Rachael's Professional Learning

Improving Workflow Today's learning was about using Google tools to help improve productivity. I had a lightbulb moment when I found out about the Toby mini extension. Every morning when I get into my classroom I spend time opening up the tabs I will need before school and also my planning for the day. Well...my life has changed!!  I have set up as you can see from the image, a folder for what I need pretty much every day, so instead of sitting and opening up each of the documents I can do it all with one click - some of you may have been doing this for ages - but I am seriously excited about this :)  GMail I found this session really useful today too and spent some time in one of the breaks tidying it up - I will have to find time to do the same in my Drive - however that will probably take a good pot of coffee and several hours there is so much in there. It's a great feeling having all emails sorted - probably the OCD in me coming out but I love it! So I had to share an imag...

Part of today's learning was to record ourselves discussing the teaching design behind the blog post from a Manaiakalani blog, and also the way that the comments support or contribute to the learning. This was all new learning for me! I had the issue of not having the record function enabled on Google Meet (something for me to address back at school) but Talei and I were able to present and record both our sessions from her Meet.  This was really useful today - I can see that the suggestion of being able to record parts of our whole school assembly to share with whanau on our class blog to show the awards being handed out, will be a lovely way to share successes with them. I have embedded videos into blogs before, but the process today was much more streamlined and very easy to follow.  I have included screenshots of the process so that I can come back to it easily and share this with others in my team. This task has also made me think about the kinds of things we are putti...

Kia ora Well today was the first DFI full on day of learning! Even after completing Google Educator Level 1 during lockdown I have come away with some tips and tricks on how to streamline certain tasks online. The add ons section is something I want to look into more - loving dualless which allows me to split the screen without having to remember which drop down menu to go to and great as I always seem to have multiple tabs on the go! Above is my poster created on google docs, which to be honest I have always found very frustrating to use in this way. After moving from PC to Mac and mourning the loss of Publisher, I found Google Drawing which would usually be my go to for things like this. However the benefits of using a table and being able to “disappear” the borders is literally work-life changing :) As I teach New Entrants and Year 1 we use iPads and are nowhere near 1:5 let alone 1:1. Thinking about how I can use what I have learnt today with them has been very thought provoking. ...

It's been on my mind for a while now to create a space where I can document my thoughts and ideas after learning new skills, attending courses and of course interactions with our students and colleagues. I am hoping that the DFI will give me plenty of opportunities to do this.