Ubiquitous Learning

Anytime - Anywhere - Any pace from Anyone.

I really like the idea of any pace - being able to rewind learning (if it is worth learning, it's worth capturing to make it accessible to more learners) to suit yourself and being able to speed it up has been so very helpful and I can see that is a huge benefit for my learners. Not only has my confidence grown I feel pretty proud of how much I have learnt over the last 9 weeks.

The benefits of ubiquitous learning is evident in the data showing that students who have the access to a device and internet is huge. Technology enables.

Reflective questions:

What are you proud of? 

I think I am most proud of how much I have learnt in such a short time. COVID helped me in that was as I had to upskill pretty quickly to be able to provide the online opportunities to our students. Also I was so pleased to have had a years worth of Manaiakalani training under my belt. I think it was very fortunate that we were in such a great programme. I know a lot of teachers who in no way felt as prepared for the online world as I felt I was.

What do you regret? 

I feel I worked very hard over the first Lockdown, through the 'holidays' and then into the new term and then back at school. I didn't feel like I let myself have a break and that may be what is contributing to how exhausted I feel today (maybe that was the exam - but who knows) I wish i'd taken time to smell the roses!

What have you taken forward into the 'new' era of schooling especially to support ubiquitous learning? 

I think all the skills I picked up over the lockdown time have continued as we have come back to school and strengthened as I have done the DFI.

Level 1 Google Exam

That was an intense 3 hours! I had 10 mins to spare. I felt reasonably well prepared and was able to navigate most of the questions but I felt quite frustrated as things wouldn't load which took up time and added to the stress of it all but apart from that it was not to bad! I have certainly learnt a lot both today and over the last 9 weeks.

Week 8 - Computational Thinking

Empowering children and whanau to change their circumstances is important. The devices are not "just to tool." It is about overcoming barriers of distance and time (NCZ)

Empowerment is about voice, ownership, and choice. If they didn't like what the teacher was offering they simply don't engage. This is also true about face-to-face learning. This is when you are dealing with behaviours and other actions that students display when they didn't like what the teacher was offering - how do we change that? We have to look at ourselves as teachers as that is the only thing that we can change and then in turn empower and change our students.

It is important to think of the things that disempower families and then in turn our students? Some include ... money, renting or owning, health, education etc. All these things are out of our control as teachers, so we need to look at the things we can control to make the difference!

Becoming digital was a potential game-changer for people to be able to take control and be empowered.

Ping-pong - if we teach our children 5+ a day challenge - that is children to have 5 interactions during a conversation. Training the children to do this is important - it improves oral language. Blogging is a wonderful way to practice this.

Computational Thinking within the new Digital Technologies Curriculum 

For students to tell their story, have their voice and be creators and directors of their own learning.

If we have digitally fluent teachers we will have digitally fluent students and being agile, able to collaborate with others working side by side working together.

The Future of Tech and what that means for our tamariki ... so interesting seeing all the massive leaps that are being made right now. I was particularly disturbed by the treatment of the dog robot (obviously to show what it can do) but am unsure why it evoked such a strong feeling. This led into the moral machine activity - another equally disturbing position to be in! Not only do we need to have digitally fluent students, but ones with good character!

Getting creative with coding!

First I tried coding with Minecraft. I thought I needed to get my head around this, as this is what my students are so into at the moment. It was much easier than I thought and I can see why they love it so much. In our Digital Bubble we talked about how the students get into that flow and now I can see why some find it so difficult to stop when it is time. I will take that more into account from now on.

Next, I had a go at Flappy Bird - that was great. I think that I will be trying that as a Choice and Challenge (opt in activities) session next week.

Flappy Bird in action!

Week 7 - Devices

Today we talked about the devices available to the students in our studios as well as the tools that they use on them. We looked at Chromebooks and iPads which was really valuable for me as we have both devices in our studio - Year 2's have iPads and Year 3's have Chromebooks. We also looked at the Cybersmart aspect of the Manaiakalani programme and how important it is that the students understand that they are leaving a digital footprint for all to see.

Cybersmart
This aspect of the Manaiakalani programme empowers our learners and introduces them to the use of powerful, positive, and proactive language and the impact it has on their audience.
It is all about keeping our students secure and making sure their actions are positive, thoughtful and helpful.
There is a huge focus on the positive - be internet awesome!

Cybersmart is a whole school focus on smart learners, footprint, relationships which grows over the years. Students are learning to connect and collaborate as they create their digital footprint. Students have a responsibility around sharing content that they are proud of and that their whanau is proud of when posting and commenting. It is great to see that what they share has value and it is important to include and engage parents in the process.

The idea from this programme is that they can take all they have learnt in the cybersmart programme through the years into their adult lives.

The focus is on the POSITIVE - this then becomes the norm.

I am getting better at navigating Hapara. 

