DFI By Hangout Through Lock Down.

Today Friday 27 March day 2 of the lockdown Manaiakalani did a DFI (Digital fluency Intensive) by google hangout from all across New Zealand. Dorothy leads the day and lots of facilitators were there to support and lead some presentations. Everyone was asking questions in the comments. Then for the leveling up sessions 2 or 3 participants were paired up with a facilitator and we went into our own hangouts and supported small groups through setting up a google form and google sheets. The small groups worked well with them being able to share their screens and me talking them through things. Then I could also share my screen and model for them and they could follow on their device. Having 2 devices for the day made it a lot easier to follow the slide show and the speaker and comments. With the corona 19 lockdown teachers are being forced to use their devices and are stepping up and taking more risks and trying new things. They are going outside their comfort zones. They realize after the 2-week break which starts today, when school goes back on Wednesday 15 April we will still be in lockdown and will be doing learning through distance learning on the class learning site.

Day 1 of Isolation at Home.

This day in the future will be talked about. Hopefully how we as a country stoped the virus in New Zealand. I am proud to be a kiwi and of how Jacinda and her team made the quick decision to lock the country down. For once we are way ahead of Australia and a lot of other countries. I am at home working for Manaiakalani we are very busy supporting schools and teachers with distance learning which is very easy for the teachers using sites, blogs and hangout meetings. We are regularly having meetings each day in our organization which is good to be in contact with and kept up to date on information and sharing resources, ideas and MOE info. It is a good opportunity to do some professional learning and upskilling. It is important to post videos to the students to keep in contact and for them to see a familiar cheerful face. I had fun at Kaingaroa school before shutting down making videos.

Please everyone out there in kiwi land keep in your bubble and we will beat this.

Online toolkit

This week I presented my online toolkit on Amplify Talk Moves. It was great to get back into my Mathematics and statistics hat. This presentation I made a very hands-on one with the teachers doing exactly what you would get the students to do. It was hard to judge the time as it is teachers, not students completing the activities. Some of the main areas, I wanted to emphasize was the purpose and big idea of the lesson. We also looked at a couple of tools to help amplify the student's voice and discussed and shared ideas of how we could turbocharge the get ideas and voice of the students. I felt it went well and feel after looking at the cluster data Maths and statistics is an area we need to focus on.