DFI4 - Manaiakalani - Digital Fluency Intensive Course - Week 4: Dealing With Data

Today's DFI was mostly about data, which I enjoy, so it was a fun day.

Learn

The focus for learning about Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was on the SHARE aspect of the Learn-Create-Share model.

Sharing is all about being connected. Manaiakalani students shared their work more than usual during the lockdown and their writing improved over the year whereas the writing for the whole of NZ had actually slid downwards during 2020.

It is natural for humans to want to share our creative work with each other and it is only the mode which has changed over time - from cave drawings to Tik Tok...

2005 saw the explosion of social media - Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, Youtube - and each platform had a tagline that was all about SHARING. 

Sharing might be taking your book to the principal to get a sticker, having your work displayed on the classroom wall or blogging or publishing online to connect to an external, authentic audience. In English, we spend a lot of time encouraging students to write for an audience where, in reality, their audience has ultimately been the teacher and our red pen or NCEA grade.

Although Blogger is a traditional platform with a number of limitations, Manaiakalani still prefers it for reasons of safety and the ability to monitor content and comments. 

Sharing a finished piece of work is an important life skill and important emotional learning - we need to make sure our students understand the importance of completing tasks and experience the satisfaction of receiving feedback, praise and affirmation.

Skill Learning: Dealing With Data

Today's skill learning focus was on dealing with data using Google Sheets, Forms and MyMaps. We also looked some more at Hapara Dashboard and Blogger. I have shared some of my learning below.

Create

Google Forms

We created a Google Form to just practice the different skills involved. This was a timely refresher for me as I am about to create a survey for our department teacher inquiry. Here is my practice form:

 

This is a link to the summary of responses. I think my favourite part was the pie chart about people's favourite animals:

My Maps - Import Data

One big discovery for today was to realise you could import data to a My Maps layer from a spreadsheet, so that was quite exciting. I did that when creating the map below showing where the course participants would like to go on holiday. My Bubble tutor used the same data set but displayed the school that each participant came from. 

I colour-coded the destinations to show:

Places I have been to

Places I have been very close to

Places I really would like to visit

Places I would go to one day if I win Lotto.

Data Case Study - Google Sheets

Our main creative task for the day was to investigate a student's blogging history. I pulled the archive data from this blog by Molly from Hornby High put it into a sheet:

 

From the data table I created a chart to show the number of blogs per month made by Molly over the period from 2016 - 2021:

 

I put the months in reverse order as this is how they appeared on the blog. There is probably a clever way to reverse the series but I couldn't figure it out!

When I embedded the sheet and graph they were very small and was quite proud that I managed to edit the HTML code to resize both objects.

Share

Google Forms - Sections & Locked Mode

I have used Forms before but I was glad to be reminded about how to create sections and send people to different parts of a form depending on how they answered a particular question. 

A new thing I learned was that if you are using Forms for a test quiz (e.g. junior spelling) you can set it so the student can't have any other tab open to look up answers. To do this, go to Settings/Quizzes - check 'Make this a quiz' and then 'Turn on locked mode' - magic! I will be sharing this tip with colleagues.

My Maps

The map below is not something I created today but I am sharing it as an example of how you can use My Maps to support teaching in English: I created this for a Y10 novel unit I was teaching on Alan Gratz's Refugee. I made this one as a model for the students, who all created their own maps to show the journeys of the three characters throughout the interlinked storylines. This was a good cross-curricular learning opportunity as students were discovering a lot of political geography as well as learning online mapping skills.

Google Sheets

Some cool little tricks I picked up today for working in Sheets:

Use the Crop Sheet add-on to crop a sheet down to a particular range of cells or just the area containing data - this makes it look a lot tidier when you embed it on a blog or site.

That student list which put all the first and last names in the same column so you can't sort by surname...

You know: the moment when you have imported some data from KAMAR or somewhere and it's all there in Sheets and you are looking at those student names all in the same column and you are thinking a word associated with Toyota...? Well, there is a solution! Highlight the relevant column and click on Data/Split text to columns. It will split it automatically for you but you can also tell it to split at spaces or at a specific character. I wish I had known about this one before!

