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.