Digital Fluency Intensive: Day 6

This week to connect with the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy we looked at the "empower" side of "Learn, Create, Share" which is on the outer circle but is of no lesser significance.  It links directly with visibility.

Dorothy described how for many of our whanau life is a struggle.  They rely on other outside "agencies" for so many of the things we take for granted such as housing and money for necessities and feel totally disempowered and do not have a positive outlook on life.

Our children start school disadvantaged in that they hear significantly fewer words spoken in their whanau.  Children are great imitators or modellers.  If they do not hear words or sentences to model their oral language on it will disadvantage them.  How can they ask for an explanation of a maths problem if they have not practiced asking questions like more advantaged two year olds do?  Research has stated that our children arrive at school already two years behind more privileged children.

Also there is approximately a turn over of a third of our students in a year.  The housing redevelopment is adding to the turn over where a whole street may be rehoused elsewhere while redevelopment takes place.

But this community is prepared to spent $3.75 a week on the purchase of a chrome book because they could see that it wasn't replacing a book with a fancy tool but it was providing their children with an experience and opportunities that were life changing and in transforming their lives they were becoming more empowered.  Children have a world of knowledge and opportunities at their fingertips.

The digital world helps to empower our community.  They can overcome some of their disadvantages because their focus is not just the local community.  Two examples of this is on line shopping and medical consultations such as those that Dr Lance O'Sullivan has pioneered in rural communities can be used to over come the problem of the lack of transport. 

It is not only children that need to be empowered but also the teachers.  They need to be able to deliver the digital curriculum and manage their own information and data.  Digital Fluency Intensity was seen as a way of empowering teachers, where ideas can be learnt and tried.

Gerhard showed us some tips, tricks and tools to manage our work flows.  Installing one tab to group similar tabs together sounds like a sensible way of managing tabs.  He also mentioned Toby and Toby Mini as well as bookmarks as other systems which create collections of tabs.  There is no right or wrong way to manage your work flow but by experimenting you can find to find the tool that works best for you.

We also looked at how to manage our Gmail and looked at our personal preference settings.  By putting unread emails at the top of the page you are more likely to deal with this mail and not let it sit unforgotten way down at the bottom of the page.  Gerhard talked about archiving mail and not deleting it, filters, grouping conversations, starring conversations and attachments.  A handy tip about labs was to be able to undo a sent email.  How often have you gone to hit send and remembered you wanted to check something before you sent it - this gives you 20 - 30 seconds to recall the email.

Organising your life with a calendar was really useful.  I set up a personal calendar as well as a class calendar for Room 16.  Having these to the side of your gmail is very handy.

Hangout was the main learning session today.  We learnt how to create a meeting environment which anyone can join.  It was all a new experience for me and we were lucky to have help at hand to link all of the group to share a place that is important to them.  After lunch we set up another hangout to share information on the digital curriculum.  I can see children would enjoy being able to see and talk with children whom they had blogged with through the Tui Mai Tuhi Atu programme or even share another classes learning experience.  Even within team one I can see the juniors would be excited to share their learning with another class via a hang out.