Another reminder of a long-unused and mostly forgotten skill I once had was how to record a macro and, more importantly, WHY I might want to do so. For example, I do a lot of graphs of our literacy and NCEA English data. I was reminded that I can use Tools/Macros/Record macro to record myself formatting one graph from a set of data and then not have to repeat that set of formatting actions again for every single graph I create, instead just running the macro which I have called 'Format chart' or whatever.

The Autocrat add-on would be handy if you are running a conference or workshops etc. It lets you create registration forms that feed back to the responders with documents, folders and links. It can create forms for you, and also when a workshop gets filled it will block the workshop so no more people can register. Aside from the conference/booking functionality, it also allows you to display data from a sheet in a nice-looking table which you can show on a site or in a Google Doc - giving a more user-friendly look and interface. I am wondering if I could use this to help display tracking information for our literacy target students.

DFI3 - Manaiakalani - Digital Fluency Intensive Course - Week 3: Media

I have really enjoyed today's DFI experience. I ignored my gmail and did NOT look on Hapara Highlights to see if my classes were on task and behaving themselves! This made for a much more relaxed learning experience. I am also feeling healthier than last week, which definitely helps.

Learn

Today's learning focus for Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was on the CREATE aspect of the Learn-Create-Share model. The original slogan was "It's all about the hook!" i.e. engagement - bringing joy to our learners and ourselves as teachers by creating. The belief is that creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators.

 "Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

We looked at a clip from the documentary The HeART of the Matter (2016). This film by Luit and Jan Bieringa is a really good reminder of an effort by a group of bureaucrats and arts specialists who set about introducing a "thoroughly bicultural and arts-centred education system" to schools 60 years ago. NZ has definitely had its innovative educators in the past, which is a good thing to remember when we are feeling strangled by the demands of senior secondary assessment and despairing at the momentum of change towards a more creative learning environment.

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn;

and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking;

learning naturally results.” 

John Dewey

Dorothy referenced something Stuart Middleton had written on his blog: "When it comes to learning, if the hands are involved, the head really gets going." In other words, learn by DOING. This is a good reminder that we want our young people to be "creators of content, not merely consumers."

Dorothy: "If we want our students to learn, we need to get them creating, and preferable wrap Sight, Sound and Motion into it."

Reflecting on today's learning from my point of view as an English teacher, I know that creativity is at the heart of my subject: our English curriculum has two strands: one is receptive and critical - Listening, Reading and Viewing - if you like, this is the 'Learn' or 'consume' mode where we act as informed readers and interpreters of texts; the second is productive and creative - Speaking, Writing and Presenting,  the 'Create' mode where we are skilled creators of texts. One is ineffective without the other and the better we become at one, the better we become at the other. The more skillfully I read, the better I write; equally, the more skillfully I write, the better I read. So as an English teacher, the Manaiakalani model of Learn-Create-Share makes perfect sense to me. Texts, whether visual, aural or written, are produced with an audience in mind, after all.

Skill Learning: Media

Today's skill learning focus was on Media. We looked at Youtube, various options for making and editing films and podcasts, Google Drawings and Google Slides. I have done a reasonable amount of creating and editing film and audio files using iMovie and Audible, so I was happy with those parts. Google Drawings is a tool I am not so familiar with, so this was one of my key skill learning moments of the day, along with some new tricks in Google Slides. I have shared my tips and learning below.

Create

Google Drawing

We made a self-introduction image using a template provided. This is my image below.

We then embedded the image on the right sidebar of our blogs as a gadget.

With this task, I really liked the way the instructions were set out in bubbles in the drawing itself, which made it easy to follow and understand without having to refer to a separate tab.

Later we had an opportunity to have another play in Drawing and I made a digital button I could use on one of my class websites:

Google Slides

For our main creative time in the afternoon, we were able to choose between a range of groups looking deeper into Google Slides. I chose a group looking at drag and drop resources.

Here is the slideshow I created, which uses drag and drop to help students learn terms and definitions for literary criticism (although you can't see the drag and drop features in this mode as they are surrounding the slides):

Share

Hapara Dashboard

Attention fellow teachers: did you know that you can move the students around in the Dashboard view? I always thought the only options were alphabetical by first or last name, but you can actually click and drag students' tabs to the top if you want to keep an eye on what a little group is up to! Another trick I already use with Highlights is to reduce my screen size so that I can view the whole class at the same time.

