Session 1 Wed 10th Feb 2021 - Core Business 

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DFI Session 1 Introduction

Session 1 Slides

Week 1 Blog Post

Pedagogy and Kaupapa

Today we learned about the history behind Manaiakalani and basically it's origin story. It all began in 2006 and has grown exponentially in the past 15 years, with more and more research going in and schools - teachers, principals, facilitators becoming involved. 

I personally found the research and evidence that they presented about the increased achievement of Y4 -6 students in reading and writing, the 2-4 times increase in the National Standards. I found this extremely positive and wet my appetite for implementing these practices within my classroom.

What did I Learn today:

I learned how to Plan - Document - Table - Share, basically how to create something on Google docs, using all the tools that they taught us today, which have all been super useful.

Above is the still unfinished document that I created today. Each of the buttons leads to the planning for each subject. Basically I created my entire weeks planning on 1 document, hopefully I can use this template within my class with my students. Share it with them at the beginning of each week, so they know what they are doing each day, and it is a user friendly platform for them.

It also hopefully makes my workload more manageable, planning has never been my favourite thing, but if I enjoy making things like this, maybe that mind frame can shift. Perhaps it can transform my teaching practice and student engagement.

Tools I found Useful:

Today we learnt about a range of different tools you can use for your drive, some I knew and some I didn't.

1. I learnt how toUse google groups, which is going to make life much easier in the future.

2. New ways of copying and pasting

3. A table of contents, which was big for me! Table of Contents example that I made

4. The most interesting and hopefully useful is the Voice typing, I am hoping to utilise this tool for my reports for one thing!

5. "Explore" which is a new and interesting way of adding images, videos and information to a document. You can search the web and your documents at the same time.

We had numerous opportunities to practice, for example the scavenger hunt, which was actually really fun:

Here is the link to the whole document: 

Scavenger Hunt

Overall

I learnt about some fun, interesting and most importantly useful applications that I can now use for my own work, in personal situations and for my students, basically to work smarter rather than harder. This Session has been invaluable and I can't wait to see what we do next!!