Digital Immersion (Term 4, Week 7)

Today was our last MDTA Digital Immersion of 2016.

We started our day off with a photoshoot at Point England Beach.. in the wind.. haha!

But we did get some good ones...

We also organised a special morning tea to celebrate the end of an era, and to thank Dorothy and Anne for their support throughout the year. 

 

For the rest of the day, we worked on a CV site. 

Yes, we do already have a CV/resume, how else did we get a job in the first place?

However, we have grown so much throughout the year and need a way to show off our skills and achievements, hence, we created a site. 

Here is mine. 

Feedback welcome of course! 

Digital Immersion (Term 4, Week 4)

Today at Digital Immersion we focused on our PCT Sites.

I had stopped using my site months ago, almost like I had made this wonderful thing and fallen out of love with it. It just sat there, neglected.

I googled for inspiration, and had so many ideas however my friend and colleague Heath reminded me to keep it simple and not make it too hard for myself. 

I began with this image.

Then I just went to work, literally working for hours on my site. 

I will not link the site here, as it has private and confidential school documents and information within it that are collected as evidence of various aspects of my professional life, but I will share screenshots of it so you can see the design of it.

The home or 'landing' page

As you click through the bunting at the top, each page is slightly different, however keeps the navigation bunting.

This is the 'Professional Development' page.

This is the 'Goals & BT Meetings' page, with links to Google Docs containing the meeting minutes.

 This is the 'Inquiry' page. Each of these is a seperate doc which details the cycle of inquiry undertaken in that particular learning area/time.

This is the 'Observations' page. 

This is the 'Release Logs' page, with my document linked in.

 This is the PTC's. Each of these 12 criteria open up into a new page, each containing evidence for that criteria, reflections for that criteria, and a link to my blog label streams (note how within my labels I have PTC labels - e.g. PTC1 that you can click, and see every piece of evidence related to that criteria).

At the beginning of the day I hated my PTC Site, but now I rather like it and am quite happy with the bunting design I chose as it makes navigation very easy. The colour scheme is some of my favourite colours (the teal mainly) and I am so pleased we had today set aside to re-develop our sites. 

If any of my school colleagues reading this would like help with your PTC site, please let me know I am more than happy to help! :)

Digital Immersion (Term 3, Week 8)

Today we are learning about Keynote.

This is essentially the same thing as Microsoft Powerpoint and Google Slides. 

Dorothy explained why even though we are 'Googlers' (aka GAFE users), we should know how to use Keynote because when you are presenting at conferences, other schools etc, you can't always trust the wifi (hence Google Slides is out, and since we are on Mac, we can't use PC products)

We spent a lot of time playing around with Keynote, exploring the many aspects it affords the user. Here are some things I made while playing around.

Using masks to shape images

Getting more advanced now...

(This is just a movie I had on my laptop pretending to be played on a laptop screen. In reality, the video is merely layered behind the photo of the laptop.)

My student Hope sharing her message of peace at an overseas temple. 

Again, this is just a photo of her sitting on top of a photo of a temple. 

It's all about layers!

To make an 'end product' to show, I found this photo of my student Hiria.

Then I cropped it, and used the Instant Alpha tool to remove the background. It left me with this image.

(Not perfect, but hey, still learning)

I then used keynote to take Hiria on a bike riding journey.

(Yes, the photo is a weird size on the page so you see a white bar at the top. I didn't want to spend hours and hours fixing every tiny thing when the purpose was just a play-around type activity). 

Keynote is definitely an awesome tool to use for animation and for presentations as well. It gives you WAAAAAY more options than Google Slides do, and Microsoft Powerpoint did as well. It can be used for green screening, animation, editing photos (ala Photoshop style). When being used for an actual presentation, you can pre-time the whole presentation so it autoplays, record audio and pre-time to make a self-running slideshow and much more. 

They are also bringing out an update which allows you to collaborate on Keynote as long as you have iCloud.

I'm not sure how often I would use Keynote to create animations as it was quite time consuming to create a 5 second video, but I would definitely use it more often for other purposes, such as creating unique blogger backgrounds, creating text and transferring it to iMovie or other platforms, and editing backgrounds out of photos.

