Today I attended the first of 9 weekly sessions of the Digital Fluency Initiative (DFI) run by Manaiakalani.
Purpose of DFI
The purposes of the DFI are:
- To acquire digital fluency using the basic tools our young people use for learning
- To acquire fluency using the basic digital tools required for effective teaching, planning, assessment and professional learning
- To understand how digital technologies used effectively can have a significant impact on accelerated achievement outcomes
- To understand how the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa has been constructed to maximise the impact of effective teaching and learning.
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| An image of my creative Google Doc from Week 1 |
Week 1 Sessions
A copy of this week's agenda can be found here and included an opportunity to get to know the other participants and the presenters.
One of the tasks we had to complete was to make a creative Google Doc which I decided to use to record the main topics we covered this week. This Doc can be accessed here.
I also took the opportunity to set up this Professional Blog.
Reflections
These are my reflections from this week's session:
Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy
While I was familiar with the Manaiakalani origins story at a very rudimentary level I discovered there was much more to it than I was aware, with the digital learning aspect being an addition to the initial kaupapa. The analogy that digital devices are simply a replacement for a pencil (i.e. when your pencil breaks you get a new pencil) is certainly one that I will be sharing with the families of my students)
Improving my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional
Having the skills to better manage my Google Drive and the use of Google Groups will help me to be more efficient in my role as a teacher. Additionally, while I already had reasonable skills in the use of Google Docs, today's session on creative Docs and improving collaboration through the use of comments will help me to be more effective as a team leader.
Improving my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life
Setting up a professional blog will help me to reflect on my teaching practice and will provide useful evidence when I apply to renew my teacher registration.What did I learn that could be used with my learners
I am quite keen to teach my students:- How to use the "explore" function
- Using headings to create a table of contents in documents
- Improving images using remove.bg
Kia ora Terry,
ReplyDeleteIt is awesome to hear your reflection of the first day. I like the way you have formatted your blog post - it flows well. I think that a lot of your students who have come from other Uru Mānuka schools should know about the explore tool! I would be interested to hear how many were unfamiliar with it. Remove.bg is an great additional tool to support learners.
I look forward to seeing what you get up to next week,
- Kelsey
Kia Ora Terry, Great idea using your creative doc task to make a resource for yourself to refer back to.
ReplyDeleteI like that you picked up on the digital device being a tool, somewhat like a pencil. As we explore this course, you may see that as well as being a substitute for the pencil, digital devices also give us the opportunity to modify and redefine the teaching and learning process in ways that were never possible, think multi modal learning - enhanced create activities and access to more resources!
So great to have you on the DFI journey with us.
Nga mihi
Stef
Hi Terry, I have enjoyed your post and the reflections you shared. Helpful feedback for our team! You have created a professional looking infographic using a tool with clear limitations. I hope it inspires you to rethink docs you use with your learners and whanau from time to time.
ReplyDelete