Youtube Channels and Playlists

Although I already have a Youtube channel, I found that I could make some changes to my settings and that I hadn't verified my account. Two important settings for educators are to set the upload default for videos to unlisted, and to turn off comments. Also really helpful is to set the audience for your Youtube channel to "Made for Kids" as this will prevent adult advertising content from being shown.

Playlists are something I already use to group together videos to support a particular unit. For example, when teaching The Hate U Give I began to put together a playlist of videos related to Black Lives Matter (and I see that a whole lot of useful videos I found did not get saved to the playlist!). Here is the link to my Youtube channel.

Another useful thing to pass on from this session was that Jeremy shared with us a playlist of videos to help us prepare for the Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam. If you are new to using Youtube in your teaching this would be a great place to start.

Filming with your phone

Using media that include Sight, Sound and Motion helps engage our students and engage a wider audience. A great tip I picked up today is that when using your phone to video something, whether in a classroom situation or at home, you can create a handy DIY tripod from a paper cup or bulldog clips! This is one I will be passing on to my students as well.

Google Slides

A last little trick for Google Slides, blogs and sites, is to add a bit of interest by using a gif to give the sense of motion and keep the viewer's attention.

DFI2 - Manaiakalani - Digital Fluency Intensive Course - Week 2: Workflow

I've struggled with my second DFI blog post, mainly because I have not been feeling very well so I am a bit low on energy. Along with that, I have been juggling the usual: marking, planning, life in general, etc. Note to self: in future, I need to post my blog on the day of the course, no matter how I am feeling!

The second DFI came around so quickly. Between the first two sessions, I passed on the tip about changing the background colour in docs at staff briefing and tried to get a couple of my dyslexic students to experiment with it, with minimal success. I got rid of a ghost Google profile I had made by mistake a couple of years ago and I also made a Google Group for my department, but mostly it was business as usual and fighting a nasty sinus infection. I was impressed when other course participants reported back on frenetic weeks spent re-organising their Google Drives. My department Drive is pretty well organised, but my own personal Drive remains as chaotic as ever; I shall put that on the 'To Do' list...

Learn

AKO describes a teaching and learning relationship, where the educator is also learning from the student and where educators' practices are informed by the latest research and are both deliberate and reflective. ... 

In te ao Māori, the concept of ako means both to teach and to learn.

(from TKI….)

Today's learning about Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was around looking more deeply into the LEARN aspect of Learn-Create-Share, based on the acronym RATE: Recognise, Amplify, Turbocharge, Effective Practice.

Many will be familiar with the SAMR model, which shows a spectrum of classroom technology integration:

According the SAMR model, some tasks are most appropriately simply digitised (e.g. Substituting the sharing of content digitally for photocopying handouts) while other tasks can be Augmented, Modified and ultimately Redefined into new tasks which could not have been imagined or possible without new technologies. 

The Manaiakalani RATE model is similar to SAMR in that it invites us as educators to Amplify (= Augment, Modify) our teaching and then ultimately to Turbocharge it (= Redefinition) using new technologies. However, the RATE model explicitly begins from Recognising effective teaching and learning practice and then using developing technologies to enhance this. The aim is not just to learn to operate in a digital world but to increase teacher effectiveness and enhance learning outcomes. 

"Tools and infrastructure without a pedagogy for learning is a disaster waiting to happen.

Expecting accelerated results without effective teaching practice is a disappointment waiting to happen."

- Manaiakalani

Reflecting on the RATE model vs SAMR was useful for me. I do have a tendency to self-criticise based on the SAMR model: asking myself whether I am just substituting digital learning for the same paper-based task, or if I am actually making the learning activity better, more engaging, more effective.  I like the way that the Manaiakalani approach emphasises best practice in teaching and learning and it was reassuring to be reminded that sometimes Substitution is just what is needed. And it is certainly a wonderful thing from the teacher's point of view - being able to scroll through students' work online, give feedback and return it in a short period of time, without all the hassle of collecting a stack of exercise books or scrappy worksheets and lugging them around.

