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.