Blog day 1 of the DFI. Friday 26th July.

First part of the day: Dorothy Burt gave an overview of Manaiakalani starting off - beginning in 2006. 2007-2008 is when it kicked off. Perhaps this is why we've got an emphasis on blogging:

Initially popular in the early 2000s - just like High School Musical and flip top mobile phones - blogging spawned what's now recognised as the voice of the internet. Of course nobody now refers to the ‘voice’ of the internet as it’s a deafening cacophony. Kind of like Smash Palace on Saturday night. The first successful bloggers came from multiple social classes, different subcultures and were difficult to define although ‘Hipster’ is a catch-all.  Interestingly, then came the belief that bloggers would become the next wave of authors and lots of big money blogger / author book deals were signed. Unfortunately this rarely worked. The problem was that writing a blog and writing a book are very different; they both involve a lot of typing but that's about it. A paragraph in a book is written often years before being published and with the intent that it will make sense 10 20 30 even 100 years later. However, a sentence on the Internet is designed to last one day-the same day it's written. The next day it's over written: there's not even a physical piece of evidence to show the significance of the original piece of writing unlike a daily newspaper. This is not necessarily a failure; it's a difference. Thus, where you can get a continual merging of the past in the present all squeezed into the same fixed perspective, it is often lacking the original context. As a fad, blogging has faded somewhat. Vlogging seems to be the flavour of the month at the moment. In fact one of the L2 assessments for media is to produce a 5 part vlog as a character. Part of the prep was to look at episodes of 'The Pengest Munch' on youtube, amongst other famous youtubers. Pewdiepie is one of the best known: in fact psychotic, aussie, dirtbag mosque shooter referenced him as a cynical ploy for popularity. Popularity is the wrong word - notoriety?

Back to Dorothy: she talked about being at Tamaki College surrounded by higher decile schools. She covered how the English teacher raised the level of her Y10 class (the top stream class) and how that was significant as it's harder to raise the level of the top stream children. This is not my experience. In the 14 years I've been at GBHS and the three year before that at Wairoa College (both streamed schools), it's always been easier to shift the students in the higher streams - and they typically have more support from home, and are often less affected by poverty. The hard yards are those won in the lowest classes. We have students who leave Y10 still at level 2 for reading comprehension. In fact some leave school still at level 2.

Next on the agenda: Google Groups. This is familiar, but have learned a few things about setting them up. This is certainly something that I'll be able to take back and present to staff. It revolves around setting up a mass emailing list. We have these at GBHS and we are used to using them such as sending out an email to 'teachers'. Useful, yes - so if we are wanting to set up a group (such as parents in your basketball team). I'll set up a couple immediately: one for the English faculty, one for staff that are in my professional learning group.

After morning tea (nice coffee by the way - and cheese+crackers!) we looked at Chrome, beginning with google profiles. This is not something that I mess around with much as I use my computer profile and work profile as such. There's been some talk about someone called Maria Condo/Kondo. Apparently some kind of computer expert who is worried about your professional profile. Judging by the reaction of others in the room, Maria is some kind of short lived cultural fad. I'm not too worried about missing out on this one.

Omnibox in google - use it for a timer, calculator etc. Some discussion as to why people are still buying calculators which, Dorothy thinks, are obsolete. Navigating tabs using command and the number of tab- really useful and quick if you can't use a mouse or touchpad and don't want to click. OK? Another reference to Maria Kondo and joy. Once again, it's like a joke about Jar Jar Binks - it falls flat if you don't get the context. It reminds me of how I read this story about Harry Potter and how Harry was a cultural phenomenon. Over 345 million copies of the books had sold-there are seven in the series- and the author had not read any of them. He (this story was published in 2007) was grappling with the thought that he’d missed something of vital cultural importance and after a decade or two had passed was doomed to misunderstand everything as Harry would come to represent a shared cultural ethos. Of course, there's some water under the bridge since then and as it turns out Harry was not as culturally important as the author thought. I've heard the odd joke about Hufflepuff and someone the other day made a joke about 'He that shall not be named' but if I didn't understand the reference I wouldn't have missed much. Our latest cultural phenomenon has been (in my opinion) the HBO show 'Game Of Thrones' and I expect it to have the same cultural impact as Harry Potter has. Which is basically nothing, apart from a few references to the arrival of winter and maybe some off-colour jokes about incest. Either way my advice is simple. Either give a small polite smile as if it were a fart joke or keep your face entirely blank as if you had gazed into the void and are now on the back end of an existential crisis. I prefer the second option for no better reason than that's my face's default setting. At least, that's what everyone tells me.

Anyway, back to Chrome - we are using command+shift+v as it copies without formatting. It's cleaner. Can be tricky to copy from word as formatting is different. Good tip to teach students. Another tip is to avoid underlining as it signifies a link. A quick look at voice typing. Another tip on inserting a table of contents on a google doc that automatically links to the sections. You can link these so it will navigate to that specific section-a kind of document gps. Also a back to the top function. Footers and headers kind of thing which sounds like a football reference.
Anyway - I've already used the google groups function to set up a group for the nine members of the faculty. Faculty sounds more important than department doesn't it? I'll set up another one mid week for the 16 members of my professional learning group, and will 'loom' it so I remember for next time.