Day 6 Digital Fluency

 Today we took an in-depth look into Google sites and the sites we had already created. It was cool to see the different styles teachers had come up with to help navigate the sites, but also to make the sites visually appealing. This gave me a few ideas and I decided to make a personal site around having all my school mahi in one place. I've created the framework for my site and moving forward I will be aiming to finish my site off before the end of this year (if I manage to find some time to complete it). We also had a look into a class site that was already established (my teams Health and PE site). We were looking at the set up of the site, what was done well and how we could improve our site. After reviewing the site, I set a goal to make the site easier to navigate and improve the visuals on the site. To achieve this, I moved up our sub page tab (it was close to the bottom and wanted it to be one of the main points to the site), Changed the banner background (we didn't have a banner originally, so changed this to an image relevan tot our subject area) and made our first blog easier to understand while also pointing out the key pieces of information (I cut some of the not so important text out, moved some of the text to relevant positions, underlined, increased the size and made bold the words we really needed our viewers to see). 

Once I achieved my goal, I realised how such little changes can actually make a pretty big impact on the navigation of the site. It looks a little better, but the things our students really need to see and comprehend
are easier to find. Here is the finished product to my updated site!

Day 5 digital fluency

Today's focus around collaborative learning/planning/teaching had a few gems in it today!!! One thing that I will be taking away from today's lesson that will enhance my students' learning ability are the Multi-text data base and Multi-modal data base. 

Having these tools ready and available for the students will give them a lot more resources to help them learn and understand their learning a lot better!! Not relying on just one resource to establish their opinion will be extremely beneficial for the students. It will also be a valuable resource for those students who like to extend themselves, using a range of different media resources to extend their learning and mahi! 

Today we were creating a Google site. We used a range of resources in the planning stages of this. I particularly liked the jamboard resource for planning how our site will look before actually creating the site.  It made visualing the site a lot clearer, and it was a lot easier to place all my resources in an easy to understand order (to help with the navigation of my site). I'm going to try jamboard again in the future when planning my next google site (probably looking into next year). Eventually we did get to create a site as well, using the plan I created on jamboard this is what I came up with..... It is still a work in progress however, and I plan on using this site at the beginning of next year before moving into our inquiry learning!!!

Here is the link to my site!

Day 4 Digital fluency

Today's focus around the use of Google sheets was really good learning. I use sheets quite a bit in school and definitely knew I wasn't using Google sheets to its full potential. This is going improve my workflow a lot, not having to navigate around sheets just to find a few pieces of information (instead I'm going to use the filter option which will be A LOT quicker) is going to save a lot of time!!!! I'm also going to try and teach some of the tips I've learnt today to my students. We are just beginning an exercise log so learning how to do averages, sums, creating charts will be cool (so the students can actually view their progress and see the progression. Also will be cool if they notice any patterns that occur in their charts, but thats a lesson for the future now that I'm thinking about it!)

Some of the useful tips I learnt for navigating Google sheets are;

• Highlighting the columns (Shift+click), then adjusting the column size will automatically adjust all the columns highlighted to all be the same size (no need to adjust all of them manually anymore).

• There is an icon in the navigation bar that allows you to move the decimal placing for numbers in the cell.

• Conditional formatting is a great tool to use to sift through a lot of data very quickly (can also be used to highlight a lot of things quickly).

• The filter feature is similar to conditional formatting, but also can be used to put a focus on the students' data/learning you want to focus on without having all the additional data on screen.

• The number icon at the top is a great tool to format your writing and everything else to the way you  want it (not the computer automatically changing numbers for you)

• Publishing and using the embed code on your charts will allow your chart to update live (instead of using an image and having to replace that image to update the chart)

Below is what we created today. I've created a chart analysing a student's Blog. The chart shows how many times this student has posted on to their blog each month. It is based on seven years of Blog post (with each year being represented by a certain colout). Because I have embedded the chart I will be able to make an update live while using Google sheets. My challenge to you is to see what changes I make to my chart before DFI day 5!!!