The new tips and tricks for me today were:

Smart Share - send files directly to a learners drive.

Class info - a quick look at the email address, changing passwords and add or remove students easily.

Work smarter - if you want to use the teachers' workspace then find one you like and copy it.

One child one device - it is a matter of equity!

Partnership - need to rethink the partnership idea as there are so many different partnerships that we can develop.

Participation - develop our fluency so much more quickly when we all work on the same device.

Protection - with the help of hapara and the Cybersmart programme we are protecting our students as well as empowering them.

The one thing that challenged my thinking here was the removal of the device from a student who is found doing the wrong thing, on the wrong website etc. Maybe it is more important to stress what they need to be doing, focus on the positive and allow them to continue working on their device rather than removing it from them.

Chromebooks 

After not really knowing much about Chromebooks and trying to do a lot of troubleshooting with the students on my MacBook instead of dealing with the Chromebooks I realise how difficult I actually made it for myself. It was really great to do the Digital Dig - a first for me. I learn a lot and became really familiar with the Chromebook and think I can help the students a lot more without feeling the frustrations that I was feeling before.

iPads 

Need to set up good routines and iPad safety. Referring to the Kawa of care is a great way to do this and using Explain Everything to create lessons to support your teaching of this is a smart way of introducing both things at the same time.

Explain Everything I still find it quite tricky to get it to do exactly what I would like. It seems a bit clunky but I just think I need to practise using it more. I could not work out how to erase the recording that I was not happy with but I will explore that more as I think it is important to have that as a feature for the things I create (rewindable) as well as for the students to use easily.

Week 6 - Enabling Access - Sites

Being connected

The ability to connect is extremely powerful and being able to go digital has made such a difference for us personally as well as a school community. We all know how important it is to connect with our students. This is another layer of being able to do this especially in terms of what has happened this year with the lockdowns. However, we can be thankful for the richness that having the ability to connect through Google Meet has bought to our relationships with some of the students and their families.

Here we are on a Google Meet during the lockdown.

Being part of the manaiakalani group brings a different dimension to making connections with other teachers. It strengthens our professional relationship and builds collegiality. The shared language of "learn, create, share" brings us closer together as well but it does need to be a two-way street and there are lots of opportunities to share, e.g. toolkits, cluster sites, twitter feeds etc. that we can use.


Why use a Google site?

A well developed and thought out site will contribute to causing accelerated shift!
It is a -
- Purposeful approach to the visibility of teaching.
- Can provide rich multimodal opportunities
- Allows a degree of student choice and collaboration
- Empowers learners that can access learning at any time

A few things to consider on a google site is the consistency across the school, how visually appealing it is and to make sure that it functions well.

Evaluation of sites
We then looked at a number of sites as well as looking closely at our own studio site. My goals for this session was to make sure that the site was inviting, to check all the links, to embed slide shows instead of using the raw link and to check with my studio team as it is our website for our learners.
Studio Site


Hapara hot tip
Student dashboard - great tool to introduce to the Year 7/8 and upwards. Learners have the power of seeing what their own workflow looks like!

SPAM
Get this under control by marking any obscene comment as 'spam' and follow the process to try to reduce any unwanted comments on our blogs.

DFI Week 5 - Collaborate - sites

This week we looked at Collaborate.
To me this means sharing and being able to see things that we need to see to grow our learning. I really like the idea that learning is a journey for all of us and that we learn as much from our failures as we do from our successes. Troubleshooting is such a valuable opportunity so instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, see it as an opportunity.

Visible Teaching and Learning
Visible is something you can see! Very simple!
It needs to be visible to our students as well as the whānau and our colleagues - this is what it means to be collaborative! We need to open up the learning journey for our students and their whānau so that they know what is going on, we have equity and more success. We need to make it less like a maze and more obvious for them without the barriers of passwords or permissions.

Multi-Modal
This is the lynch-pin to teaching and learning online. It needs to take into account all the different learning styles and preferences when designing our learning sites. We need to cater to all the different students, have a differentiated approach, and learning needs to be rewindable.

Hapara Hot Tip #4
Make sure that the "sharing" tab is empty. The students should be filing their documents in the right place every time they do something. Children should not make folders as we lose visibility.


MultiText Data Base
We need to engage our readers and this is a way to do it. T-shaped literacy needing eyes on text. We need to go 'wide' and 'deep'. Going 'wide' by engaging the students to look at a variety of texts as well as going deep into the main text that you need the students to read.

I think that this way of planning reading is really engaging for our learners. We use a google slide to structure the reading for the week but I think we can go even deeper and wider using the ideas from this data base as well as adding to it.

Google Sites
It is really important that what we do digitally needs to work for our learners. They need to be hooked into their learning, be able to access what we are providing for them digitally which means that our sites need to be clear and simple.

