DFI Week 1 4th May, 2021

 

Today's session has been really refreshing and so helpful. It has been a balance of relearning information and tips that I have previously forgotten. 

It was fantastic relearning and hearing the Manaiakalani story and having the vision shared. I particularly thought hearing about the timeline of how Manaiakalani has evolved over time and where our kura fits with Manaiakalani. It was fantastic to meet Dorothy Burt and that she was able to korero  about how Learn, Create, Share evolved and the way learners have used such a wide variety of digital tools over time. I think the analogy of our devices are our pencils to how Learn, Create and Share.

I took part in professional learning in 2019 with my Year 3 class and since returning to the New Entrant some of tools such as blogger I haven't used in recent times so I had concerns that these sessions were going to be beyond my current skill base.  I have found the pace of today's sessions well paced and our facilitators were both patient and explained tasks well.

Some things that I have immediately changed were my photo in my chrome profile.  The google groups session in the Deep Dive was interesting. I will set up a group for the Belfast Early Childhood Network. The group has discussed sharing readings and emails- so this will be perfect. 

It was also great to have tips and feedback on ways to improve the organisation in my google drive- there are a few tips that I will share with my co-teacher Judith Short around sharing docs and opening the links to all people who have that link to a doc. This will be a time saver in the future.

I have particularly found the short cuts useful and I have a doc of short cuts that I am particularly wanting to remember. I will keep adding to this doc. 

Short Cuts

It has been extremely helpful having some time to sort my bookmarks bar and reorganising my folders. 

Google Docs

There were lots of many tips regarding google docs- such as opening a google doc in the correct folder. I also used the voice to text- this I will use during the Oral Language Writing sessions and also to when I am publishing the children's writing for cut out sentence.   There were also lots of other useful tips when presenting in google docs and I will utilise tables when creating on google docs. I liked the idea of changing the table outline to the same colour as the background. This will be so useful when I am creating resources for the class and the Junior Syndicate.

The other really useful tips were around using headings within a google doc. Our staff had learnt about this in a slam dunk but I hadn't really understood- so having this reshared today was so helpful. I had previously set up our school's Team Profile and I had used bookmarks. I have already replaced the bookmarks in our Junior Team Profile with headings and I have added the contents to the top of the doc. I will share this with the other Team Leaders at our next Middle Leaders meeting.

Overall today has been so very helpful and I feel its been like doing a jigsaw puzzles- where I already has quite a few pieces joined and today I filled it many more pieces.