Dealing with Data

 Day four of the Digital Fluency Intensive kicked off with reflections on what is working well and what people need more help with. It does seem as though people are embracing the learning into their classroom practice and their daily lives.

From that we focused on the third element of the Manaiakalani pedagogy - Share. Share has become an integral part of our lives and sites such as youtube have allowed Share to occur on a wide scale. Social Media apps such as Facebook and Twitter have enabled (and commercialised) the human compulsion to share. Share is not constrained to online however, students will always look for opportunities for the human connection and using the ability to share.

Underpinning the idea of share is the concept of Audience. Students can share with each other, the school, the local community of even globally. Authentic audiences are audiences who make the choice to actively chose to view the content that is being created. Blogging is a great way for students to share their content with the globe. John Hattie notes that the feedback ability of blogging is a powerful enabler of learning for students.

Moving on to our focus for the day of Data, we looked at Google Forms. Forms are a great way of collating data, with a number of different question formats. We were given the opportunity to create our own forms. 

Google My Maps (as opposed to Google Maps) is a really cool new app that I was introduced to. I can see a lot of applications for my class - and I have created my own map (see below). Check out the cities I have been lucky to visit with my wife. 

From here we moved onto google sheets. I feel pretty comfortable with sheets but did learn about options to filter options. This tool enables data to be accessed by the users to be specific to their needs. For example if you had a class set of data and wanted to view boys reading levels, you would be able to do this automatically. There is so much functionality within Google Sheets including the ability to lock data inputting, viewing edit history and the ability to Split Data to columns.

For our afternoon session we took our learnings on google sheets to analyse a students blog. See below the chart that was created based on the analysis of a students blog at Point England School. It is clear that this student likes to blog a lot in the middle of the year, and that 2020 (COVID!) had a massive increase in blogging.

 

Reconnecting with the DFI

 It was great to reconnect for week 3 of the DFI this week. I had done the first two weeks of the DFI in term 1 in Papakura, and today was a change to restart this journey. The learnings that I took from the previous DFIs made me excited to restart.

The focus of the day was on Create. Dorothy remarked early in the day that creativity seems to be dying in the New Zealand education space. She referred to Robin Sutton, Principal of Hornby High who said that "If we are serious about the 'create' component of our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy, then as individual teachers we also need to be serious about our own creativity, We need to nurture it, to not be afraid of it, to invest in it, to invest in ourselves". He is certainly correct, and so today we learnt about some tools to help foster creativity

Google Draw

Google Draw is a fantastic tool for creating content for students and allowing students to create.  The possibilities are endless. Students can create images, bubbles, and can manipulate them into a number of different shapes

Harpara Teacherdashboard

We have been using Hapara at Tamaki for a long time and so I feel very comfortable with its use

Youtube

Youtube has such a vast array of teaching resources. Too many in fact. Today we learned how to create playlists which is a great benefit to any teachers workflow.

Google Slides

Google slides are becoming more and more useful and can be used for more than just presentations. The use of hyperlinks and buttons can create interactive teaching resources for learners. Below is a very simple example that I will continue to develop.