DFI: Getting to know our Devices

It Tuesday and we are back again at Maniakalani's Digital Fluency Course.


Today started off with a refresher of the Cybersmart Program. Its always a good reminder for me to be newly aware of what the Cybersmart curriculum contains as so often, like the children, I easily slip into bad habits.

It was good to get a reminder about children managing their chromebooks and having the knowledge to sign other children off their chromebooks, (not have other children signed in on their chromebooks in the first place) and respecting the capability of the device.

Being visible is at the heart of the pedagogy of Learn Create and Share.
Visible - nothing is hidden or secret, everything online needs to come with the understanding that it is freely given and shared with no strings attached.

There should be nothing that I do on the internet as a teacher that the students don't see.
Digital Citizenship and being Cybersmart is all about children being educated to live in the and with the internet well.

When I'm googled there should only be positive things that appear.

Hapara

Wow, there is so much that Hapara is capable off that I didn't know. One of the things I have struggled with in managing blogs is the visibility of easily seeing and accessing blogs and comments and up till now checked the children's blogs by individually scrolling through and accessing each blog. This is a slow process. The ability to see all the blogs at once, those finished and those still in the editing process is a treat.



Highlights is another important and underused feature for me.

Some of the things I need to follow up on are:

Sharing links with students: Remotely type in up to 10 site links and it will get those tabs open for them. They might then need these bookmarked.

Using guided focus sessions - Often  docs. google.com and drive.google.com need to be included. Think carefully about all the sites that need to be accessed within that session. PATs could also use focus sessions which will allow the students to only use the PAT test.

Filtered Browsing may be better than creating a guided focus session for children type in the sites that you don't want them to access eg. block youtube.com

Activity Viewer - hover over the yellow/ green bar to take a snap of all the children's screens. These get deleted after 7 days, however if it is something you need to keep you can email it to yourself.

Workspace - works a bit like google classroom. You can create different workspaces and set up learning to be accessed at different times. Children can submit work and time out of the workspace. Eg. Time a unit so that children cant rush ahead in the unit.tHe benefit of workspace over google classroom is the fact that everything is visible. In google classroom the children would need to share everything with you whereas if a child has just started some work and has not submitted it it is still visible.

Hapara is not a monitoring and filtering tool. It is to support teaching and learning. First of all children should be in the right place in the right time. It is just for the teacher to have full visibility to the children's learning as they are the care givers and have the responsibility to ensure the best learning possible at school.

A student's drive is like their bedroom they need to regularly go in there and keep it tidy . Set up systems like the 1 minute morning email check and do the same with drive. Set the timer and get the children to tidy their drive at least twice a week.

It's really important that children's drives are ordered and put into the Hapara folders before the end of the year. All documents get archived but the archived ones are shared with the children so that they can get their old document out of shared with me. Personal folders don't count... they will be deleted.

Chromebooks

Protection should be seamless. Every students and every piece of work should be visible. This is supported by the cybersmart curriculum where children should self-mangage and make good choices about their learning. Kids will very quickly learn how to bypass a school network. They need to have the intrinsic values and not just firewalls.

The fact that everybody has the same device makes it easier for everyone. ( BYOD - Bring your own disaster) In the case where parents kick up a stink it is usually IT parents: the solution to this difficulty is saying that the child can have that device at home but at school we will provide them with a chromebook.

Deep Dive shortcuts to remember:

Always use 'Command + F'  or 'Cntrl + F' to find keywords in a document.

'Cntrl + L' on a chromebook locks the screen (eg. It takes them back to the sign in page) Show this to the children and get the to use it when they walk away from their chromebook or pass it to someone else.

Remind the children to use ' Shift + Command + V' ( Once again this removes the formatting and pastes the content in the font that is currently being used.)

Ipads

The same thing that happens for chromebooks should be happening for ipads. This is set up by fusion and needs to be done right following protocols. It should be set up with exactly the same icons and exactly the same place. Mistreating equipment - there should be consequences for children who mistreat the equipment.

Get the children to begin using 'Explain Everything' again. Especially for maths modelling.

Screencastify now has draw tools which can be used for maths modelling in a document. Here is a screencastify that I made for my children this week and as a practice session for using the draw tools.



Every Tuesday I am consistently reminded to keep learning, keep creating and the wonder of shared learning.

Nga mihi everyone,
Alethea