Google Certified Educator - Level 2 (recert)

So in my inbox was the notification that I needed to re-certify my Google Level 2. That email arrived way back in Term 1. Shades of college days and leaving it to the last moment, I sat it last weekend 2 days before it expired.

The bit I do want to reflect on is about the way Learn can be amplified and how the use of digital technologies supports us as learners.  Quite timely given that this week in Digital Fluency Intensive the focus is on Learn.

The Google Educator communities are worldwide. This Bootcamp was held by the Global Google Educator Group - Global GEG. And it is as part of this community that I hooked into to swat up for Level 2. I follow the Global GEG on Twitter, @GlobalGEG, and on Facebook. It was in July on Twitter that I saw their post about the up coming Bootcamp for Level 2. Perfect timing!

The Bootcamp was based in the USA so the live event was not a good time for New Zealand but they recorded the Meet and posted it on their Bootcamp Google Site. The site is a "one stop shop". It houses all the resources for Level 1 and Level 2. Because the Meet was recorded I was able to watch it later and not in the middle of the night. The ultimate in rewindable learning - another part of our Manaiakalani kaupapa. 

I actually preferred the rewindable aspect because each recording is just over 3 hours long and there is Day 1 and Day 2 recordings. I watched the Bootcamp recordings on YouTube and was able to fast forward using the arrow keys to the bits I knew I needed to brush up on. A set of slides accompanied the session so it was pretty easy to work out what I needed to do.

 

I marvel at two things from having completed the Bootcamp. One is the generosity of educators who take the time to plan and host something like this Bootcamp which amplifies their learning for the benefit of others. The sharing of knowledge is immense. The other is how technology supports learners in any place, at any time and at any pace. 

I know I passed immediately after the exam which was really speedy, and now all I am waiting for is the official certificate. Good for another 3 years! 

DFI Week 6 - Sites & Enabling Access

DFI continued online this week with the theme of enabling access with Google Sites. We explored many sites and evaluated them in terms of visual appeal and user experience. These sites were from across the clusters and provided a range of levels for us to look at.

Then we explored the sites we have made ourselves and provided feedback for each other. We used this exploration and feedback to work on our sites and develop them more. A large chunk of the day was for participants to work on their own site. Having this uninterrupted time is significant for time-poor teachers and allows for focused working time.

I loved exploring and seeing the use design elements that make a site visually appealing.  I love sites that use art from the students and photos as design elements. Here are 2 examples...
Room 8 Wesley Intermediate - home page with a photo as a header
Te Ana Ako (Waikowhai School 2018) - photos used a buttons

We worked in our regional groups connecting on Google Meet which enabled teachers to share their screen to trouble shoot. We covered a range of issues including using Incognito Window to test sites, publishing settings so everyone can view the site, changing sharing properties of Drive folders, creating buttons on one Google Drawing and downloading as a PNG...to mention a few.

The theory behind Just-in-time learning (JIT) has been played out dramatically since the lockdown was announced. Even in days like DFI with a set agenda and times, there are times where we are working in groups and this allow for some of that JIT learning to happen. The immediacy of connecting in a Google Meet means that participants can present their screen in Google Meet and we can deal with their particular issues and queries efficiently and to completion. This reduces frustration and learning is in short bursts without distraction.

I have enjoyed seeing the growth in confidence and capability of the teachers in DFI so far. The sites I viewed by our participants from Tairāwhiti today are coming together nicely. While many teachers instinctively use design elements well, they have worked really hard on making everything accessible today. This all bodes well in this lockdown and means that learners and their whānau can access sites and see everything on the site.

Are you ready? Remote Learning here we come!

In the two days we had before schools closing down St Mary's decided to go ahead with their scheduled staff meeting. And as some teachers had selected to work from home, a Google Meet was set up so they could join in. What a great opportunity to practise the coming reality of delivering #remotelearning when school resumes on 15th April.
With the announcement on Monday of the lockdown it made the theme of this staff meeting very relevant. Helen, the Principal, talked about the expectation in their school for how they are using sites to amplify and turbocharge learning. Most classes in this school already had sites set up. SOme had just started using them this year and some teachers have used them since joinung the cluster 2 years ago.
In the past week we had been discussing with school show they will deliver online learning using the Manaiakalani "Limit the Links" doc as the guideline. St Mary's set to last week and ensured every class had a class site and that all content was visible. Their class sites and blogs are all linked on the school site here.
During the week the year 4-6 classes practised using Google Meet to familiarise the student with this Google App. It also gave the teachers an opportunity to set up protocols with their learners for connecting online in a video conference.
So are they ready? Yes indeed. Combine this with effective practice, Digital Fluency Intensive participation, online support from facilitators of The Manaiakalani Programme and a strong collegiality, they sure are ready.

