DFI: The Journey Begins

Welcome to Day one of the DFI, Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Course... and what a treat it has been!

This is the first session of a nine week course held each Tuesday of Term 3. Many thanks to Gary and the awesome senior team from Hornby Primary for the opportunity to up my skills in this course.

The learning from today has been applicable into multiple areas and the ones I have found most helpful I have categorised below.

A huge thank you to Gerhard and the team for a content rich and fast paced teaching filled with gems for the class.

Enhancing Professional Workflow

Connect the Docs

Headings and Table of Contents was a delight to discover today. This was a practical session outlining the use of Headings, Sub headings etc. and using the table of contents efficiently to give learners better access. A great way to visualise and organise.

A few key tools to implement:

Always Crtl + Shift + V when pasting as it pastes content without its formatting.

When requiring folders or documents in multiple folders or saving information that has been shared use 'Add to' rather than 'Move to' . Use Shift + Z to do this.

Any G-suite app can be accessed via the omnibox using ______ .google.com

Learn Create Share Pedagogy

Connecting the Docs Again

The practical session of the day spurred me into changing my mindset on how I viewed Docs. A view that was limited my my original and outdated understanding of a Word Doc. It helped me understand what the Google Doc app is actually capable of and how can I use design skills to make both the document more functional and accessible for both myself and the children.
The learning accomplished in my pedagogy was developed through creating a new collaborative writing Doc updating my previous more messy old school version.

Here is an example of my previous collaborative Shared Writing/Modelling Doc.

Here is an example of my new structure.

Click on the link here to check out the slide of examples.

Skills to Teach the Children and Apply in Class

Chrome and extensions:

• commenting and assigning questions to children in class from a document

Speech to text/ Voice Typing:

• Begin to use speech to test more often.
• Use a cup with its base removed to direct the child's voice or sound to their mic.
• Change the accent to 'English ( New Zealand)'

Extensions and Add Ons

I'm excited to use Talk and Comment, an extension that allows you to leave verbal feedback as a comment on a child's writing. I can see this being very handy especially to engage the children who find written feedback difficult to follow through with.

Doc to Form and Word Cloud Generator will be definite 'go-to's from now on including a few fun sites quickly bookmarked including:

• Vector icons - fo shoozing up Docs and Drawings
• Remove the background - a free lasso tool that... removes the background.
• The Most Dangerous Writing Prompt Generator - a website for quick write practice where if you do not continue to write for more than 10 ten seconds your words will slowly fade away and be lost forever!!!

Personal

Google Groups

What a relief to finally fully appreciate that a system has been created to keep organise emails and the information that is constantly flying through my inbox. Google groups will now be visited by moi more often. To practice my Google groups skills I set up a new social group for the school, however, in the future will aim to use it to organise and collate parent emails, class emails and information and access other professional group information especially items that have been shared via email.

Today has been a flood of information and I look forward to the content and skills that will fill my kete over the coming term.

Site link to Cohort