DFI Course - Week 2

Since Last Week

At the beginning of this week's DFI session we were asked to reflect on three questions:

What has worked for me since the last time we met?

Re-establishing my professional blog was a big step for me, including getting over the feeling of pretentiousness of it all. I have also tidied up my drive a little, used remove.bg a lot.

What hasn’t worked (or made sense)?

There wasn't really anything that hasn't gone well, although I did need to remember to dress more warmly for the venue this week.

What do you need help with?

I spent a fair bit of time getting voice typing to work on my computer (technical issues). I need a bit of help using this though - either I’m not speaking clearly enough or my computer is scoring poorly in its listening comprehension. I’m keen to try this in class.

Dorothy Burt (one of the DFI presenters) commented that internet speed is a major key to success, so if we have poor connectivity we will struggle. She noted that when she is working on a serious piece of work using voice typing she sits right next to the AP box.

This Week - Workflow

A copy of this week's agenda can be found here.

The main focus of this week's programme was "Workflow", i.e. making life a bit easier for us and making us more efficient in a digital world. This included sessions on:

• Google Meet
• Google Keep
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Taming your Tabs

Google Meet

This session caused me flashbacks (not all negative) to our lockdown period where I was running up to four Meet calls a day, and we revisited how to get the most out of this ever-developing online tool. While I had used most of the features of Meet regularly during lockdown it was good to revisit this (especially "just in case" we need to return to its regular use).

Interestingly, I found myself being more self-conscious using and recording the Meet call with a colleague than with children. I think this is more a reflection of my self confidence, as reflected in the video below:

On reviewing my video I am reflecting that I need to remember to stop saying "Um" (better preparation will help with this) and to speak more slowly and more clearly (this will also help with my voice typing). I also need to discover an easy way to trim the video to lose the messiness at the beginning and end.

Google Keep

With the Google Keep Chrome Extension we can easily save the things you care about and have them synced across all of the platforms that we use (including web, Android, iOS, and Wear. Take notes for additional detail and add labels to quickly categorize our notes for later retrieval.

This is similar in nature to Notes in Apple devices, but has the added advantage of "Grab image text" where you can take a photo of a block of text then turn it into text on your device. This will be really useful for editing and re-formatting printed text.

You can also use your phone's microphone to record a message and it will save both the recording and the written text from the recording (I had more success with this than I did with voice typing).

Gmail

This session dealt with a number of advanced features of Gmail to increase productivity. I was already using most of these features apart from the "snooze" feature which I intend to use all the time from now on.

This session was really a case of assuring me that I was managing my emails as well as I can. I just need to employ a PA to answer my emails for me now, and to convince colleagues to stop cluttering up my inbox by replying "to all"!

Google Calendar

I am already a (recent) convert to Google Calendar having started using it in conjunction with Google Meet (as "events") during Lockdown. I have also linked my teaching timetable in KAMAR (our Student Management System) to Google Calendar so I can see my timetable on any device I am logged into. However one of the anomalies of how our classes are structured in KAMAR (i.e. composite classes appear as two classes) means that this can appear a little untidy on the screen. Rowena Clemence adds her timetable manually into her Calendar and this might be an easy solution for this. I am also looking for a way to have the timetable linked to my Apple Watch so I can get easy notifications of events.

Taming Your Tabs

This session looked at ways to better manage tabs in Google Chrome. We looked at a range of tools and features to help us to become more efficient. I already pin my most frequent tabs with no discernible drop in computer performance, but I am quite keen to try the OneTab extension to group tabs for regular purposes.

There were a number of other extensions we looked at:

• The Great Suspender
• Tab Snooze
• Toby Mini

I will experiment with these extensions over the next couple of weeks, starting with Onetab.

Conclusion

While there was a lot that I was already familiar with this week, there is a lot to look at over the coming week. I'm looking forward to finding some solutions to the Google Calendar and tab-taming challenges. I also want to master voice typing ... even if it means speaking like a BBC news presenter!