DFI Week 9

 So I sat the exam today, and...

I am pleased to have passed. This exam has been at the back of my mind for a long time, as I started working towards it when I was back in the UK in 2016. I really wanted to become Google Certified before I started applying for jobs here in NZ but the process of getting here became far more complicated and challenging than we had anticipated, and I needed to switch my efforts to completing the Teacher Education Refresh Programme at the University of Waikato instead. It's nice to know that it is done now, and I am confident that with a little more work on sheets and pivot tables I will be at the standard to complete the Level 2 Certification too. 

However, there was a moment of panic when my password didn't work, and it was really difficult to figure out why. I mean, there's no difference between these right?

Well, this was a quick lesson in the importance of font and how sometimes letters and digits appear the same. Look what happens when I turn the two into Comic Sans:

If that isn't an important lesson in how fonts need to make letters distinctive between the upper and lower cases, then I don't know what else would be!

I've filled out my response survey, so I'm going to put a copy of the answers here [with any extra reflections added in comments in italics]:

Let us know how this opportunity to attend the Digital Fluency Intensive has impacted you positively. * We are thinking of the whole package here - the digital, the group, Manaiakalani, learning using the LCS pedagogy etc etc

I have been able to engage with a lot of tools which I would not have had the time to develop independently: 

• Google Sites - building, constructing, embedding, linking, designing, 
• using Blogging (I haven't used blogger since 2002 so this was a useful refresher 19 years later) 
• Google Drive - effective link sharing 
• Google Mail - filing 
• Google Slides - creating animations

[I did like the session on Sheets, but I need to go back and review that again to make it make sense. Especially the section on Pivot tables.]

Are there any highlights that have impacted your life, your practice, your workflow... 
Google Keep. I don't know how I would get along without this app now. For taking notes, recording digitally, voice recordings, extracting text from documents, turning handwriting into text, this is an app which will make me work far smarter rather than harder and I am delighted to have it in my life. I would not have encountered it anywhere else.

Let us know how you think we could improve or do this better to support the next cohort. 

I did feel like a huge amount of the emphasis and expertise was directed towards primary education. Often the focus was in student engagement and while that is admirable, and I recognise that increased engagement does have an impact on the learning of students, at secondary school we need to focus on the NCEA standards and their requirements, and in particular how to prepare them for those assessments, design assessments which tap into our students' creativity and ensure that what we do would be acceptable to NCEA moderators and assessors.

[I recognise that this would not be of use to any of the primary teachers attending the DFI, which is why I am suggesting that a separate DFI with a secondary focus should be run, rather than incorporating this into the 'main' DFI]

Is there anything else you would like to say or let us know?
Further to my previous answer about needing a secondary focused DFI... I would have liked to see more examples of how these tools can help students to meet the requirements of the standards in new and innovative ways. How can we use these suites and tools for teaching AND ASSESSING Bivariate Data, Multivariate Data, Right Angled Triangles, Number skills, the numeracy portfolio... and that's just the maths side. Our moderators are so used to marking pen/paper workings, and many of our students struggle with that in maths [but we end up reverting back to it because we know the moderators understand it, and we understand it]. But we are nervous of using these new technological innovations for assessment because if WE get the design wrong, it's our STUDENTS who suffer when it comes to their grades. For true digital fluency in a secondary school environment, these are my primary concerns. How can we make sure that our technological innovation does not damage the authenticity and independence of a student's work and undermine their chances of success? [They get one, or at most two, chances of getting this right, so there isn't the room available to experiment and 'see if it works' without gambling on their pathways to future courses] I feel like this would have been far more useful guidance for me as a teacher in terms of my classroom practice and my professional practice, and would recommend that a Secondary Focused DFI be considered in the future.