Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 1 Reflection

 I had a great first day at the DFI course today. 

I can recall hearing about Manaiakalani briefly in the past during my time studying at Laidlaw College. At the time, there were lecturers and staff who were involved with the programme, and so I came to know a bit about what was going on. I also knew friends who did placements in schools part of the programme who had such positive things to say about it. I remember hearing about the community WiFi initiative and can recall finding myself amazed that such a concept could work in reality. The organisation is doing great things for children and whānau in our country, and I am excited to be a part of it in a small way. 

I have always considered myself to be reasonably proficient when it comes to digital fluency, but it has been great to learn little tricks and ‘timesavers’ here and there, which I know will help me in my day-to-day use of devices in my class. Tools such as the Add ons and extensions which we were shown in the breakout session are great and will definitely be looked further at, with the goal of incorporating them into my classroom practice.

Functions such as the explore capability in Docs, and the feature which allows the assigning of comments look really handy, and I am already beginning to think of ways in which I could have them a part of my student’s learning experiences. Also, I had never thought of the possibility of using Docs for the purpose of Graphic design. Using tables to lock text and images into cells is a fantastic idea, and one which opens up new creative possibilities to students who don’t consider themselves particularly creative. 

Here is my Create task from today's session. I decided to make a poster to do with our school's PB4L system.

Having grown up with Microsoft products at school, I am definitely more accustomed to using these products as my ‘default’. Having said that, today has taught me that Google products, along with extensions and add-ons can be just as, if not more effective.

I’m very much looking forward to what the rest of the course has to offer. 

Jeremy