communication throughout the course. Emails from our group leaders and ourselves can be sent via email or posted in our DFI Google Group. This can easily be lost on an email thread especially if there are a large number of emails back and forth. By accessing the Google Group this will allow me to find what I had been missing to avoid confusion. Google Groups can be set up for colleagues, but not my students.

One thing I learned that will be useful for my learners is using the voice typing tool. This will allow me to engage my reluctant writers as this it allows children to record their voice and the text comes up on the doc. The children can then read it back to see if it makes sense and add changes or errors where necessary. As well as this when it comes to a lesson when children need to access a Google Doc, it is important to get them to label their docs with their initials and whatever it is. This makes it easier to look at tabs bar and at all names (e.g. LG Sandpit time). It would be worthwhile to use Hapara as children are doing this. Display it on TV giving positive praise of those who are doing this. Reward those who do it first. Don’t move on until Hapara is full.

I learned how to better organise my Google Drive which in turn will allow me to improve my workflow in my personal life. We did this by setting up user profiles, our bookmarks bar and learning some tips and tricks.

Hope you enjoyed reading. Until next time!