Surf to Turf Belfast

This year I have organised an event called the Surf to Turf. The children have been busy training over the last 6 weeks. Early morning bootcamps (7am-8am) with the support of the NZ Institute of Sport. Belfast Community Network have been providing beautiful breakfasts for the students. Next Wednesday is the actual event which involves the children running 5.1km, undergoing some physical challenges and then the finale being the kids pulling a fire engine up the Belfast Rugby Club driveway. Looking forward to seeing the children's successes next week! 

Google Certified Educator- Level One

 Super excited that I was able to achieve my Google Certified Educator, Level One. It's great as now I can join my Syndicate Team with the Certification. Thanks to Manaiakalani for supporting us with the DFI and also giving us the skills required to be able to sit this exam.

Google Certified Educator Exam and DFI Day 9

Today for me was all about sitting the Google Certified Educator Exam and hopefully joining my colleagues in the Year 7/8 team at my school with this achievement.

If you would like to know more about becoming a Google Certified Educator, check out this link here.

I must say that some of the parts on the exam I flew through and there were a couple of questions where I did have a wee bit of a panic. I marked them for review and then at the end was able to go back and complete them. I think it was more of a panic around running out of time that made me feel like I couldn't answer the question, opposed to not being able to answer it.

Being on the online DFI has been an amazing experience for me for a number of reasons:

* I was able to connect with a wider range of facilitators and gain useful learning and expertise from each of them

* I was able to connect with other teachers and see what they are doing in their classrooms and with their learners

* I have further developed my toolkit with useful tools, tips and smarter ways of doing things

* I have the rewindable learning material that was shared on the agenda's, that I can go back to at any stage and revise what was taught, and reflect and adapt my practice

Where to next?

For me I want to continue to share the things I have learnt with staff and students at my school and in my interactions with others. I want to look further into becoming a Hapara Champion Educator and to look at other opportunities where I can lead and develop as an educator and a person.

Thank you to Manaiakalani for the support you have provided over the course of the nine week DFI and a special thank you to Venessa who has been so amazing to work with. You have been supportive, knowledgeable and an empathetic ear and it has been fantastic. Thank you!

Code, Computational Thinking and Micro bits- DFI Day 8

Great day exploring and learning and grateful to be able to have this time to have a play and learn. So many applications for the classroom and for my code club back at school. Thanks Manaiakalani. 

Today was a great opportunity to be able to have a play around with Code. I was able to give a Minecraft code project a go through Hour of Code. What a fantastic and easy way to teach the students code. Great step by step instructions to guide you in bite sized steps. You are able to follow the steps and then problem solve to figure out where your code is taking you wrong.

Here is the link to my Mine craft Code project that I tried first in Hour to Code. I even got a nice wee personalised Certificate as evidence of my work.

I also had my first wee look at the Microbit. Very exciting that you can utilise Scratch and this site to help you to create your own projects. I am very excited by this and will definitely be looking into this further. Here is the microbit project that I created with the simple heads / tails coin flick.    

Children will see flashing images and some sounds, before they are needing to have made their heads or tails decision. Heads being the skull and tails being the umbrella. Have a play and see what you think. Push 'A' to make it start.

But for now it is time to revise and sign up to do the Google Exam..... wish me luck!

Explain Everything- DFI Day 7

I am not totally sure where the last seven weeks have gone but am definitely buzzing with possibilities after today! It is fantastic that you can access Explain Everything without having a subscription, however it does have some limitations. This is definitely something that would be amazing for the school to have.

Today we took a look at being Cybersmart and what that means for our learners, whanau and teachers. I took one of the ten Manaiakalani Cybersmart categories and created this Explain Everything, focussing on 'Smart Parents'. I created this task so that learners could teach their Whanau how to access their blog and also be able to provide Positive, Thoughtful, Helpful feedback.

As I didn't have Explain Everything, I was unable to insert links, so some of the boxes look a little bit untidy......but you can get the idea.

                                                                            Today's take aways from the DFI were:

* I would like to delve deeper into Hapara Workspaces and have a look at how these might look. * The 'Digital Dig' is a great resource and way to expose our learners to some of the things they need to know in order to use the Chromebook effectively. There were many things I learnt how to do on the Chromebook that I didn't know how to do prior to today. It is very beneficial to take the time as a techer to get to know the ins and outs of the Chromebook. * I learnt about the blog list gadget and also the link list gadget. These are things I need to set up on my class blog. * I came across this link here, to a parents ultimate guide to certain popular trends. I am going to take a further look into this later as it is relevant to some of my learners at the moment. * This link here is also great for students and Whanau to be learning more from home.

Taking my learning into the classroom

My class have been learning about Statistics for Maths, so I taught them how to use Google Sheets and how you can create graphs using this data. Prior to doing this activity with the children, only one child had ever used Google Sheets.

I replicated what I did in the Digital Fluency Intensive with my class and they have created some pleasing blog post analysis'. It was interesting getting them to think about the why. Why is it that you did lots of blog posts here, but didn't there? What is your average number of blog posts last year, compared to this year? What do you think your next steps are? Why?

As you can see they did a pretty good job. 

What's in a Site? DFI- Day 6

The greatest learning I think that we can have as educators, is to learn from one another. Whether that be by looking at something someone has created, watching a video (tutorial), talking in person, or reading instructions. The list can go on.....

Today was really beneficial to me as I was able to look at a range of different Learning Sites to see what was visually appealing and also to see what works functionally.

After looking at our Collaborative Site, it was clear to me that I would need to work on a few things:

1) I needed to make all of my content visible. There were a few things that others were not able to see as I hadn't set those visibility settings right back at the Google Drive level.

2) I learnt that you could put a twitter feed up on your site, so have done this so that the children will be able to see things that are happening in the Te Ara Tuhura Cluster (in live time).

3) I set up Google Analytics, so now I need to go and look at how I can put this onto my Site / Blog as well.

4) I wanted to create some buttons for our Site to make it a little more appealing to the students as well.

How blessed are we to have this time to have a look at these things and to be able to put some things into action!

Here is our Collaborative Site- check it out here. Please feel free to comment with other suggestions that we could do to make our Site even better!

DFI Day 6

Some of my key learning's / take away's from today are:

* To make a connection, we need both parties to share- communication is the key. If there is no backwards and forwards then how can we make a connection?

* I learnt that Google Plus has become 'Currents'

* I picked up on a few tools that I want to look into a little further (after looking at other's learning sites)- Visuwords, creating a Padlet with learning activities on it, Slidesmania, Spell Zone

* I want to look further into Hapara Workspace's and look at some of the resources that my bubble group facilitator Venessa shared with me

* I want to add a photo album to our Collaborative Site, as well as a Whanau Page

* I learnt more about dealing with SPAM on Blogger

* I want to look more into Student Dashboard

It has been another great day full of idea sharing, collaboration and reflection.