DFI Week 1: Core Business

Connecting:
This morning we had a lovely welcome at the Bay of Islands College for our first day of our Digital Fluency Intensive. We had the opportunity to introduce ourselves which was great to meet other teachers and colleagues within our area who we will be working with for the next 9 weeks. 
Dorothy talked to us about the origins of Manaiakalani and the most important the 4 goals of DFI, which are:

Connecting:
Dorothy shared the beginnings of Manaiakalani and interestingly I wasn't aware that it actually begun in November 2006....so it isn't just the three years that my school has been involved with. The reason why Manaiakalini was to be raise student achievement.

"In 2006 it was very clear that the digital age was present and we had to keep up" -Dorothy Burt 2020.

I really enjoyed hearing about Dorothy's experience and she has a valid point when saying in 2006/2007 they had very limited resources. In some classes they had 1:6 device ratio, something now that I cannot fathom. Her rationale was that if they could succeed back then with limited resources that any other teacher on this learning journey can succeed. In 2010 this was when Manaikalani introduced whanau with huis to involve each other and align school with home learning. Together with whanau they decided for their children to be successful that they would need a device which came to the loan scheme. 

One thing that they struggled with and a barrier was not having internet at home, I know at my own school that this is also a challenge that we are facing.

Moving ahead I can really value how lucky I am to be apart of this course and how lucky I am in a junior class to have one device per child. I am in a very fortunate position and cannot wait to see where this journey will take me. 

Deep Dive-Google groups:
Dorothy presented our first deep dive for the session looking at Google groups. She showed us how to set up and organise our groups which I found very helpful. It was made clear that it is easier to use google groups to send emails instead of contacts. 


Chalk'n Talk:
Google Chrome:Venessa talked us through on how to use and access Google Chrome and how to easily switch between multiple accounts I found this useful as I myself have 2 accounts that I go between. Today we learnt how to set up our Google Chrome profile adding a profile photo and personal information. 
One thing I wasn't aware of is the tip 'command and number' of tab to change between tabs. This will help within my day to day teaching as I am constantly needing to change between them this will be much faster and easier. 

Google Drive:Venessa talked us through how to organise our files and folders. I liked the tip of using an asterisks for each current school year as these folders will stay at the top and be easier to find. Vanessa recommends to 'Add to file' instead of making a copy as this won't be deleted from the original copy.

Google Docs 101: Dorothy talked about the basics of Google Docs and even going back to children to name docs and especially starting with their initials then the name of the doc. I thought was a great idea and would be easier to manage and find their work. We worked through copying and pasting with formatting as this is important to remove things like links and to not change the formatting. Once we had done that we practised making headings and subheadings. One thing that I learnt today was clicking the heading and changing the font size etc and then clicking heading 'update to match heading 1'. This was amazing and such a quicker and smarter way to do it. This will save lots of time.

We were then given time to create a poster in our google doc using skills and tools that we had learnt today. My favourite was 'remove.bg' as this instantly removes backgrounds. I often struggle to find png images online and this will be much faster.  


Overall thoughts from todays session:
There has been a lot of information a little bit overwhelming as I find we do move at a fast pace however I have learnt so much in only the first session of our course so know the future weeks will be even more helpful. I appreciate that all the sessions are rewindable so if I am not sure of something or miss parts of a session I can go back and continue to work on it.