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!)