Week 9 - Reflection time

I thought long and hard about whether to sit the Google exam, and for me in my stage of where I am at I decided not to.

I know I have the skills to do what is needed, but used the time to update the school website ready to go live next term with links to visible learning as a result of the feedback from teachers and whanau post lock down. 

Not all classes use a learning site and on the blogs the term overview could get lost easily so have created a page on the school website for all whanau to be able to have a one stop (3 click limit) to get to the overviews for the term for each class to increase the whanau/student/teacher relationship.

As discussed in the last meet.. my Freddy afternoon surprising the students

Week 8 Computational Thinking

A day for exploring and time (that elusive thing!) to play with new ideas and consolidate old ones with tips and tricks.

A deeper understanding is growing with the digital curriculum with some good supports to help the school move forward in this area. Made a copy of one document to continue the school discussion on this.

Played with the microbit simulator, https://makecode.microbit.org/ and looked at sources for acquiring microbits. This will need to be revisited ready for the next budget.

Week 7 - Devices

Interesting morning, revisiting keyboard shortcuts and use of devices.

Explain Everything looks good but without newer ipads, not an option for us. The online version is usable, but can be laggy.
Installed and used Screencastify, tip if using with students is to get them to drop the Screencastify folder that is created into a visible folder in Hapara.

Used my create time to make a how to video to get student reading graphs out of the system. For this blog I have removed the final part so students data remains private.

Week 6 - Where did it go! Slide access

A useful day with time to play with our school website and make it more easy to follow.
Kept the same format throughout the site and making many places in the site that link to the student work, Made a visually appealing class page and reorganised the flow so viewers don't miss important information. Also made a file drop to make updating newsletters and annual documents easy to do.

The site is here.

Day 5 - Collaborate

Day 5  Collaborate

A cold day, running on empty for some reason but warmed up and energised by getting some good tips to improve the current site.
Creating a play site from scratch gave me good insight to the process and increased my understanding to continue the great work on our school website. The process of sites is much easier now with the new page than the old. Much more wysiwyg then previous with more simpler customisation.

I learned how to link a drive folder in with ease to make file updates easy such as newsletters (was in place for the newsletters, I wanted to do the same for annual accounts) now I just have to remember to put the files in there as they are created to be seen.

Im tempted to put a counter on some of the pages to see the number of times they are actually used..

Day 4 - Data

Plenty of tips and tricks to tweak sheets use, many links saved to look through and refer to as needed.

Validation options will make data creation easier. I went though a couple of old sheets and updated them with permanent cell links so values can be changed in  a master cell and populate to all the other required cells.
Copied and shared a basic income expenditure sheet with a daily expense sheet also.
Grabbed a blog and pulled the view data out, copy pasting the data was good to keep a link to the month to refer back to easily.
Created a quick Google form also available here

Created this graph from one class blog, as you can see, lock down was a good spike for posts by the junior class and is now continuing after back on site.