Blogging Tips: Labels

Labels for blogs are a must. They are effectively the index to your blog just as the blog archive is the table of contents.
Labels for student blogs should be curriculum areas such as reading, writing, maths, art, inquiry, technology, computational thinking etc. These labels should be added to the first blog post by the Blog Admin so that they are already listed for students to choose form. 
Students tend to put in all the main ideas in their labels and this defeats the purpose of labels which is to group blogs and make the posts searchable. 
At this week's DFI Kerry shared with us Blogging Tips: Labels and the gem in this was the table for labels for professional blogs.

STP1	Te Tiriti o Waitangi Partnership
STP2	Professional Learning
STP3	Professional Relationships
STP4	Learning-focused Culture
STP5	Design for Learning
STP6	Teaching

These are from the Standards for the Teaching Profession

Remote Learning is here

What a week this has been!
The announcement on Monday that we were going into a nation-wide lock down at midnight on Wednesday sent many into a spin.

There was panic buying nation-wide and widespread anxiety from parents about their children's educational future if they miss 4 weeks of school - which is actually 2 weeks because there are 2 weeks of holidays in the 4 week. But who knows if it will only be 4 weeks. It could be longer and we need to prepare for it to be longer.

Our Manaiakalani team were onto it a week before this announcement and delivered a doc title "Limit the Links" to all our schools.

We were preparing all that week before the Level 4 announcement was made. We connected with Principals to ensure they had read the "Limit the Links" doc and shared it to staff and that they realised what a lockdown could mean for their school.

Schools were closed effectively on Monday and teachers were to be at school preparing and teaching remotely. We supported schools on Tuesday and Wednesday face to face as much as we could. Most of the support I provided was about using Google Hangout Meet with learners. Lots of the sites just  needed a bit of tweaking in the schools I supported.

Our Manaiakalani Schools are well poised to deliver #remotelearning. Some schools could tick most items off the list immediately and in particular having a school site with links to class sites and blogs.
Take a look at some of the local schools and their set up for this...

• St Mary's Catholic Primary School - Gisborne
• Ormond School
• Campion College - Courses page

This means there is one portal to all sites and blogs in the school. Whānau only need to Google their child's school and can get to the leanring that their child can do remotely easily.

Click here to view all the schools in our local cluster.

DFI Day #2 Tairāwhiti Cohort

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Lenva presented the "Connecting with Manaiakalani" section today. I was riveted to her presentation. Even though we are immersed in the kaupapa of the Manaiakalani Programme, whenever I listen to one of the team talk about Learn Create Share I alway deepen my understanding of another facet/portion of our mahi.
The part that got me thinking more deeply was about amplifying teaching practice as giving and getting. I have just written 2 blog posts about this part of our term 1 staff meeting. I will go back to these posts and make sure that I have expressed with clarity amplification of effective practice.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Workflow and being efficient is hard to nail. Just when you think you have it sussed up pops another challenge - like screen recording in Quicktime. Today's Share | Tohatoha section was to be in a Hangout and record the conversation in 3's. One team recorded theirs but there was no sound. I had helped set up Quicktime for this group but forgot to check that the microphone was set to the internal mic before they started. Grrr!!! Sorry about that team!  It goes to show that practising with the tools and testing is necessary prior to any event.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Being able to record your screen is a critical skill to nail to make rewindable material for our learners.
Quicktime is something that I don't use frequently. I use Screencastify with learners in the classroom on Chromebooks and to make tutorials for teachers as the mp4 is automatically saved to Drive and can be shared from there.

Google Keep voice recording on a mobile phone is a fabulous addition to my toolkit.
For today's session I focused on voice recording in my phone app and was pleased that I had done so as there was a question from one of the participants today about using it for Te Reo Māori. This is a great way to record voice, download the mp3 from Keep on a laptop, save in Drive so it can then be inserted as audio into Google Slides. This feature would be so handy for inserting instructions into slides in my Cybersmart lessons. It would function like audio clips in Explain Everything where each slide can now have an instruction inserted for learners to rewind if they forget what to do. I need ot create a workflow diagram for this and share to the group.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Keep is such a great tool to have. It integrates with Google Apps so well. I use it lots on my phone. In my personal life I use Keep to save recipes! If I am disciplined as I use it and apply labels it is an efficient file of stuff that I like but don't get around to cooking. I really need to teach my retired husband how to use it. Now there's a challenge!