St Mary's staff meeting before lockdown 25th March

Helen, Principal of St Mary's Catholic Primary School - Gisborne

Digital Fluency Intensive - Cohort 2 2019

To be included in this PLD programme is the highlight of my job. I have been looking forward to this with much anticipation. I am always learning and view this opportunity to extend myself as well as support teachers. As a facilitator my Friday's have been up until now in schools providing in-school support for teachers as an Outreach Facilitator. For this term my Friday's are gong to be full-on days attending the DFI with this band of committed professionals. I am going to buckle in and enjoy the ride of Learn, Create, Share.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Everytime I listen to Dorothy Burt talk about The Manaiakalani Programme I find out more about this highly effective programme. This time I concentrated on the building of partnerships with whānau. This is critical to having whānau fully engaged as partners in their child's education and to students' success. I have been involved in many whānau hui in my current role and the school's are always disappointed with the small turnout they have and the focus some parents have on homework, neatness of printing or screentime. These topics overtake the hui and the main reason for the hui gets lost in the hype around these issues. Schools are asking how they can engage whānau in hui that is learner and learning focussed. I can hear another blog post coming up.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
Workflow is so important in my role. Anything that improves or makes for speedy execution is welcome. Today I brushed up on Table of Contents in Google Docs, voice typing (with hands cupped around the microphone) and unique URLs for headings within Google Docs.
The new learning for me was the power of Comments in Google Docs and using it with students to reverse roles by getting them to read text and assign questions via Comments.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 
The Google Doc section today was full of content that allowed me to review some of the features I was aware of and extend my knowledge of Docs. Today we were given applications in the class e.g. use of Comments to get the students to do all the work while working with texts.

The voice typing with hands cupped around the microphone is definitely going to be a game-changer in a class of 31 very vocal students. I think I remember seeing somewhere the use of paper cups with the bottoms cut out for this purpose too. I'll try the hand

I am a Google Drawing fan and it is my default app for anything to do with images. I used Google Docs today to create a poster that highlights the use of shortcuts. Shortcuts should be the way students do stuff. I am currently in a year 2/3/4 class where lots of them have difficulty using click+drag. Shortcuts eliminate the barrier of not being dexterous and needing to control via a trackpad.  Maybe I need to review the pinkness of it. What do you think?

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Getting in and Kondo-ising my Drive is a must. My personal Drive is a schmozzle and my work one is a mass of folders. I need to get in and cluster folders together and bring joy to my Drive.

Google Certification

Having just completed the Google Level 2 certification exam (yes, its called an exam), I was thinking about how stressful exams are. I haven't sat an exam for many, many years. Even when upgrading my TTC to Bachelor of Teaching & Learning way back in 2003, there were no exams. That qualification was based on assignments.

Once again, to be put into the place some of our learners are in is good for us to understand what it feels like.  There was a mixture of emotions leading up to taking the exam - anxiety, fear of failure to say the least. Why is this so? Even having been well prepared by going through the training material diligently - even if I thought I was au fait with the content, I was still quite nervous going into the exam.

Adult training or Andragogy, is well documented and I was aware of this as I prepared and went through the training material and considered my experience and knowledge as I did them.

I considered the assumptions of andragogy [1][2]  following this exam to see if there was something in here to explain the nerves...   Need to know: I knew the reason why I was learning this. 

• Foundation: I was using experience as the basis for learning
• Self-concept: self-concept was not a tick - I wasn't involved in the planning or evaluation of this instruction
• Readiness: this had immediate relevance to my work 
• Orientation: this learning was mostly problem-centered, scenarios were included, and there was some content-oriented material.
• Motivation: and the motivation for me was internal rather than external as I knew I needed to dig deeper into the Google Suite. External motivation was also a factor as it is an expectation of our employment. 

No real clue in there either as all but one was a tick. Maybe I am just an over-achiever? And it just goes to show - you're never too old to learn. 

Upshot of it all is that I now have Google Educator Level 1 & Level 2 and ready to take on the Google Certified Trainer next - but first Apple Teacher.

1. Instructional Design: Theories - Andragogy M. Knowles Encyclopedia of  Psychology. http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/andragogy/  Retrieved 2018/08/12

2. Malcolm Knowles, informal adult education, self-direction, and andragogy. 

http://infed.org/mobi/malcolm-knowles-informal-adult-education-self-direction-and-andragogy/ Retrieved 2018/08/12

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.

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.

Google Certification

One thing about this role is that it makes you do stuff - like Google Certification. This was on my "to do" list but it kept getting pushed down the list by other things.
I got stuck in over the holidays and worked through the fundamental training for Level 1with the intention of sitting the 3 hour exam while hubby was on a fishing charter trip. But as with all good plans they quickly change. The fishing charter was cancelled and the 7 day deadline for sitting the exam was quickly disappearing. Grabbed the bull by the horns last Thursday after work and beavered away at it. And passed! Phew! Now for Level 2.