Gaylene Young Professional Blog

Finding solutions while navigating in an online learning platform. Thinking outside the box seems to be a regular occurrence for the students in Room 7.  We are constantly trialing new things to support their individual learning needs.  Take Jamboard for example.  We needed a digital whiteboard to help us explain our thinking - particularly in mathematics.  The only issue was, we couldn't seem to figure out a way to transfer that learning to our individual blog sites. Two great things eventuated from coming up with solutions to these problems.  One we learnt how to download to a pdf, which helped our students who had access and internet issues use drive offline and continue with their work.  As well as download as a pdf and embed the Jamboard into their blogs. Maybe this post will help you in some small way.  If you come up with another solution, please feel free to share in the comments.

Jamboard...New Whiteboard Function for distance delivery? Tēnā Koutou Katoa, We've recently started using Jamboard.  I needed a programme that had a whiteboard element, particularly when meeting students online for explicit teaching sessions.  Jamboard allowed me to do that.  I particularly like the collaborative functionality.  It also allowed me to download as a pdf, so I could ship it off to students who had limits to internet data and access.  If work needed to be completed individually, that was easily done also by giving them a copy each. I encourage you to give it a go and see if it works for you and your students. Nga mihi Na Whaea Gaylene

Kia Ora Koutou, Working online during lockdown level 3 has come with many hurdles that we as a school have had to overcome. One such hurdle, is overcoming access and data issues for many of our students. Below is a video that I quickly recorded, please ignore many of my blunders.  Regardless, the end result is the same. Working offline is achievable with the Google docs offline extension. It allows you to select the work in your drive that you want to have access to. Any and all work that is done is quickly updated and saved once you get back online. This option no longer limits the progress and learning for each of our students, so hopefully it will support your online delivery also. Nga mihi Na Gaylene

Building Proficient Writers # Bookmarking101 Motivating my students to write can seem at times a really difficult task to accomplish.  I've started to use mixed ability groupings, and encourage them to all write within a shared document.  This approach enables my struggling writers to get the support they need from their peers really quickly.  I'm not sure if you find yourself in the same situation, but my reluctant writers tend to take in the words given from their friends more than they do from me.  My proficient writers also love being able to give that help and guidance. We've worked really hard this year on building that strong, supportive culture within our classroom.  Self-management is a key goal we strive to instill in all our students also.  Building Leaders comes as an added bonus! In our shared writing documents, you may find yourself in a situation where they have tonnes to write about, which leads to the students having to scroll th...

Google Certified Educator Level 2 I went into the exam feeling fairly confident....I mean surely I can complete the tasks within 180 minutes right?  Well wrong - I spent a lot of time reading into the multiple choice and drag and drop questions.  Some answers seemed the same, so it's really easy to question your knowledge and understanding of different topics and scenarios. I think there was something like 12 scenarios where we had to use all the knowledge, skills and competencies we'd been studying about relating to the Google for Education tools e.g. youtube, spreadsheets, docs, new google sites, gmail, calendar, blogger, drive, hangouts, forms, google scholar and chrome extensions.  Time just started ticking away....I mean the last 10 minutes was absolutely intense and I knew I wasn't going to complete the exam...so had to race, pick and choose the tasks that i'd be able to complete the quickest. I can honestly say, that I would not have been able to com...

It is awe inspiring the digital technologies that are available to transform learning - opening up a whole new world of learning opportunities.  Students now have the opportunity to participate, create and thrive in this ever evolving digital world. It was a lot of fun to experience 360 virtual learning.  There is also Paint 3D, TinkerCad, SculptGL, Google Sketchup, Clapmotion, Clapmotion....I started thinking about how I can use these tools to support their computational thinking and to ensure that they are able to design and develop digital outcomes that will solve authentic problems or issues that are important to them. Below you will see my 3D image using Paint 3D.

Digital Fluency Session 5 Today we have been familiarising ourselves with google sites and reflecting on how we can make learning more visible for our learners, whanau, parents and the wider teaching profession.  It definitely makes you more conscious of the content you teach.  What are we learning?  Why are we learning it?  Where do we want to go? Similarly, is my learning site interesting and engaging? Are my learners 'hooked in' and keen to be part of the learning environment i've created.  Thoughts of whether or not the multi-modal learning pathways created are generating innovation, creativity, critical thinking.  Will they become better communicators?  Which leads me to consider the nature of the assigned tasks and whether or not student agency is evident....(so much to think about when making learning visible). Below is a link to the sites that the teachers in our cluster developed. I like the idea of having the whole learning proc...