How Did I Miss This?

We all know how important feedback is. We all know how important learning intentions and their associated success criteria are. So how did I miss putting these elements into my Cybersmart lessons? No excuses except to say that lessons are an hour long and time pressure is huge- just as all teachers experience all day - every day.
I had to get back to what I know works and have inserted these 2 elements into the Cybersmart lessons.
Learning intentions and success criteria really should be co-constructed - but there is that "time" word again.
Feedback and feedforward go hand in hand. For the purposes of the Cybersmart lessons, I am using Sheena Cameron's 2 medals and a mission, or 2 stars and wish for younger students.

Incorporating this feedback into each Cybersmart lesson will lead into quality commenting on blogs when students need to comment in a positive, thoughtful, helpful way.
The format for blog comments are...
Positive - something done well.
Thoughtful - a sentence to let us know you actually read/watched or listened to what they had to say.
Helpful - give some ideas for next time or ask a question you want to know more about.

Created in Google Drawings

A Cybersmart lesson for Smart Footprint

Making "How To" Videos

This week I wanted to give oral instructions on how to use Voice Typing in Slides. I had experienced Screencastify a wee while back so dived in to record the instructions. I found it interesting that I was a tiny bit nervous about recording myself and then putting myself out there. This is how our teachers and learners will feel as well I think. Always good to be in the position of a learner.

Part of this learning for me was about how to embed it in blogs. The Manaiakalani protocol is to save the video to Drive and to embed video content from Drive. Screencastify saves videos automatically to Drive so all I had to do was to find out how to get the embed code.

As usual, there are complete instructions on the Manakalani Cybersmart site here.

2 steps that I followed for this post are..

So here goes with my first Screencastify video on how to use Voice Typing in Slides...

Creating Portfolios with Google Sites, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick

Google Sites are our bread and butter in Manaiakalani for visible and rewindable learning.  Our Pilot teachers build a class site to make learning visible and rewindable for their students.

While I am quite happy with how my use of the new Google sites is developing, this session was a good reminder of how to work with people new to Sites to get them to set up a site from scratch. As this is my focus for our Tairāwhiti Toolkit later in May, a very timely session indeed!

Emily's resources are here.

The other great resource for anything Google is Steegle.

Visit our Tairāwhiti Site which Maria, Renee and I build for our Manaiakalani Outreach Programme.

Keep it Together! presenter - Rachel Duckworth

Google Keep is my new best friend. This is a powerhouse organisation tool. Add the Chrome extension to really power it up. Thank you Rachel! My life is sorted!

You can view Rachel's presentation here.

Best tip of the session...

Automate the Mundane, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick

Emily really got us making tech work for us. there was so much in this session that I was almost dizzy. Take time to go through the slides and give them a go.

I tried setting up IFTTT App on my iPhone but it is definitely better on Android as Emily pointed out. I was trying to set my phone to turn off wifi as I leave my house and turn it on when I return. How good would that be?

Keynote #2: A Māori Perspective on developing Resources to Support Te Reo Māori, presenter - Te Taka Keegan

Te Taka Keegan has a mantra that if you need something then you probably need to do it yourself. This session highlighted the difficulty in NZ around having Te Reo Māori resources for classes.

Te Taka has worked with Google and Microsoft to develop resources such as Google web search in Māori and Google Translator Toolkit for Māori and The Māori Macron Restoration Service.  Take a look at them and see if they are useful to you.

Taka did caution us about the use of Google translate as it is throwing up lots of inaccuracies. He thought he needed to make another trip to Silicone Valley to help them fix it up!

Taka showed us Swiftkey - an on-screen keyboard that you swipe to type. The beauty of this keyboard is that it remembers your keystrokes which is great for Te Reo Māori and dialects. SwiftKey learns your writing style to suggest your next word - much better than any other predictive text keyboard I have used before. I have been using it and already it has turbo-charged my keyboard on my iPhone.

Flipgrid: The Tool For Student Voice You Didn't Know You Need, presenter - Nick Brierley

Nick is a teacher in Sydney. Having only used Flipgrid once before it was great to have time to explore and have a go with this tool.
Nick's resources are here.

How to get the most from your Chromebook, presenter - Suan Yeo

Suan describes himself as an Education Evangelist. He works at Google in the Asia-Pacific region heading the Education business unit. So what he knows about Google is huge!
He spent quite a bit of time going through Chrome extensions which was really beneficial. My takeaway from this session was the Toby Chrome extension.

Details about Toby...

"Bookmarks are for books, not browsers. Organize your browser tabs into Toby so you can access key resources in one-click instead of seven. Toby is better than bookmarks, it levels up your Chrome browser. Toby is a visual workspace that lives on every new tab. Add new tabs by dragging and dropping your browser tabs into collections or save a whole session in just one-click. Access all of your collections on any desktop with automatic sync. Use tags to organize your collections or create notes for your to-dos."

Reflection: after having made 380-odd blogs and using OneTab to collect student blogs together in their classes, I realised the power of Toby in that it is web-based and collections can be accessed in all my profiles. A life-saver! 

Design Thinking and iExplore at Ormiston School, presenter - Michael Davidson

If anyone is really into design thinking then maybe go and visit Ormiston School and see it in action. Michael's resource page is here and his blog is here.



Check out his page on making a Digital Breakout. We had a go at his Anzac Escape one. Tricky!

Michael is very active on the www with "The Monthly Maker".  He has a You Tube channel MakerEd NZ. A must see with the new Technology Curriculum now being implemented.

Keynote #1 - Let's Make Some Magic, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick

Emily was a really engaging presenter. She was full of vim and vitality and really got us thinking. Link to Emily's resources is here.

Emily's point was that there are ways to make magic happen in the class...

1st magic: Questions inspire. What questions inspire your classroom? Do your students ask the un-Googleable questions?

2nd magic: Go beyond expectations. High expectations student rise to the challenge. Expect success rather than accept failure

3rd magic. Find a new normal

Closing remarks: The right person finds the right question. the importance of being problem solvers

Magic makes the impossible happen...

How will you make magic happen in your classroom?

Tools help to create magic in the classroom

What tools are in your toolbox now?

Reflection: this session really feeds nicely into our Manaiakalani term 2 focus on "Learning empowers creativity". And the big question of how do digital technologies turbo-charge creativity?

Ed Tech Summit - Wellington

During the term break, I attended the Ed Tech Summit in Wellington. This summit was 2 days jam-packed full of Google Goodness. It was held at Amesbury School which is pretty new and that was a delight to be in modern learning spaces.

In true digital immersion fashion, an App was used to communicate and organise schedules. The neat thing about using an app like this at these summits is that you can change your schedule whenever you like. This is particularly handy if you miss a great session and can pick up on it at another time.

The sessions I attended were...
Keynote #1: Let's Make Some Magic, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick
Design Thinking and iExplore at Ormiston School, presenter - Michael Davidson
How to get the most from your Chromebook, presenter - Suan Yeo
Flipgrid: The Tool For Student Voice You Didn't Know You Need, presenter - Nick Brierley
Google and the 4 C's, presenter - Kim Sutton
Demo Slam

Keynote #2: A Māori Perspective on developing Resources to Support Te Reo Māori, presenter - Te Taka Keegan
Automate the Mundane, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick
Keep it Together!. presenter - Rachel Duckworth
Creating Portfolios with Google Sites, presenter - Emily Fitzpatrick

I got so much from each session that I think I need to reflect on each session in a separate blog post with links to resources.