The End of an Era

The idea of ubiquitous learning is a real game changer in education. No longer are we confined to the 4 walls of the classroom, we are now able to be almost omnipotent with the advancements in technology. Learning at school, at home, while travelling or while away on a conference in the middle of nowhere (as long as there's wifi) is now a thing.

Being able to connect at any time in any place means that learning can be done whenever it suits both teacher and student within reason. Google classroom means that all students can be sent documents at any time to keep them up to date with all assignments.

Being given the Google Certified Educator Level 1 badge is proof that I have been able to take in a lot of this information and apply it in real life contexts

Empower-ful stuff

My first DFI of term 2 and there was a lot to pick up! The first thing we learned about today was empowerment. Empowering learners to take control of their learning and become creators of content not just consumers. We talked about the ways we can use technology to counter negative impacts in students' lives.

We spent a lot of time talking about computational thinking. We discussed how many of the jobs that exist now have been created in the past 10 years and what the job market will look like in 10 years for our students. The new digital technologies curriculum means we are creating learners that will be savvy with technology by the time they are in the workforce.

There were a couple of activities that we did that I thought were easily transferrable to the classroom. Giving instructions to each other to draw shapes or walk through a grid showed how important and basic computational thinking is. Using Scratch was also something that would translate really well in the classroom. I created a couple of sports based animations using sprites and coding. Here is one og those


The potential to use these animations for presentations for both students and teachers is an exciting prospect that I'll be sure to explore in the coming weeks.

The other Scratch animation i made

DFI 7

Another week I missed on holiday! This week seems to be one of the most useful weeks and I am gutted to have missed it. Using Google Forms is something I have been intending to play around with so I will definitely be looking at the links given to give me a better idea of how to use them. I may even do a Google Hangout to get some people in the DFI to help me figure it out!

Google sheets is something I use everyday to monitor student achievement so using the links in the DFI from this week will be something that will no doubt help me streamline the creation and usage of these documents