Dealing with Data - Week 4

Share - it is such an important part of the learning but can often be missed out in the classroom due to time or lack there of. It light of the current situation where we are in lock-down to stop the spread of Covid-19, the importance of making connections has become a strong focus and one that I took for granted. Never would I have imagined a time when I could not go the school as see my students face to face. I applaud the New Zealand Government for taking this action to keep us all safe, but due to the swiftness of it, it has left me feeling unprepared for online learning. Being new to the Manaiakalani facilitation this year we had only just scratch the surface. When reflecting on sharing in this current climate I feel my learning will be from my peers who have experienced the Manaiakalani programme longer than I and also my students. Their digital knowledge surpasses my own and I look forward to learning from them and with them together on this collaborative journey of online learning.

An authentic audience is one where people choose to listen to you. How can we ensure we are being heard? Learning about Google Forms today has sparked many ideas and conversations with one of my colleagues about how we can use Google Forms.  We both created a form and uploaded to our Site for our tamariki to fill in. From there we will be able to gather some data on how they are felling, what their day looks like, what apps they are using and what they think online learning looks like. This is an exciting way to keep connected with our students, collect data that will link to their well being and encourage student voice about different types of learning activities. 

Data with Google Sheets - arghhh... my brain hurts after this session. I have used Google Sheets before but not created one, just entered data into one. I found this lesson frustrating especially with the many challenges delivering this content to a large group and all the technique issues that came along with this. I had great difficulty hearing and my laptop kept freezing. I was unable to participate in the smaller group chat due to my laptop continuing to play up (it's due for replacement) so I have requested help from my Manaiakalani facilitator at a later date. It's on my to do list. 

Blogger - what fun! I liked the way I could add labels and link key works to make it easier to connect with the appropriate blog or to organise my blogs. I can see the benefit of analysing the data in blogger not only to track the students blogs but to explore what types of blogs are more engaging and also spark a little healthy competition into blogging (like Mele's goal) or commenting on peers blogs. This will easily encourage more tamariki to engage in each others blogs. I enjoy using my classroom blog to get the message out but at the moment I am having trouble getting the tamariki to engage. For some of our year 5 students blogger is new to them and all the tamariki have their own school blog. I'm trying to find ways to get them to engage in the classroom blog as well by adding links to our Team Facebook page to engage whānau as well but this is not working. I think my expectations are too high as this is all new learning for our team and for many parents. I need to keep it simple and for now focus on getting engagement with our Team Sites as this where the bulk of our learning will be delivered over the coming weeks.

My Maps... I can see this becoming a fun way to explore and make real connections to our local area, nationally and linking to whānau overseas. First thought was it would linked nicely to Mathematics but as I played around with it I could see it easily integrating to all curriculum areas. It is an easy way to create custom maps with the places that matter to you. I like the way you can personalise it by adding colour, icons, photos and even videos. Add points or draw shapes anywhere, find places and save them to my maps and even make a map from any spreadsheet. I do need a little bit of practice though, lets me honest...a lot of practice. :)

I know there is  a lot more to add from today's session but my brain is full and it's time to log off. It was interesting doing today's DFI online as it gave me an insight to how our students might feel as online learning increases. I like the advice of keep it simple and limited the links. 

We can do this...