Digital Immersion (Term 3, Week 7)

This morning we reflected on how we were going with our Manaiakalani Film Festival Movies that we are making, which are due for submission next week. We were given the day last week to film these, and the day today to edit them.

Before we began editing, we connected with Manaiakalani pedagogy and talked about ubiquitous learning.  The whole idea behind this is that learning is not contained within the confines of the school walls anymore - learning is not a 9-3 thing. If we truly had ubiquitous learning, students would be able to be learning anytime, anywhere, at any pace. 

To do this, teachers need to have set up systems so that students know what they are learning and how they are to access it. 

We were asked to reflect on how we as individual teachers are doing this, or maybe not doing this..?

I thought... I don't really do this at all?

I don't give students homework apart from something to read, they aren't allowed to take their netbooks home so they can't work on their in-class work (most of my students don't have a computer at home, or internet, or both), and there isn't any after school learning programmes happening either.

This is food for thought for next year.. What can I do to encourage my students to be learning outside of school hours?

Digital Immersion (Term 3, Week 4)

Today we are discussing developing our own PLN (Professional Learning Network).

As we are digital teachers in a digital world, so it makes sense to connect digitally through a PLN.

We had a Google Hangout with James Hopkins, who is an educator in one of the Manaiakalani outreach clusters. He talked us through how he got involved in Twitter, its benefits etc etc.

One of the main ideas he put across was...

"You need to be who you are going to be, regardless of the platform you are on" - James Hopkins

Meaning.. regardless if you keep your Facebook private and your Twitter professional, you are the same person on both so need to have some consistencies. Having an actual picture of yourself is also a very important thing to have on all your social platforms, as it makes you 'real' and people can actually connect with the real you, rather than a picture of a beach or your newborn baby.

Then we had a Twitter chat #MDTAchat for almost two hours. We were given questions by Anne and we had to respond to these. 

You can read the thread here. 

(Note the Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 at the beginning of the Tweets to see which ones we are responding to)

Reflection

As I am very new to the Twittersphere, and keep my Facebook private (free of kids parents, etc), I think I have made a good start to building my PLN. I share my blog posts onto Google+, and now on Twitter. One thing I need to work on in the future is making more of an effort to comment/repost/retweet other people to build up those relationships. 

Digital Immersion (Term 3, Week 3) - Garageband!

Today we are learning how to use Garageband, with help from a Point England School teacher Rob Wiseman, who in a previous life was a music teacher and audio buff. I took screenshots and screen recordings as we went so I could blog them, as I had zero knowledge to connect to with Garageband and I just knew I would forget everything if I didn't write it down..

He talked us through 

how to get into Garageband 

(which is more complicated than it sounds)

When you open Garageband, you get this screen.

Each of the different buttons shows a different screen when you go into it, so you really need to know what you are wanting to do before going in to it. We went into the 'empty project' button.

Then this opens, and you have to select what kind of music you are going to create - we went with Audio (the microphone). 

It opens up like this. The far left hand box is called your library, the middle 'box' is where your tracks layer up, and the black box on the right is where your waveforms live once you have added audio.

What to do before you do anything!
Change all your settings! Make it how you want.. (And get your head around what is what)

You can alter the key, which here is 'C major', and you can also change the beats per  minute, which here is 120. The Music note and metronome icon on the left hand side mean that it is in 'beats and projects' mode, and can be changed to 'time' mode by clicking it and selecting time.

Rob explained that our laptops will automatically be on 'System Settings', and the audio quality will be better if we go in and change the settings to reflect what microphone/headphones you are using - even build-in output/microphone is better then using System Settings.  (Access this by going Garageband/Preferences).

Each layer of the audio file you are adding is called a 'track' and looks like this in the middle-left of your screen. If you have multiple tracks, you can mute one or more by clicking the mute button, or only allow the noise through headphones. The green bar shown is the volume you are recording - you should aim for the audio to be around that little ball, or slightly higher. 

The '1,2,3,4' on the right hand side gives you a 4 count count-in, so you have time to prepare and take a breathe before starting to talk. The speed of the 4 count will be at the speed of the number of beats, for example mine is set at 120 bpm. If you select the other buttons on the left-hand side, such as the metronome or the tuning fork, you can have those sounds to guide your audio recording.

