DFI Day 7 30 April - Devices

Our day started with Fiona talking to us about being cybersmart.  I search the TokiPounamu site while she was talking and decided I would run online lessons next week around Cybersmart behaviour.  In particular on creating DLO's, adding posts to the class blogs and how to attribute images.

Gerhard introduced us to hapara.  I have been using this for a number of years and had self taught myself. A couple of things I had missed during my self teaching.

1. I can drag and drop the students into an order that suits me meaning I can put my target students together or at the top - very useful
2. I can track blog posts in hapara and see what comments have been made on individual blogs

I liked Gerhard's idea of giving them 10 minutes before morning tea on a Friday to make sure everything in the unshared tab in hapara is filed correctly.  Once filed individuals can go to early morning tea.  

An interesting thought from this session was around the use of highlights and to continue to be respectful to students.  Just because we can put highlights up on the class tv and instruct students to be in the right place, doesn't mean we should do this.

I learnt quite a few shortcuts for the Chromebook which will be useful.  In particular:

1.  ctrl B to get off full screen.
2. ctrl O to restore zoom
3. ctrl shift t to open closed tabs
4. ctrl backspace to delete the last word
5. lock screen - search l

We had a look at explain everything.  The app on the class ipad is not up to date and probably not worth using.  There is an online one that the students could use. Although there are a limited number of projects that can be created.  I had a play and created a very simple Explain Everything project to see if it worked.  Here it is here.

and this is the link to the site whiteboard.explaineverything.com

DFI 24 April 2020. Enabling Access - Sites

We started today talking about being connected with our learners and with each other, which is particularly important and in many ways more difficult during these Level 4 Covid 19 times.

An interesting activity that was suggested (and I plan to do) is to look get the students to look at the Manaiakalani Twitter feed and chose 2 or three interesting blog posts to comment on.  Then to reflect on why they chose those posts and post that reflection on their blog.

The Toki Pounamu and full Manaikalani twitter feeds can be found by clicking here and here
            

We spend some of the day evaluating other classes sites.  We considered the visual appeal and the user experience for each site.

Gerard gave us lots of ideas to make our sites appealing and easy for our users.  The site is for our learners and we should ask for their input into how they find it easier to navigate.  He suggested we set a task for our students to explain how to navigate the site.  There is an example of this here

The rest of the day we spend in our small group exploring each others class sites, giving feedback and improving them.  I created new literacy and maths pages, at this stage I have hidden them from navigation, but when the students click on the weekly plan, it will take them to the new page.  I am happier with this navigation.  Here is the link to my site.  It is evolving.  At some point I would like to have separate pages for each literacy and maths group, however the students are not used to navigating this way and I would prefer to introduce these changes face-to-face when they are back at school.

The final tip for the day was around adding a gadget to the class blog to show all the students blogs and the activity on them.   My class blog already had these on it, however the gadget was too far down the page so I moved it up.  It looks much better now.