Day 4 DFI Friday 16 August. Honestly, my drawing is Thingy from WhatNow.

Cybersmart rather than cybersafety. Cyber from the greek word meaning skilled in steering or governing means pretty much anything to do with the spread of the internet. I wonder whether 'bubonicsmart' would be a better metaphor and it would fit with the whole 'viral' idea. In this context, it relates to being responsible users of the internet. One of the tips was not have have a whole lot of don'ts; instead show students what they should be doing. We didn't look at deepfake, the darkweb, install a TOR browser or scan through the deepweb/darknet or torrent sites. Instead we looked at a slides presentation that had lots of fun tips about being safe on the interwebs. In fact, later on in the day, I made a short video using screencastify where I scrolled through the 'smart legal' slide and a couple of attached resources. I'll try and embed it in this blog.

Hapara and the joys of big brother: monitoring and focusing students’ work went over to our staff like an open bar to an alcoholic. Or to pretty much anyone that likes a drink or two. I know I do. Some good tips today - especially around naming documents and organising folders - changing the view to 1 file in the folder so you can see which of your students have actually done what you told them to do two seconds ago and moved it into the correct folder.

We all had a go with Chromebooks - using shortcuts/taking screenshots/right click. Beneficial as it is good to know the hangups with using a chromebook; first thing you notice are the differences. We had a slides activity to work through. Robbie thought it was a good activity to give to the boys - I agree. In fact I think our staff should have a crack at it. On the same grotty, stained chromies with loose keys and shonky touchpads that our boys routinely defile.

Ipads. All the apple stuff is loaded for $$. I’ve got a Macbook. I found the ipad stuff difficult and I’ve got one. I use it for teacher observations and not much else; in fact my oldest daughter uses it to watch an atrocious reality show called Love Island. Bumped into 'Grinter' the principal of Rotorua Boys' at the Auckland airport. He was extolling the virtues of using ipads as RBHS has gone fully ipad. There's no keyboard and they're more than twice the price. But he thought they were great creative tools... I don't think we'll be going there.

Screencastify - this is another great tool, although I have gone down the 'Loom' rabbit hole instead. Loom offers 100 free videos that it hosts. And I've used 76 of them so far this year. In fact I've started recording my marking/conversations with students .Advantages of (free) screencastify: 50 videos per month that are downloaded straight to drive and there's the drawing functions. Advantages of (free) Loom: editing and hosting 100 videos that can be commented on and you easily can see how many times each video has been watched. This can be discouraging. If you hit the 100, you'll have to download them to drive.

Actually, now that I watch this video, I realise that my drawing looks a bit like Thingy from What Now - although you'll have to skim through to the end. Probably shows my age right?

Alright then, my trip to Tamaki last week. Russell started by giving us a description of the school community: something like 30% Tongan, 26% Samoan, 23% Maori and the rest is a combination of the other islands, Phillipino and 2% Pakeha. At least, I think it was something like this. My brain shuts down with statistics really quickly - even faster if you show me graphs. Very low average income and lots of students commute to the school - and lots of students commute to go to other schools - and lots of movement. The school wears the loss of the chromies when students move.

Five computers in each class (not chromes) for those who forget or are getting their chrome fixed.
We looked at some of the sites - Hinerau Anderson (tech) gave a tour of her site. Impressive - she said it was the third iteration and her first couple of sites were trainwrecks - although, at the time she thought they were gold. Russell talked about the uniformity of the sites - for student’s ease of navigation. So the name was the teacher, then subject. Year levels across the top. Calendars organising coursework were the first content. However, looking at the different staff sites, they did not always conform to the model. Good model to see though, and borrow from.

Tour of classes. No class seemed bigger than 13 students. 13 -  WTF!  Also interesting - instead of all teachers using Hapara workspace there was variation. The first student I spoke to had a couple of classes using Google Classroom, a couple with Hapara workspace and another couple that just used sites - the student referred to this as ‘Drive’. Not all staff were as accomplished as Hinerau Anderson either - she was obviously a bright light and had her courses/content organised outstandingly well. In terms of course content, Tamaki weren’t doing anything that seemed out of the bag special - they were using the same sorts of content and tools (such as Education Perfect) but the advantage was how visible everything was on sites. Another difference was that all students had devices - which were not in use in every class. One class was doing an annotation activity for heath that involved a text reading about the dangers of Methamphetamine. They were using paper and highlighter pens - it could have been done on a doc, but they’d chosen to go ‘old school’. Not too many ‘shared learning spaces’ - in one double class, the teacher was explaining the vagaries of her year 10 Social Studies course to us while at the other end, a member of the Y12 English class played hip hop music through a bluetooth speaker and others were involved in a boisterous discussion about a subject I’m not sure about but am confident it wasn’t anything to do with English. It felt a bit like GBHS. David Winter persisted in asking the English teacher an awkwardly worded question while we disrupted her class. She didn’t hide her annoyance.

Blogs - these were not commonly used. Tamaki, like Hornby, experienced a significant drop off in the senior school. In fact juniors were not so keen either. They were optional - and an alternative used for sharing was the google + communities. We had some discussion about the use of blogs as a method of increasing writing practise (I was about to say mileage but we have the metric system and kilometrage doesn’t have the same ring to it). If blogger is merely a tool for sharing, then google + communities is a fine alternative, but in terms of reflection on learning using writing… Well, I guess the jury’s still out. Jason noted that they have a lot of wrecked chromebooks to fix. They have a school of about 600 students and 50 staff - and a full time techie with an intern coming in for two days of the week. And they were busy cannibalising broken chromebooks and fixing minor and major issues with students' busted stuff. Jason said they had a lot more repairs, possibly due to the fact that the chromes go home each day and get munted around.

What GBHS has to improve then, is the visibility. Developing sites is ideal - if every teacher can start putting stuff together on sites then we are not too far away.