When recording audio, it creates the waveform alongside your track. The larger the wave, the louder it is; the smaller is it, the quieter the audio is.

Recording Audio
Firstly we just played around with recording...

Then we actually recorded ourselves reading a children's book.

 As you can see, I actually missed a page in the book and had to add that section in. It was hard to try and make my voice the same volume and pace! I also (purposely) took lots of deep breathes, read it wrongly etc so I then had to practice editing those parts out.

Editing in-track

  

The button on the far right-hand side with the camera and music note icons allow you to easily access all the audio and movie files on your computer, and drag them into your open project. You can also easily drag-and-drop from your desktop.

To 'cut' or 'split' the audio file, put the playhead where you want to cut, go to 'edit' and select 'split regions at playhead'. Also de-selecting 'Snap to Grid' makes editing audio easier. 

For super-fine editing, select the region you want to edit, double click or press 'E' and a separate, more detailed editing box pops up at the bottom. Hold your cursor inside the bottom half of the audio track, and it will turn into a cross, allowing you to click and drag sections of the audio to then edit.

By clicking any track and hitting ‘B’, you bring up the smart controls at the bottom of your screen. The reverb and ambience on the right hand side, when dialled up a little bit can make your audio sound much better e.g. giving the illusion of space between the voice and the microphone, which makes the voice sound better.

Compressor - mediates your wave volumes to make them more even.

By keeping a track selected, you can change the voice by playing around with the 'voices' inside the library. If you have exited the library, press 'Y' to bring it back again.

Well, that was a very detailed note-taking of our Garageband lesson with Rob! Here are some shortcuts for Garageband version 10 that Rob gave us. Thank you so much Rob, I literally knew none of this without you! And thank you viewers who made it to the end haha, hope you learnt something new!

Digital Immersion - day #18

Today I finished my interview video. It's not perfect, but enjoy!

Digital Immersion - day #17

Today we discussed interviewing ourselves as a reflection on the first 6 months being an MDTA.

We were given prompts to consider - 

• Introduce yourself and your teaching context
• Who are you as a teacher? (Brief description of your beliefs as an educator)
• Why did you apply for the MDTA programme?
• Describe the opportunities that have contributed to your learning so far e.g. enablers, digital immersion, university study, co-teaching, school, being part of a wider community of learning, growing your PLN.
• How are you approaching challenges? (strategies, recommendations, support, collaboration)
• Wrap up with a personal anecdote from your experiences so far this year and what you are looking forward to/next steps

I videoed my interview myself, and began editing the video, but needed footage from my school and of my students.

Whilst filming, I kept getting distracted, annoyed at myself, forgetting what I was saying, stuttering etc, which made editing very annoying! It was a lot harder than I thought it would be to interview yourself. Even writing the script, so I had some rough idea of where I was going, was conflicting and took over an hour.

Here is a bloopers real I made to show just how hard this process was..

Digital Immersion - day #16

Today we made screencasts explaining how students access their learning through our class sites. This is a demonstration of Manaiakalani pedagogy and principles. My video shows the 'learn, create and share' pedagogy, and as the site is a public site, all learning is visible to anyone anywhere. 

Click here to explore my syndicate site.

It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, to try and explain everything necessary, without waffling about nothing, without it taking more than 3 minutes (optimum attention span time). I also had to record it four times, as my audio kept dropping out for no reason. 

Digital Immersion - Day #14

Today we focused on making stop motion movies. 

A stop motion movie, is where you put together HEAPS of still photos and it creates a movie.
You take a photo, move the props ever so slightly, then take another photo.. again and again and again and again.

Stages of progress

1. Create a plan - what is going to happen?

2. Create your movie set

3. Set up camera on tripod

4. Start taking photos! (Keeping in mind that each photo will show for 0.1 seconds, so take it slow and take a lot of photos!)

5. Get photos off camera, onto laptop

6. Import files into iMovie

7. Edit, add sound effects, etc.

8. Remove photos with your hand in them... (whoops!)

I had a lot of photos where my fingertips stuck into the photo, so I had to go through my movie frame by frame and delete them, like these ones... 