Skill Learning: Workflow

Speaking of easier ways to work: today's new skill learning centred around teacher workflow, looking at Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Keep. We also looked at different ways to manage tabs when you are working with a large number of open tabs in your browser. I'm already pretty zippy with Google Calendar but I found some useful tools and tips for most of these, which I will share below.

Create

Our main learning task for the day was revisiting some of the online teaching tools which we all became familiar with during lockdown last year. We were paired up with another teacher and had to hold and record a Google Meet, then embed the recording on our blogs. The content of our short Google meetings was to discuss a student blog post, which we found through the Manaiakalani Mailout Archive.

I chose the following blog post from a Year 8 student who had written a poem.

I was paired up with Heidi Davis from Pt. England School in Auckland for this task. Here is the video record of our Google Meet discussion of Fau's blog post:

Share

Here are a few of the things I can pass on from my learning on the Workflow focus day:

Gmail

My inbox is looking slightly more tamed after I did a bit of reorganising following the session on Gmail. I had all my messages coming into the Primary inbox, and I have now added Social and Promotions. I don't get much Social Media email to my school address but it is now tidily in its own inbox. Much more was achieved by moving the hundreds of messages from people trying to sell me resources out into a separate inbox. I experimented with Updates, Forums and decided not to use these at present, as most of them are for list serves like Secondary English, which I read regularly. Still, I can report that it is suddenly a whole lot easier to see emails from real people (colleagues, students!) and the inflow of information seems more manageable. So, a plus for the professional workflow.

 

Resizing your embedded video or other object

I discovered that embedding a video in a blog post isn't as easy as embedding it on a Google Site, which is what I did with my videos of classes during the lockdown. On a Google Site, resizing an object is easy, simply by clicking and dragging on the object handles. If you use the corner and are careful, you can maintain the aspect ratio of an image or video. 

However, a blog page uses HTML, so to resize an object where you have added it by pasting the embed code, you need to actually change the height and width manually in the embed code. The code generated for this video had a width of 640 and a height of 480. 

I estimated that I need a new width of around 500, but needed to know what height would preserve the aspect ratio. My bubble tutor, Maria, pointed me to the solution. By googling "aspect ratio calculator" I came up with this site which enabled me to enter a new width of 500 and it told me I needed a new height of 375: Aspect ratio calculator. 

Then, all I needed to do was go into the embed code and change to the new width and height:

So now my video fits in the narrower column of my blog above. Ta da! 

This learning will be useful for both personal and professional reasons - on my professional blog, but also in my personal life, as the fan sites where I spend a lot of time use HTML or BB code.

Taming Your Tabs

Vicki introduced us to some tools for working with multiple tabs in your web browser. This is something I do all the time at school: as a secondary teacher I am constantly opening a whole set of tabs which relate to the next class coming through my door, and closing another bunch for the class that has just finished. And then there's the desire to leave a tab open to remind me that I have to finish marking a student's work and give them feedback.

I want to try using the Toby extension to create a set of tabs for each class, as I think this will be helpful. I have added the extension and set up a couple of collections but I am still trying to work out the details of how it works. With this one, I can see that if it works for me I might also be able to pass the idea on to my students and I would be able to share a set of tabs with them which relate to each class.

Google Keep

As teachers, we access inspiration and resources from many different places on the web: TKI, Teachers Pay Teachers, Twitter, Khan Academy, TES, National Library, Studyladder, Wonderopolis, Twinkl, K5 Learning, teacher Facebook pages and groups, Lauren Fairclough, Transum, Liz Sneddon and DMIC resources were some that were mentioned by course participants.

It can be difficult to keep track of many different resources and sources of information. Vicki introduced us to one tool for doing that, an extension called Google Keep. It is useful for storing notes, files etc. Some of the functionality was similar to Evernote - a way of filing and organising webpages, articles and documents. One really useful tool is the ability to extract text from an image in Google Keep. You can snap a quick photo of a page of text and then in Google Keep just click to extract the text into a separate document. Those aspects of Google Keep will be helpful for teaching resources.