Learning on our sites needs to be engaging, personalised, accelerative for students, and empowering for our students.
So what is important?
THE HOOK! We need to hook students in and draw them into the learning and this is competing with the all the other things in the digital environment. Our site needs to be a dynamic place with students wondering what is on there today and being motivated to go and have a look.
This is the site that I made today.
Reading Site

DFI Week 4 - Dealing with Data

Today we looked at ways to use data to inform us about our learners, ways to collect and organise data, as well as how important the 'share' part is in the cycle of 'Learn, Create, Share.'

 The Hapara hot tip showed us how to easily see which of our students had their blog posts commented on and how long ago. This will help to focus our commenting to make sure there is an even spread as well as see who has made a blog post recently and who may need help with this.

Share. The ability to share using the digital platform is enhanced by its speed and amplification. It is our natural inclination to want to share and being able to do this digitally means there is a global audience. Getting to the 'share' stage of the 'learn, create, share" cycle is important as it acknowledges that a piece of learning has been finished. This is an important life skill and is also often a starting place for new learning.

Why Blogger?

- Its functionality is similar to other social media platforms.
- Its legality, systems and security.
- It has the same google sign in.
- It has the 3 check system.
- Its large audience.
- It uses the same platform for both teachers and learners.


 Google Forms - This was a good refresher for me on remembering to use Google forms to get information from the students. I think it will be a very useful tool to use for gathering data, such as finding our prior knowledge about a topic, using forms as follow up reading activities to gague understanding of texts and getting the students to create their own google form to show what they know by creating surveys and tests for others.

    My maps - I think this will be a very engaging tool that the students will love to explore and create with. It would be very useful as students will be able to show their understanding about a place and with the ability to add information and pictures it.

I have always dreaded google sheets and in the past had forced myself to use them as they suited the majority of my team and allowed us to have a lot of information in one place. After today I feel a lot more confident about using them.
Top Tips
- Lock your rows and columns by hovering over the thick lines in the top first cell of the sheet  until you see the hand and then select what you would like to lock.
- Select multiple cells by clicking on the first cell and then going to the end cell and holding down shift before clicking.
- Resizing - select all rows or columns that you want to resize and then use the arrow to drag it to size.
- Drag handle - this is useful to put the same formula into multiple consecutive rows or columns.
- Hide rows or columns to protect information.
- Protect parts of a document so that they can not be changed.
- Explore tool to get other charts.
- Click chart to make 3 dots appear in top right-hand corner - option to move to own sheet.


Using data to make meaning ...
Using data to analyse student or class blogs to create a sense of ownership and accountability about how much you are blogging. You can look at visitors to your page and even track who is visiting on My Maps. This would be fantastic learning for any student. Here I looked at Candice's blog and analysed her average monthly blogging total.

DFI Week 3 - Media

Today we talked about how important the 'create' opportunities in the learning environment are to students and that often this is the part that gets left behind. We need to refocus on this aspect of learning.

It's all about the HOOK and engaging our students so that they find the academic side of things exciting both behaviorally and cognitively. Young people want to create, and this is what excites and empowers them.

"Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators."

Dorothy reminded us about a documentary called 'The heART of the matter' which I have watched before. I remember how inspired I felt, how ripped off I felt because that was not my school experience and the questions it raised as to how I could do this for my current students. I want my students to be saying things like, "... school is wonderful and I just want to be there." I know this is a good conversation to have with my team to see what opportunities we can create for our students to become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators.

 The Harpara hot tip helped me realise how to drag priority learners to the forefront. Also creating groups will be very useful in our studio when we are working specifically with our literacy or maths groups. This will make it easier to see what they are doing and use the guided session a little better.

I became familiar with google draw during lockdown while trying to create presentations for students that they could complete at home but it was very dependent on what device they had access to and when we got back to school I found out that you could not access this on the iPads. So it went to the back of my mind. But trying again today I think it could be a very useful tool and I am going to try and find out how to utilise it more in the studio.

I think it could be a very useful tool for a creative activity based around our science learning making Battle-vore cards as we learn about habitats and foodchains.

I think the main thing that I realised about 'media' is how much we use it in our studio and how useful it is to help with making learning more engaging for our students. What they can see in a well thought out and presented video is ten times more engaging than listening to the teacher drone on about the same things, plus they can do it in their own time and rewind it whenever they need to.

Today I learned how to add the whistles and bells to the slideshows that we use for independent learning in our studio. I can now easily add sound. video and hyperlinks to our slideshows making the learning more accessible, rewindable, and engaging.



I also learned about creating a playlist in YouTube. We use a lot of YouTube clips to hook our learners into our writing, inquiry, and maths by putting the video into our Google Slide deck but the problem was that all the ads and other, sometimes more interesting, videos popped up enticing them away from the intended viewing. I will be using the playlist feature more to see if we can stop this from happening.