Digital Fluency Intensive Week 3

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today I learnt about the 'create' part of Manaiakalani's philosophy. This aspect is focused on engaging learners in creative tasks and is not based solely around a device. Dorothy made a point of explaining that everyone learns differently; and we need to provide a range of opportunities for students to create and use the whole body to do so (the  infographic to the right demonstrates what this looks like visually). It is important to note that devices are a small part of 'create' and is often only used as a recording tool to capture the creativity e.g. via photo or video. Devices are a way of turbocharging the learning and creativity!

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Today I practised making buttons. I have already had a go at making buttons for my class google site, but it was great to have a refresher. 

We were shown how to change certain settings on our youtube channels to make them more private and make sure the videos we embed on our class sites are free from showing suggested videos; therefore eliminating the element of distraction of unintended youtube clips. This will definitely help with keeping my students more focused while viewing content via our class site!

I also started to make an infographic for book week for our school as it will be held next week. As a library leader I thought this would tie in great with making things more visual and creative! 

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

I had so much fun creating an animation using google slides. I can definitely see my students utilising this and creating all sorts of animations. It is important to remember to make duplicate copies of the slide as you go to make it easier to move the images gradually to make it look more realistic. I got some great feedback from my fellow course buddy Blake Masters on how to improve my animation and it was easy to adjust. You can view my practise animation below. 

One thing I'm not sure about is how to make png images work on iPads as the pixelated backgrounds still show up once an image is inserted. This will be an issue for my students in class as they are one to one iPads. If there is a way to fix this please feel free to comment! 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?


Learning how to adjust privacy settings and create labelled playlists on youtube will be invaluable both professionally and personally. I have always been reluctant to upload videos to youtube as a way of storing them and as I've found out for good reason. It turns out it's not good to post videos of students to youtube especially for Years 1-8 with the comments feature present. I know as a parent I wouldn't too happy is my child was in a video online especially without my permission and for public view. 

This has prompted me to recheck my child's youtube account settings to ensure the restrictions are appropriate (now that I know how to do this).