However, it also has a lot of functions around notes and 'to do' lists and integrates with Google Maps. You can use it from any device, whether phone, iPad or laptop. My husband, who does the weekly grocery shop, looked positively scared when I informed him that I could create a shopping list, share it with him, and have his phone send him a reminder of what I need when he drives past the supermarket! I think he felt that this was too much of a good thing and that Big Brother was at hand. However, I am still planning on experimenting with this one in my personal life (though I will start with reminders to myself for my own errands!)

DFI1 - Manaiakalani - Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 1: Core Business

I have spent today out of the classroom on the first day of the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive course. Ōtaki College has been part of the Manaiakalani programme for some years. We are a 1:1 device school: most students have Chromebooks and seniors are allowed to have laptops or other devices. I was an early adopter of technology and have always been a reasonably competent user who could find my way around and learn new apps and programmes quickly. As such, I have understandably not been a high priority to send on PD for technology and have had to wait my turn to get on the DFI course. At last, my opportunity has come!

Learn

Part of our morning was delving into the HISTORY of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy. I had heard some of this before - I remember watching early videos and thinking how lucky the students in the original schools were to all have their own devices, something we now take for granted in our college. Listening to Dorothy's presentation today on the Manaiakalani Origins Story, I was struck by the fact that the Learn-Create-Share model which is central to the programme was in fact developed by the teachers themselves from their reading models. I like the idea that the model grew out of experimentation and teacher practice, as I had tended to see it as something which was imposed from outside. I suddenly feel more accepting of the model, though I recognise that is not very rational! I also like the way that research and inquiry have been central to the initiative from the outset.

Skill Learning: Core Business

In terms of skill-learning, the focus of this first day has been on basics such as managing multiple accounts, organising our Drives, using Google Groups, Google Docs, Slides, extensions, and add-ons, as well as blogging basics. While most of this was familiar to me, I picked up a few good tips and tricks which I will share below.

Create

In the afternoon, we were given some time to create a resource using images in Google Docs. I created this doc as an organiser for the literary criticism unit I will be starting soon with my Year 13 English class. This will be embedded on their class website and I will include links to the resources for each of the literary theories.

Share

Here are a few of my learning highlights of the day. Hopefully, they will be useful to others.

Using a hidden table to align graphics and text

I was already familiar with using tables on my teaching websites to help organise material and make the layout more regular. I hadn't considered doing this in docs or slides and can see how it will be equally useful there.

The trick is to create the table and add the content, then to change the colour of the lines in the table grid so that they are invisible. This can be done by making them the same colour as the background colour (as in the yellow table in the document above) or by making them transparent.

Using Styles in Google Docs

Again, Styles is a feature I am familiar with, having come to Google Docs from being an reasonably expert user in MS Word, having used styles, tables of content, glossary, footnotes, bibliographies and other features in my previous work before teaching. So this was useful revision and reminded me that some of the resources I am putting together for my senior students are fairly wordy and complex and could benefit from a table of contents with hyperlinks, to make it easy for students to find the specific information they need.

Removing background from an image file

I had previously used LunaPic to do this, but today I was introduced to remove.bg which I think is easier to use and has a handy edit tool. For example, I found this image to represent structuralism, which was a jpg with a white background:

I put it through remove.bg to change the background to transparent and I ended up losing some of the text:

By clicking on the edit tool in remove.bg and selecting Erase/Restore then Restore, I was easily able to put the deleted parts of the lettering back into the image, though I see I missed some of the horizontal line.

This is a tool I will find useful when creating teaching resources and it will also be helpful to me in my personal life for my own online interests.

Changing the background colour in a document.

This is easily done in File/Page setup, but for some reason, I had never noticed or used this feature. For some students with dyslexia and other literacy issues, changing the background colour of the page can make the text easier to read, so I will teach my classes how to do this.

Adding accents to text using the Easy Accents - Docs Add-on

In my professional life, my main need for accents is to add macrons in te reo Maori and I do this using the Maori keyboard with shortcut commands. In my personal life, I frequently write in both Italian and French with online friends, and find the Insert/Special characters function in docs time consuming and usually not worth the effort. So I was quite pleased today to learn about the add-on Easy Accents - Docs. Once installed, you can click the add-on menu to open a panel on the right of your document, and then it is a quick click to insert letters with accents.