Digital Fluency Intensive

Dealing with Data | Week 4

Learn, Create, Share

We connected with Manaiakalani's pedagogy this morning, and Dorothy spoke to us about sharing. She spoke about the fact we have been sharing since the beginning of time, and that we are only constrained by time, place, and people. She talked about Manaiakalani embracing the power of social media and taking what we already have and harnessing the power of an online audience for our learners. We have always had an audience with our learning, including the class, school, local community. Manaiakalani have embraced the power of online users, and provided children an opportunity for a real, authentic, audience. 

Dorothy emphasised that it's not the connecting and sharing that changes, but simply the way he do it.

Why do our learners use blogger?

• Blogger resembles the spaces our young people want to be on, functionally
• We are able to provision this legally, systematically, securely
• There is no new sign in required for G Suite users
• Guarantee three check system
• Largest audience reach via Google
• Multi purposed
• Can be used by learners and teachers

Dorothy compared blogger to the vehicle we practise our drivers test in. It's not the flashest vehicle, but we have to practise on the road in order to become 'good' drivers. Just like driving on the road, students need to practise contributing to their online community, in order to become cyber safe.

Hāpara

Gerhard gave us some tips for Hāpara, which were very useful. I didn't know you could search for someone or drag a students' tile to the top of the page! 

Google Forms

Venessa talked us through google forms, which is great because I've never made a form before. It looked very simply and easy to navigate. We then split into our small digital bubbles to create our own google form. Here is my google form I made about our Solar System.

Google MyMaps

Gerhard talked us through Google MyMaps, which I have never used or seen before. He showed us how to use this tool and showed how it can be used for teaching measurement and comparing the growth in scales. We moved into our small digital bubbles and had some time to create our own map.

Google Sheets

Gerhard took us through a Deep Dive into Google Sheets and how we can use it effectively as educators. I really enjoyed the freeze feature, as this makes it so much easier to keep track of learners across different curriculum areas.

We split into small ability-based groups to work through the features of Google Sheets more carefully. Vicki was very helpful and showed us how to freeze rows and columns, find averages and sums of data, as well as create and input graphs or charts into the sheet.

Blogging Data

Dorothy talked us through the statistics available behind the scenes on blogger. I didn't realise how many amazing statistical analysis' were available on blogger itself! Dorothy really made me consider the authenticity of our online audience and our learners creating content that they actually want to share and talk about. This also made me think about the importance of time, and giving my learners time to explore other blogs and contribute to their own blogs.

I decided to analyse my own professional blog, and I was very surprised! I started my blog in 2018, which was my second year as a teacher and I had 56 blog posts! In 2019, I only published to my blog 18 times, and so far in 2020, I've only published to my blog 3 times. Take a look at the graph I made using Google Sheets and Google Draw.

Today's session has really rounded out my understanding of Manaiakalani pedegogy, as we've now covered Learn, Create, and Share. When my school first started the journey with Manaiakalani, I didn't have a clear understanding of Manaiakalani or their pedagogy, which made me very hesitant to embark on a journey that I had little understanding about. 

Now that I've had the opportunity to participate in the DFI course, it has really highlighted the Manaiakalani philosophy, and I am so thrilled with this opportunity. Manaiakalani really does have our learners at the forefront of their pedagogy, and everything is given serious thought and consideration. I really value the learning and professional development that we get to explore as educators through DFI, to enhance the learning experiences for our students as well as providing us with the tools to make teaching life more efficient.