That took a looong time haha. And unfortunately there was a 20 seconds (ish) section where I just couldn't edit it to get my hand out, nothing worked.

The movie I chose to make was made with trains I borrowed from my nephew. It is to show students how making a simple mistake, and doing nothing about it, can make it into a HUGE mistake and sometimes, a disaster, so we should always try to fix our little mistakes before they turn into big ones.

Details of my process..

Taking photos - 30 minutes

Getting photos onto laptop - 1 hour (there was alot of photos..)

Editing - 2 hours

Total number of photos used - 708

Here it is - hope you enjoy!

End of Term 1 - reflection and next steps

Today marks the end of Term 1, 2016. I have had many congratulations this week for surviving my first term, without any sick days as well!

It had been an awesome journey thus far, I have learnt an incredible amount and feel as if I am a different person now then I was at the beginning of the term.

There are some things I personally feel I need to work on next term, which include

-using more DATs to get a bigger shift with my learners 

(I feel like I focused a lot this term on settling in, getting used to the school, building relationships etc that I didn't push my students as much as I could of)

-being more pro-active with my university readings 

(as I have really let this slip this term and have been doing them at 11pm the night before, or during lunchtime the day of class)

-doing more things for me 

(I have stopped going to dancing and no longer have anything I do just for 'me')

As I have been reflecting on my journey this term, I also wanted to see what my students thought about it.

I sent them a Google Form which they filled out. The questions were mostly about their own learning and responses to what we have learnt and what we will learn next term, but I added two questions just for my own interest. Here are their responses...

Ah, the honesty of children...

I thought it was interesting that they said they wanted me to read with them more, because I did at the beginning of the term and it seemed to be boring for them.. Yet they want it. So, reading from a novel everyday it is!

One student said 'explaining to us the meaning of the problem'. This is something I am already working on, and talked to the students about how I need to get better at this with their help (see here). But I am glad that he pointed this out so I don't forget - I'm not accountable just to myself anymore, my students want to see my progress too!

I also love that one student said 'she can get better at learning more and more'. This reflects how I have encouraged a growth mindset with my learners and been open about how I am a learner in our team as well as they are! Yay for culturing a positive learning culture.

Time to take a wee break before really knuckling down next term!

Digital Immersion (day 10)

Today we continued working on our site that we will be using for next term. 

Mine is based around our inquiry topic,

Reading for leisure, writing for pleasure

This week I added another page, as I have been thinking a lot about how we assess students and the students awareness of the assessments we are doing of and for them. I decided I wanted to do a rubric based around the key competencies, as we don't refer to these a lot in our class and that is something we need to work on. 

How this works is that the student will circle or highlight which level they think they are at for each of the key competencies, and write a comment about how they feel they did overall for each one. Then the teacher will circle or highlight where they feel the student was working at, and leave a comment as well. This becomes a discussion tool for next learning steps for the student, that aren't based around curriculum levels or specific subject-specific learning goals. 

I personally feel like this will encourage a growth mindset in our classroom, as their assessment is no longer enforced upon them, they become a part of it. They are no longer passive, but active in their own assessment of their learning. It gives them back the ownership of their own assessments.

By assessing their learning outcome against the key competencies rather than a skills based rubric, we show that the task (in this case, an E-book) was not an end in itself, but a way to develop skills in the student. It makes the assessment about the student's growth, rather than the quality of their outcome or their ability to read or write, to draw, to paint, to 'do' the thing they had to do.

The 'next steps' for the learner are then a development of themselves,  as they move along from levels 1-2-3, instead of task focused assessment which would leave them with nowhere to go when the 'unit' of work is finished.

More about key competencies for my non-teacher followers can be found here

Digital Immersion (day 9)

Today we began making our sites that we will use for teaching and learning in Term 2.

Here is my site.

It is built around our inquiry topic for term 2, which is

Reading for leisure, writing for pleasure

I played around a lot with this site, trying to get things where I wanted them to sit and creating the supporting HTML for my design. Over the past two weeks we have revised a lot of the things we learnt about HTML, especially the use of tables to hold content. My Inquiry site is made entirely using HTML formatting (rather than WYSIWYG formatting) which is quite an accomplishment for me. It is very helpful to refine my skills by creating different layouts, changing/merging cells in invisible tables, set theme colours, fonts and styles to override the automatic formatting.

