Session Six - Digital Fluency Intensive "Enabling Access - Sites"

 Another busy session today.  I am definitely ready for the breaks when they come around as it gives me a good chance to stretch.  I can see how you could easily become so engrossed in what you are doing that you could forget to take breaks and this would not be healthy.  If I put myself into the shoes of a child that is having to do their learning remotely I can see positives and negatives to learning online.  For me, the ability to work in a totally quiet space helps but on the other hand when I need to ask a question or if I miss an important piece of information it is a much more drawn-out process than just asking a question of the teacher or quickly checking with the person who is working next to you.  It also doesn't seem to matter where you are the opportunities for distractions are great!!

Today I worked with Liz on a site related to our whole school learning celebration based on our learning theme for 2020 which has been growing.  Due to COVID Christchurch is unable to have the annual A&P show that usually occurs during Show week so Rāwhiti School is going to have its own show instead.  The site we worked on will be for whanau to have a look at what competition and/or tasks they could complete as a family at home prior to the day and then also include entry forms for what they are wanting to enter into.  As the time draws closer, we will be able to include information about what can be expected on the day to build some enthusiasm.

This has been my first time being part of creating a Google Site as I do not have a class that I am working with.  It has been a steep learning curve but I can see areas where I could set up other sites to assist some of my learners across the school to accelerate some of their learning.  I have been working a lot around teaching using decodable texts with groups of children and I have been spreading the message amongst the staff about the benefits of teaching struggling readers using this method. I am thinking that I could set up a Decodeable reading site that will be accessible to all of our teachers and learners.  This way it will save teachers time as the same information will not need to be made a number of times.  This could also be handy as our collection of hard copy texts is minimal so could look at sourcing some of the free online readers for the children to use and link these to the site.  Within this work, I have been looking at the importance of phonological awareness when teaching the kids reading and this could also be a link on a site for children to go to practice rhyming, sounding out words, videos of nursery rhymes, etc.  This will hopefully help to cut down the workload of others and will mean that the children that require this assistance will be getting a consistent message from anywhere within the school.

Even though I do not have a class site it has been good for me to look at what goes into creating and maintaining a site.  Over lockdown, I was amazed at what our teachers produced for our kids but all their talk about the sites seemed like a foreign language to me.  Now I can understand what they are talking about and feel more knowledgable and able to offer my thoughts and suggestions when it is required for some special needs children.

I still have a lot to learn but feel that I will gain a lot more knowledge by working on sites often.  It is nice to know that many of the staff that I work with are very skilled and familiar with having their own sites so there will be a lot of others that I can ask for assistance if I get stuck.  Liz and I are sharing our A&P show site at a staff meeting on Tuesday so it will be interesting to get feedback and some suggestions.  The fact that the site has a real purpose will ensure that I continue working away on it and therefore upskilling myself further.

Session Five - Digital Fluency Intensive "Collaborate - Sites"

Today was a day of new learning for me.  Up until now, I have been somewhat familiar with what we have been learning about as I have been using them professionally to some extent.  I have not made a Google site before today as I do not have a class that needs to access their learning through one and anything that I have wanted to share with children has been uploaded to other class sites which have been done for me.  I do feel quite overwhelmed today and will need to spend time this week revisiting Sites and having another go.

Listening to Dorothy talking about making learning visible I found the concept of "Cultural Capital" interesting.  Now that we can share learning with our children and their whanau through the use of the Internet so many more children will be given the chance to succeed.  Also making what the teacher expects visible made me think back to when I was a student particularly at high school.  I can remember finding it difficult to know what the teacher wanted us to do unless it was clearly spelled out.  In fact, when I was at Teacher's College I can remember that we were given rubrics that told you what you needed to do to get a 'b grade', 'a grade' etc.  This took all of the guesswork out of completing assignments and made getting acceptable grades much easier for me.

I will need to have a think about how best to build a special needs website and what the purpose of it will be.  Our school website has a lot of information on it around the systems we use for special needs and information for our parent community.  I would prefer to make a site that the children could use and am thinking that I may make a site around reading using decodable texts and phonological awareness for some of the children who struggle with literacy.  This site could be available to the children who are in the reading groups that I take but also made available for other learners within the school that may need further practice and resources.

The learning celebration in term 4 is going to involve the whole school and their whanau and needs a site so may work on this.  As the annual Canterbury A & P show is canceled for this year we are going to hold our own version of this (name to be decided!).  This links really well into our overall theme of growing that the children have been learning about this year.  There will be opportunities for families to create, grow, bake, make, and enter their hard work into a variety of categories for judging.  Having a site that will have the enrolment forms, guidelines, and information about the day itself would be a useful tool as families will be able to find out all that they need in one space.  As this is the whole school I won't need to be creating the website on my own I can enlist the help of more experienced users to work with me and learn further from their knowledge.

Last Tuesday our staff met with Mark and Sharon from Manaiakalani and spent time looking through some of the learning sites that some of our staff have created.  I was blown away by all of the amazing stuff that was on many of them.  The fact that the children can interact with the site and the opportunities for rewindable learning I found very valuable.  I know that if I get stuck creating a site that many experienced colleagues can give me a hand.

