Week 9 Google Certification Examination Level 1

It  felt sad that our Friday sessions were over, as we were really enjoying working with Dorothy, Mat and Gerhard in getting up to speed with technology. Dorothy advised us to go over some of the opportunities Manaiakalani teachers have to sign up for in 2018.

For a few days including today, we got to feel what it's like to be in the shoes of students preparing for exams. We were nervously awaiting the 3 hour Google Certification Examination . I did  the preparation all right, and after eight sessions of intense learning , I was feeling confident of passing the exam.  I didn't expect to find the test so long, so I didn't quite make it and so did many of us in class. This makes me determined to enrol again soon and pass it.

Having spent nine weeks working as a very close team, sharing and supporting each other in our learning journey, we have made some new friends and I can imagine this living on. Thank you all from the group above.

New Google Sites

After slogging and sweating through all the maths to ensure that all our bits and pieces fitted on the classic sites, we were introduced to the  very exciting and simple New Google Sites that were so much easier to build. So today we created a new site with links to our school site, class site, class blogs,my Professional Blog and  my Standards for the Teacher Profession.

Standards for Professional Teacher Performance

Week 7 was really adding to our site building skills on our previous week's learning. We had built a site for our Teacher Performance Standards. This is a really good way of keeping up to date with the expectations and attaching the evidence.

We also looked at Google Keep and realised that we could easily use that to keep record of documents by taking photos, as well as grabbing texts from documents that have text and images. This is very useful in creating text resources from documents which you couldn't scan and convert to pdf.

Google Sites

This was an extremely useful session where we learned to create Google sites. What I really liked was the ability to make the site a multimodal one where students can have access to a number of different modes when learning about a particular topic. For my students, I really want to create a site that looks inviting so I have used images and linked them to websites and sound links as well as video links.

SCREENCASTIFY We used Screencastify to explain how one should comment on blogs. I hate listening to my own voice, but I am sure you may pick up a few tips on how to make good blog comments by watching the video below.

Explain Everything

CHROME BOOK SHORTCUTS Today was a really good brush up on using Chromebooks shortcuts. I feel so confident to be able to teach these shortcuts to my students. I know that they would love the two finger tap to be able to access the functions that one would get on a PC.

Day 3 Gmail Calendar and  Hangouts

Got better at organising my Google Calendar to get it to work for me and help organise my life. It was also very useful to set up a meeting with other collaborators. I learned to turn on and set a very useful feature on Gmail which would allow you to "undo send," perhaps very useful if you forward an incorrect attachment or email and you wish to undo that within a few seconds before it's actually sent.

I used to use MSN Messenger to communicate with my siblings who resided in Australia and South Africa. Having learned about hangouts , I feel confident that this is a way I can have a 6 way communication with all my siblings who live in different countries.. I could even use it with a small group of students at my school, not a large group since it can be time consuming to set up and  you probably need a few confident users to help with setting up.

We got into groups of 3 and we commented on a student's  creativity in writing on hangouts and that was really exciting to be able to complete the entire process from inviting the group via. Calendar to recording the screen and sound.

Click below to view the screen recording .
I do apologise for the annoying sound which came about as a result of having the volume on the microphone turned up too high. That's something I will remember to correct on my next screen

Manaiakalani Digital Intensive Day 1

My colleagues have attended the  Digital Fluency Intensive  Programme in the second term and were wowed with the amount of digital tips that they have learned as the nine week programme gave them sufficient time to learn and consolidate. I was keen to get in and upskill myself with digital technology so I could impart those skills to my students to get them hooked in their learning and to make them lifelong learners. It was interesting to hear about the journey of the Manaiakalani Cluster   from the early years to its present day success stories. What a beautiful successful journey?
I really enjoyed finding new Add Ons to Google Docs and I am really excited to share some of those with my students. I think by using Headings in Docs was an awesome way to help readers get to specific parts of your document quickly.