Not to say I am an expert, certainly not. This page I literally scraped and started again, four or five times. It was difficult to get the page to do what I had in my head (diagonally downwards, L to R) using HTML. In the end, I discovered the best way to do it was to have invisible cells either side of each piece of content, and change the width of those cells to make each one sit either hard left, center, or hard right accordingly. I got there in the end, but no small feat!

I'd love to see what you think of this site.

Constructive criticism welcome! 

(Remember that this is made for my own learners, who are 6-9 years old and who are very new to using technology for learning)

Digital Immersion (day 8)

Today in our digital immersion, we collaborated on a current events site, that when it is finished, will be gifted to the teachers of Manaiakalani for them to use, and to use a template as well.

This is our site.

As you can see, each section is a different current event, designed around a different group of learners/learning age.

This is my page - be sure to scroll down!

At a surface level, I have created my learning based around the changing of China's one child policy. Although this is not a current event in April 2016, I felt that it was an interesting enough of a story and had enough meaty content that I could relate to my learners, so I chose it anyway. I have included a full weeks worth of planning, learning outcomes and success criteria, and all the resources you would need to complete this study down the bottom of the page. 

At a deeper level, unseen from the naked eye, is the cementing of my own knowledge by using HTML code to create this page. I also used tables to structure my content, and then had to revise how to make the borders invisible, change sizes of cells, merge cells, add rows, add colour to cells etc.  None of the formatting on that page is pre-made, I created it myself.

I am quite proud of this site, as it not only cemented my own knowledge and challenged my HTML abilities, but is now a resource I can use in my school and class, and others can use as well.

Digital Immersion (day 4)

Today we talked a lot about Google Sites, and touched on other background things such as writing HTML and embedding outsider gadgets.

As I use a ready-made syndicate site at school, and my PRT site was made from a template, I have not made a site from scratch before. It may seem a bit bland to make a 'sandpit' site, one designed purely for someone to play around it, for hours, but it afforded me a lot of learning opportunities.

I now know how to create a site, change all of its settings, layout and design features, turn particular features on/off, add content from many sources and then 'bling' it up (aka making it pretty).

It will be awesome to create on I can use for my learners, as I can design it in such a way that makes sense to myself and my learners.

I also learnt a little bit about how to read, write, edit and embed HTML code.

Here is a little Youtube explanation of what HTML is.

Note: this Youtube video is inserted into this blog post using HTML! 

We played around with inputting resources from different sources into a Google Site, and shared these with each other. 

Lecture #1 (740)

Today was our first lecture as part of the MDTA programme and I am feeling inspired!

I thought it would take me a long time to get back into the swing of learning 'lecture style' after not having been in lectures since October, but no way! 

First Rebecca talked us through the purpose of our paper (EDCURRIC740) and we discussed accelerating learning; the teachers role, the students role, 'the black box', effective teaching and critical thinking. These all related to our paper 740 but also our daily classroom teaching.

Next Nina Hood got us to do a good ole' pen and paper survey. When I do these, I tend to go with my first thought and not over-analyse the statements or why I am choosing what Im choosing. 

Here is mine -

Click here for some of the discussion points for each one.

If you made it till the end, congratulations! I hope you were inspired as I was to use technology in its best way, selecting the best tools for each purpose, and to not forget some students are going to prefer to keep the ole' pen and paper, and thats okay too!

(Digital Immersion day 3) Google Certified Teacher Level 1

Today is the day 3 of Digital Immersion and we are sitting the Google Exam (Level 1).
It is a end product for the Fundamentals course we did throughout summer and over the past few weeks.

Concentration at its finest - Photo credit to Anne Sinclair

The exam consists of 20 multi-choice/drag and drop type questions, then 11 scenarios. In each scenario, there are multiple tasks you have to complete. These scenarios take you through all different aspects of the Google for Education tools, including forms, sheets, calendar, docs, emails, classroom, etc. Even though I completed the Fundamentals course, I still learnt things for the first time as the exam walks you through step by step what it wants you to demonstrate.

Here is my certificate and the badge I can now add to my blog, emails etc.