Manaiakalani DFI Session One: Core Business

As a starting point, it's always useful to know that I'm using things such as the sign in, bookmarks, omnibox, drive filing, clear formatting tool, titles etc. well.  

I was planning to show my kids how to format their Google Docs to create digital 'exercise' books so it was good to know I am on the right track with this and how to interweave digital platforms into my teaching. One really useful bit was to learn that the titles also help to create specific section URLs so that you can direct people to certain parts of a longer doc.

I learnt about and installed the Small PDF extension - that will be a great tool to use in the future to change things back from PDFs without the hassle of reformatting.

I also learnt about Google Groups which has very immediate applications in terms of management jobs that I have to do. However, I worry about using a class group as kids might not realise that they are replying to all; so that would be a really important to consistently refer back to protocols that when we are using the group email, then that is similar to saying something in front of the whole class and so it's important to check the email address if you want / need something more private.

Some other quick tips and tricks I learnt were:

- CTRL+Z - copies a file into another place

- Using google docs to create infographic style resources such as this one.

- Increasing my understanding of how to use the Google Doc tools on the treasure hunt

I also learnt some great things to use with my learners. The first thing was the Mote extensionfor quicker marking and feedback but I also think that it is important to definitely keep this short

and sweet so that kids don't get overwhelmed; I think less than 20 seconds or less.

Additionally, voice typing has great potential in terms of getting ideas down - especially the

kids who are all like 'I don't know how to write down and then explains it perfectly orally'.

BUT I always worry about the assessment stuff, for example are we able to let them use voice

typing for the Manaiakalani asTTle writing test? Will we be able to let them use this for the new

NCEA writing test in 2023 Despite these questions, it's a powerful tool and here's my example.

When I was having a go with the voice typing, I realised that you need to be very clear on

punctuation marks and paragraph breaks in order to direct the technology to do the work. Also,

it highlights a real need to explicitly teach how to use the grammar tools - eg what do the blue

underlines mean? What do red ones mean and how do you fix them?

So overall, some great professional learning which helps make my job easier and my teaching

more effective :)