Today was very interesting and I learnt quite a few handy tricks. Firstly turning my screen white or black during presenting a Google Slide will be really handy in class.

Dorothy’s chat about Ubiquitous learning was really interesting. I had a great conversation with family (retired teachers) the other day who saw an article about a school getting rid of devices and going back to using pen and paper. I think this is something that many people think is happening in classrooms, the misconception that children are just on devices all day at school, which is obviously not the case. We still do lots of book work, but I firmly believe that taking devices away will not help, we need to teach them how to use these devices effectively – exactly what we are learning in the DFI.

Using Google Vids to create a video about the Class on Air was really great. Super nice and easy to use, so this is definitely something that I will try to implement more in class and possibly on my website.

Explain Everything is a tool that I used to use a lot when I had older students. They always had to make a “Prove it’ video with their new maths learning. I’m starting to think of ways that I could use this fantastic app in my current classroom with year 2/3 students.

I chose to do my ‘create’ session using Google Vids, as I found this really valuable and feel like I would use this more than Explain Everything.

Here is the Google Vid I made about the Smart Values.

Here is the Google Vid I made about Sam Jones and the Perky Pukekos on the Manaiakalani Class on Air website.

Also here are a couple screenshots of the Explain Everything Projects I created today.

Another really interesting day today using Google Sites. I have been fortunate enough to use Google Sites a lot in the past, but I haven’t been using it so much with my year 2 and 3 class this year. When I taught Year 7 and 8, each child made sites for passion projects so basic skills such as adding pages, adding images, videos etc were taught to these students. Today I learnt some even handier tricks – such as creating my own theme so I don’t have to constantly change the font and colour of pages.

During Covid times, I used Sites a lot to share links with other teachers as I was the Digital Technology Specialist Teacher at the time, and when I was a PRT the school I was at, had us using Google Sites for our Appraisal information.

I have never really thought to use it as a link to Inquiry or Topic learning, it has mainly been just a place that my students can create their own learning or simply click to take to a specific website or app. So today’s learning was a fantastic way to share resources and then start creating my site for the Solar System/Matariki Inquiry unit of Term 2.

Here is a link to my Google Site below

Today was a very interesting day and I got a lot of learning that I hope to use more in my planning and with students (when possible).

I have used Google Sheets quite a bit in the past but I was shown today some handy tips to use when in Sheets. I was really impressed with its ability to make QR codes – this is a lot faster than trying to find a QR creator website to use. Over the holidays I will make some QR codes of websites that my students can use easily next term during independent work times. Using Google translate was also a very cool trick.

I was also really impressed with Google My Maps – last term we had a ‘meet the teacher’ evening and I asked whānau to add on a map of the world where some of the children’s ancestors came from. It would have been really cool if we could have used My Maps to do this digitally – something for the future.

Google Forms is also something that I love to use – mostly when I taught older students. Here is a link to the Google Form I created today.
https://forms.gle/DH8sEvKbJ8hZdq3X9

I am not using blogs with my students as they are only just learning to read and write but it was really handy to know a bit more about making charts and analysing data. See the image below of my analysis of Tahlia’s blog data from Wigram Primary School.

Today was Day 3 – Media. It was really interesting and I have learnt so much. Dorothy’s presentation on CREATE this morning really sparked my interest. I completely agree with her that as children move through the year levels the opportunities to create seem to wane. As I teach younger students I try my very best to allow students to create as often as possible in a variety of ways. I also try to limit the perimeters around what they are creating – for example we made volcanoes in my class last year after learning about volcanoes and earthquakes. All they needed to do was make a volcano with a vent, the differences in their creations was so awesome to see. We then made them ERUPT using different chemical reactions that they could choose from. Dorothy also shared some quotes that really resonated with me – such as; ‘Students need to be creators of content, not merely consumers.

I really enjoyed learning more about Google Drawing, YouTube and some extra tips and tricks with Google Slides. I am still thinking of how I can use all these tools best in my class this year. Overall, today was really engaging and I have taken a lot of fantastic ideas away with me.

Below is the animation I made using Google Slides.