Digital Fluency Intensive Session 7

Today our DFI was on Devices. After connecting with Kelsey and my team I started to update my blog by adding gadgets to make it funky- what do you think?

We had a Chalk and Talk with Fiona about Cyber Smart. She reiterated that it is important for learners to be at the centre of this Maniakalani Pedagogy. Cybersmart empowers learners to be smart in a digital environment.

2012 became a pilot year for Maniakalani. For it to be implemented Cybermart needed to be a whole school focus. Planning needs to be collaborative in order to identify Cybermart categories that are priorities for our schools and learners. It needs to involve planned and deliberate teaching, relevant and real scenarios as a part of an existing programme of learning. Fiona mentioned that as we as educators become more familiar with Cybersmart ideas then our learners can connect clearly with the too as opportunities for learning. 

After this, we had a ‘Deep Dive’ with Gehard around Hapara Teacher Dashboard. I am quite familiar with the Teacher Dashboard as we use it frequently. To monitor students on devices and to access students documents from their Google Drive. It is an incredible tool. I learned last year how to lock in students on to particular tabs (focus session) for those ones who needed it. 

Hapara Teacher Dashboard empowers visible teaching and learning. It is a powerful tool which allows us visibility into the learning of our students. We discussed all the tabs and how they help us. Everything within our student’s drive appears on our dashboard tab. It reminded me the students never actually have to manual share documents/slides to us, as long as they are put into the folders we can access it. As teachers, we need to teach children to put everything into approximate folders to help our workflow. There is also under the ‘sharing tab’ an unshared part where you can see documents that have not been put into folders. Could dedicate 10 mins before morning tea on a Friday- put up on the screen and say that whenever children have nothing in the ‘unshared tab’ they can go to morning tea. I learned that you can drag children (perhaps of concerns) up the top and this won’t affect anyone else’s view of the dashboard.

We had an explore session with Kelsey where we did a ‘Digital Dig’ around using a Chromebook. We even used a Chromebook simulator (so cool!). Chromebooks confuse me so this was great to learn all of the shortcuts. 

After this we discussed iPads. This was helpful to me with a year ¾ hub. Our year 3s are on the iPads and year 4s are on Chromebooks. I feel as though I know a lot more about the Chromebooks compared to iPads so this session was really helpful. We learned how to set them up for the next which we have done.

We looked at the app ‘Explain Everything’ which is an iPad app. This was great as it was something I wanted to know more about using with my year 3s. We learned how to create a whiteboard project and how children upload tasks to explain everything.

See my screen classify video below on a talk through the Manaiakalani iPad site.