DFI 9, Google exam, ubiquitous.

We had to write a review for the course earlier today and I definitely felt a sense of mourning at the prospect of having to be back at school on Fridays and not being in the warm embrace of the DFI Fridays. I have really enjoyed these sessions and not just because of the chance to get out of the classroom for the day. The MOE would do well to provide a professional development day per week for every teacher in the country - it might sound ridiculous but I am pretty sure the benefits to everyone would be worth it, anyway enough dreaming. One of the real eye openers for me was hearing what life is like for primary school teachers. I am shocked at how different our worlds are and yet we actually teach the very same kids.

The progression being made through the DFI and weekly catch-ups with Herman have meant we really have developed our teaching practice in ways that move us along the SAMR spectrum to somewhere better than mere substitution of devices for paper.

There seems to be a lot happening in education and I am starting to see a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes in Gisborne. There are all sorts of connections being made here and it will be very interesting to see where all this leads us. Many people agree that education globally seems to be on the verge of some sort major paradigm shift as we start to understand what the technology is doing and how we can harness it in ways to serve our students better. What has become apparent to me is that very few seem to have crystallised any sort of vision or road map for this crazy journey we have started on.

When anyone with a phone has pretty much the entire body of all human knowledge at their finger tips, teachers and schools no longer have the monopoly on education that they once had, and the role of the teacher has to evolve accordingly. 

Something that occurred to me today is that for the people already on this waka it is important to remember that we are all at a different stage on this journey and there will be major hurdles ahead as the status quo is challenged and education changes. Many of the ways things have been done will simply have to be abandoned. I think will be a really hard on some people and sometimes a sad and even traumatic experience for some teachers. In the technology department at GBHS we have some incredibly experienced technical drawing/graphics teachers - in fact one of them even created the booklets used in most NZ schools today. We all love teaching graphics or DVC, but last year we had to face up to the reality that using set squares and pencils etc to do drawings was completely redundant. We had to just let it go in favour of an entirely CAD based system. Letting go of this area of teaching meant coming to grips with the fact that many decades worth of learning no longer held the value it once did and if this value is tied to a person's identity, as it often is, then you can imagine the human toll these changes can have on people.

On a positive note I was at a professional development course at Tauranga Boys High a few years ago and some of the older technology teachers told us that they had initially been reluctant to learn all the new CNC technology but once they bought into it they discovered a second wind in their careers that meant they weren’t even that keen to retire anymore.

That’s my two cents worth for the week. Ciao

DFI 8, youtube, sites, google

Last DFI then the big google exam, I will be pretty sad to be back at school on Fridays but at least I have a ton of new stuff to try out on the kids. Young Matt Goodwin was our guest tutor today - he was telling us a story about how much younger he used to look but he still looked younger than most of the year thirteens at GBHS.

I logged into this blog today for the first time since last week and realised that I had somehow managed to put in some double ups of ridiculously big graphs so the lesson there is double check the published work.

This week we looked at youtube, which I use a lot - both professionally and personally. TBH it seems like there is a lack of consistent functionality which made doing a tutorial hard but I haven't really ever had any problems using it so I won't be worrying about that. We had some fun using the polyline tool on google draw to make some self portraits which is one of those bizarre activities where you can vortex into losing hours trying to perfect the look. I tried this with the students a few weeks ago and they would have happily done it for the rest of the term. We also had a session on slides - this is a tool that seems to be used a lot by the Manaikalani crew, and I see why. It is a really versatile option and works well with sites, we also learned how to make an animation using slides which was pretty fun and you can check out what I made below. There is some pretty funny stuff out there if you check out stickman gifs - which my ten year old introduced me too!!

DFI 7 Data

OK today we rolled into the DFI with the previously enigmatic Stef showing up to help out - presenting stuff on data, forms, mymaps and sheets. First of all though we had our weekly hangout, this time with Dorothy Burt. Dorothy presented a slideshow about the share side of things, explaining how Manaiakalani is a series of networks and connections between schools. I was struck by the fact that schools most often only meet with each other to compete, and how detrimental this attitude of competition can be.

The share part of the presentation also reminded me of a pretty heart warming story from the week. I have a level two student who is always smiling and happy and has always been a really nice kid. I knew from previous conversations that dad is in prison for dealing meth and mum might be going soon. He has quite a number of younger siblings so it wasn't a huge surprise to learn that his large number of absences were mainly because he has to stay home and baby sit. The heart warming part of the story is that he told me he now has a chromebook at home and is able to do his english work even though he isn't at school - I wonder how many other students might be in a similiar position.


The best parts of the day for me were learning about forms, sheets and some of the ins and outs of cryptocurrency. I have used forms and sheets before but not as much as I have wanted to - my top tip today is that if you want to get a quick quiz together on forms just head on over to Kahoot and copy and paste the questions and answers into a form. I will be using the same form to do some formative and summative assessment on computational thinking and will also do a couple of kahoot quizzes to mix things up a bit.
                                                                                                                                       A little graph we made of our blog posts, note the                                                                               sharp drop off from Willie after the first week.

As I have said before the amount of amazing tools and resources available "out there" in cyberspace is phenomenal and probably just overwhelming in most cases, every week I am stumbling upon some new stuff that I want to include in my sites for the juniors, but I just have to do some consolidation of what I am already doing before .

Somehow I also managed to find out that Tim is also a bit of a cryptocurrency nerd. Funnily enough it is something I have just been reading about and relates straight back into the stuff that Dorothy was talking about in terms of networking and connections.