Digital Fluency Intensive: Day 8

The Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy link this week was cybersmart. 

Even when Manaiakalani was in its early stages of development, cybersmart was an important part of the digital learning.  In the real world teachers are responsible for children's care and well being so this same care should taken in the digital world where a device can take children anywhere in the world.  

We need to be able to say to our parents that we have a positive programme to make children cybersmart which will begin in Year 1 with smart learners and smart relationships and continue to be intensionally delivered weekly through out their children's schooling.  It uses positive language and teaches children to navigate and be responsible.  A smart person is a positive and empowered person.

Manaiakalani has put together eleven categories that children, teachers and parents need to know.  These range from smart learners and smart relationships through to smart footprints.

The Harpara Teacher Dash Board was devised by Jan Zawadzki and because it was created by a New Zealander with Manaiakalani in mind it aligns well with visibile, ubiquitous, connected and empowered learning.   It helps keep learners focused and organised on line and provides the teacher with visibility into what learners are working on, thus allowing quick feedback.  Work does need to be saved in the correct folders so that visibility is not challenged.  Blogs and comments can also be kept track of without having to actually visit the blog.

We found out what it is like to use the devices that our learners use.  We used the Digital Dig that is designed for learners to become familiar with using a chrome book by doing tasks such as taking screen shots, using the webcam and finding keyboard short cuts.  It was interesting putting ourselves in our learners shoes.

Khismira took us through how we use our iPad sites for our year one learners to access their learning.  At the beginning of the year we teach the children the kawa of care and introduce the skills they need to complete tasks such as taking a photo, copy and paste, duplicate and locking items down.  They very quickly learn these skills and use them to complete activities in Explain Everything.  We were all able to try out our skills on an iPad.

Screen castifying was a skill we looked at.  This could be useful in making tutorials for students to learn new skills.  Listening to yourself talking through a process shows how much practise you need to become a fluent speaker to get the precise instructions across without "umms" and pauses.  It is something I need to practise!  We had to prepare and castify using one of applications that we have found useful.  I chose Goggle Keep which I have found very useful in keeping organised.

Here is a quick video tutorial on how you can use Google Keep.