Session Four - Digital Fluency Intensive "Dealing With Data"

Whew!!  I found this week very full-on.  I am definitely not a numbers person so working with data in spreadsheets is not something that comes naturally to me.  I did manage to make it to the end with everything (I think) completed and added to this blog post.

I really enjoy listening to Dorothy speak about the Manaiakalani as I always learn something new and get my assumptions tested.  I did not know that blogging and sharing learning was used as a vehicle to teach children about cybersafety.  You do not have to be working in a school long before you are aware of how much time children are spending on devices, often unsupervised, and how vulnerable they could be without the correct information and teaching.  The expectation of children continually blogging what they have been learning means that the safety messages are being reinforced constantly rather than just in one-off sessions.  

Finding out about all that was produced in 2005 was very interesting and it feels hard to believe that we have only been able to dive into a deep rabbit hole of cat videos on Youtube for fifteen years.  It is amazing how quickly we have accepted Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc into our lives and now can't imagine not being able to share or view what is going on in our own and others worlds.  I do not tend to share much myself on these platforms but am an avid viewer of other peoples lives from afar.

Learning about how to create forms was a tool that I found really useful today.  I am often the person who is tasked with coordinating meetings among many staff, families, or professionals.  Usually, I have been sending multiple emails or making many phone calls trying to find a time that suits all parties.  I realised that I could create one form that gets emailed out and that all the information I need can come back to me through this.  The form that is on this blog post is one solution to this problem.  This could be sent out when a child's I.E.P. is due to be updated to assist me in finding a suitable time.  By doing it this way it gives me time to get all of the information in and to plan my time to ensure that I don't double book myself also as I often have many special needs meetings to attend.

While I have used Spreadsheets often when looking at children's data and progress it was good to have time to try things again and refamiliarise with getting averages.  I picked up some tips that I did not already know, such as how you can continue on a repeating pattern and quickly get days of the week or months of the year.  Being able to filter our data will save me a lot of time.  In the past, I have had to go in and change the background colour of our target learners.  I no longer need to do that as I now know how to use conditional formatting to get all of the children below or above a certain level to automatically be colour coded.  

I had time to have a quick look at some of the add ons that go alongside Sheets and I would like to spend more time having a look in the Flippity link that was suggested.  It appears that you can use Sheets for a lot more than I am currently using it for so this will be something for me to explore in the near future.

I appreciated the information about what to expect in the exam around Sheets.  I was able to complete the tasks asked of me which gave me some small shred of confidence about what it will be like.  I will have another go during the week with the other staff members at my school who are also doing DFI as we have set up a regular meeting time each week to go over what we have learned.  This time is proving valuable as the other staff members share some of the tips they have learned while in their small groups which I was not present at and we can help each other with any problems we have encountered since the last Friday intensive.

Session Three - Digital Fluency Intensive "Media"

Today was a very 'full-on' session where I learned many things that I had not used or learned about previously. Many of the skills that I learned about today I will need to go back to over the week and have a play around with them to ensure that I fully grasp what they are capable of and how I can use them.  Some of what was shared today I am not sure if I will use in my current role as SENCO.

I enjoyed listening to Dorothy talking about 'Create' today and how through the learners creating something it gives their learning purpose.  The quote that Dorothy mentioned from John Dewey resonated with me "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking: learning naturally results." John Dewey.  This made me think of a lesson that I took last week while I was doing come CRT release and I realise now that I needed to give the children more time to create on their own to make it more purposeful for them.  I may have known what the purpose of the lesson was but it did not seem to mean much to the learners that I had in front of me.  I will now go back to my planning for these sessions to ensure that the children are given many more chances to create to ensure that their learning means more to them and this will also engage them better.   The survey of all the different ways that we can get learners to create in different subject areas and using different mediums will be handy to refer back to in the future as creating does not just mean working with digital technologies.

I enjoyed learning more about Google Slides today as this is a tool that I think will help me both professionally and with the learners.  Every second Wednesday afternoon at school I try to run a drop-in session for the teachers around an aspect of special needs.  I usually try and have slides to accompany what I am going to be talking about.  Sometimes this has gone well other times not so much!!  Having more knowledge around what is effective in setting out my slides is useful knowledge for me that I can take away to ensure I use a viewer-friendly format in any future slides I create.

With the learners that I work with, they often need repetition of the concepts that we are learning about, and also due to slow processing speeds having the learning rewindable is a bonus as well.  Today I worked on making some slides for some of the children that I work with for literacy.  Each session that they are with me we look at some phonological awareness activities.  Today I put some of the activities that we do together onto slides for the children to go back to and practice their skills.  I am sure that they will also find using a device much more engaging than working with me.  I learned how to use Slides to create a game/quiz where the learners know if they have made a correct or incorrect selection.  I also found out how to insert a recording of my voice into the slides so that the children can hear the rhyming words and syllables etc.  Inserting my voice is something that I had not been able to figure out before in slides but was a feature that I used to use a lot when making Powerpoints so am glad I am now able to insert this to assist my learners.

Personally, I am not sure how much of what I learned about today I will use.  Unfortunately, my settings for Youtube did not allow me to create Playlists so will need to talk to our school administrator about that.  Playlists may be something that I would use personally but am not sure that I would use Youtube enough  for this to be needed.  I can definitely see how I could use this with learners however so need to get my settings sorted once I get back to school next week.