Taming Your Tabs

Session 2  (Digital Fluency Intensive)

Today started with organising my book marks. 

At the end I felt like I do after spring cleaning my house......awesome.

I got rid of old bookmarks, replacing them with ones I open everyday. I also got rid of the names and just left the icons, this enabled me to have many more bookmarks open. 

I am very excited about Toby. This Chrome extension allows me to organise my browser tabs and access them quickly anywhere and create and store sessions to make collections of tabs to access. As I work in a shared space with 52 students we have 12 Reading groups. I organised them all under 1 tab so when it comes to my weekly planning I will have only 1 tab open not multiple. 

We did quite a bit of learning around gmail. Now anyone who knows me understands that reading my emails is one of pet peeves. I have organised my emails and have decided to archive weekly the ones I have not already deleted. There were many other tricks but I am not interested in spending too much time in this area. Get in, read the important ones and get out. 

One Tab was another great Chrome extension that I was introduced to today. You can use One Tab to close all tabs that are open in the window then create a list of the tabs that you can revisit all at once.

Dorothy spoke to us about the power of rewindable learning. As a year 3 teacher and also having spent many years teaching Year 2 and New Entrance, it reminded me how important this was. Inserting voice recordings in students activities on their i-pads allows them to be independent learners. If they are unable to read the question or remember what to do next they simply push a button and can hear my voice giving them the next instruction.  

I had a great idea for 2 of my students using rewindable Learning. These 2 girls are 8 and have a reading age of 11. (level 30) They are both very tech savvy. Next week I am going to give them a book at level 9-10 (blue) and get them to make a digital activity using voice recordings. It will be interesting to see what they think is important for the students reading this book to learn. 

It was another great day and lots to think to think about.

Digital Fluency Intensive

          Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive

First Session:

We started the session learning about the origins of Manaiakalani. After working at Point England School for seven years and hearing this story many times I still find it inspiring.

I have been working in a 1:1 digital environment for 5 years  but I still discovered many new tricks I could use both in my classroom and in my personal life. Google Keep was an amazing new tool. I have already talked to the teacher I work alongside in a shared space about using Google Keep to help us keep a list of our 52 students and who has blogged their work.

I got more familiar with Google Docs and how to make a presentation look aesthetically pleasing. Below is a link to a lesson we did last week. 

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

I learnt how to use the Explore button instead of opening numerous tabs. 

I got familiar with the Add Ons, however my favourite new tool I will be implementing in my classroom immediately with some students is the voice typing tool. I have several Year 3 students who have some wonderful ideas but they struggle to write these down. Using this tool I can get a true idea of what they are thinking and it will allow them to write a narrative using their imagination to the fullest.

It was great to meet some new teachers to share ideas with and discuss what they are doing in their classrooms. 

Looking forward to session 2.