Smart Surfing in Social Studies

Within my role as a Manaiakalani Outreach Facilitator, the majority of time is spent working in the secondary school sector.  Facilitation in a secondary school setting does look slightly different to what might occur in a primary school setting.  One of the reasons for that is the pressure high school teachers are under to deliver a curriculum that prepares students for NCEA.  It's often thought it difficult to run lessons throughout the year that focus just on the Cybersmart curriculum.  Instead it's more about integrating the Cybersmart curriculum across subjects and embedding them into teachers' lessons. 

Working with a teacher of a Year 9 Social Studies class today's focus was on Smart Surfing. 
This class are learning about our Kiwi Culture and identifying what aspects make up their own culture.  I modified the Smart Surfing lesson from Manaiakalani's Cybersmart curriculum adapting the key search words to align with their topic focus.  I also extended the search functions to show students how they could search for different time periods which was interesting especially as there were no news updates for the mid 1950's and 1960's.   Next steps are getting students to think about whether or not their search findings are reliable.

Cybersmart at School

Today we have been learning how to be Cybersmart, what's ok to share online and what's not ok.  It's part of our Smart Footprint. 

Secondary School Workflow Online Toolkit

Today I ran a Manaiakalani online toolkit which focused on the secondary school workflow.    The main aim was just to give an overview to teachers who were new to visible learning within the Manaiakalani programme.  Utilising Hapara workspaces for assessment, google sheets for online moderation and assessment criteria can make the whole NCEA online workflow that much easier not only to track students' progress but also to collaborate with other colleagues.  

I'm looking forward to running more toolkits focused on connecting secondary school teachers, watch this space.

Adding a Google Calendar

Here is a video that shows you how to add the Te Hiku calendar. 

 

Getting your online workflow right.

Today at our Digital Fluency Intensive course we were focusing on how best to manage your workflow.  Getting this right, being organised and methodical in your online practice can really help you feel confident teaching in a digital environment.

For teachers new to digital teaching,  establishing good online practice for your own workflow will serve you well when it comes to creating and managing your online learning space. 

The google suite helps you to be super organised, so on our course today we explored how to make your gmail account work for you by utilising Google's priority inbox, setting up filters and rules, personalised settings and add ons.  Working hand in hand with google's mail box is google task, google calendar and google keep.  All wonderful extras that enhance your workflow and help to save time. 

We did have a glitch with technology which was a real disappointment and meant we couldn't execute our Google Hangout session successfully.  This is a good reminder to triple check your IT provider has considered all potential issues.  On this occasion the problem lay with N4L's recent upgrade which meant that anyone outside the school's email domain address couldn't use Google Hangouts.  We troubleshooted a couple of ideas like creating everyone a school email address but as soon as they started to share their screen on a different profile their connection was lost.  Thankfully everyone was very understanding and it meant they had a fun homework activity to try with their peers.  Although the IT provider had been given a heads up about our requirements months prior, this was a good reminder to myself that you have to repeat two days out with a note about N4L changes.   To all our DFI participants thanks for your patience today. 

Manaiakalani DFI - cohort 1 - day 1

Our first Digital Fluency Intensive for 2019 is underway and we have a fabulous group of 20 participants including principals, primary, intermediate and secondary school teachers.  As you can imagine there is a lot of experience in the room and it makes for some very interesting discussions and sharing of ideas. 

Everyone brings with them a unique set of skills and in this collaborative environment there will be plenty of opportunities to learn from one another.  It's great to be in the company of open minded individuals who are all focused on offering their students the best teaching practice in keeping with learning in a 21st environment.