The Fundamental Four!

The Fundamental 4

The Essential Tech Slide Deck: bit.ly/uwctechdeck

There are lots of aspects to digital organisation, but the four that are most essential, and that also happen to be synergetic, ie all four are codependent, are:

1. Get Connected

Open up the Chrome Browser, then click in the little icon in the top right corner and sign in to Chrome. Sign in with your account details and agree to Link data when prompted. 

This means that everything you do with account is continually synchronised with your Google 'cloud' online, so if you lose your laptop, and have to either use a loaner or start with a new one, as soon as you sign in a sync—voila—everything in your Google life will reappear in seconds. Note, this just synchronises your browser content, files on your hard drive will not be backed up, to do this you'll need Backup & Sync*.

2. Organise your Drive

Open up the Chrome Browser, and go to your Google Drive online. Make sure you have folders created for all subject areas. You might want to add a folder for your own personal files, but remember, your drive is a school space, not your personal space.

There should only be folders in your drive, no loose files. If you have files from previous years that are making a mess, just create a folder called Archive (if you haven't already) and drop them in.

3. Desktop (almost) Zero: Drive it or Dump it. 

Your desktop is not a good place to keep your files—it makes them handy, but once they build up it comes very difficult to find anything. Worse, if you have any problems, none of those files are safe, so make sure any files you do have their a strictly temporary. Like the desk in your classroom, at the end of the lesson, make a decision; drive it (move it to your drive) or dump it (move it to the bin). Now you have your Drive synchronized this is as easy as a drag and drop, or within the Finder. 

4. Bookmarks on the Browser Bar, Trim your Tabs

All of the websites you rely on to function effectively from day to day should be organised along the bookmark bar. Make sure you are signed in so these are all synchronised to your cloud account. That means that those bookmarks, stored in folders, are backed up, and accessible on any other device that you sign in to.

Too many Tabs 

Too many open tabs is a symptom of poor bookmark organisation, if you know you can easily find any page you need in you bookmarks, you don't need to have 50 tabs open 'just in case'. If the site matters, then bookmark it, if not then close it if you don't need it now; an easy to do this is just use command+w to close any tab you have open.

To quickly close loads of tabs, just control click on a tab and choose one of the options, like Close Other Tabs!

Less than 10 tabs is ideal

This many tabs is unmanageable, and bad for you! 

(While you're there why not quit the apps you're not using and close any open windows as well?)

bit.ly/fundamental4

There are more than four?

Yes, but don't panic, one a week will see you reach organisational nirvana within a few months, with fabulous habits for life! 

What kinds of things? Well simple but powerful tips like this one for example:

Using the slide deck below, all you need to do is commit 10 minutes a week, until you have the fundamental four covered.

Here's the tech slide deck, open it, drop it on your (nice and tidy) bookmark bar and check it out once a week!

Poetry - Made Multimodal!

This incredible, beautiful example inspired me to approach our English teachers to consider making their work with poetry multimodal; showing this to them was a pretty persuasive pitch.

One of the many great things about my job is that I get to work with teachers and students throughout the college, from Kindergarten to Grade 12. One of the fabulous aspects to this is how often the fundamentals that are introduced in the Primary School, are just as effective and just as powerful in the Middle and High Schools.

We have been making a concerted effort to ensure that when we talk about 'digital literacy' we back that with some fundamentals, specifically the expectation that as our students move through the college they move from introduction to consolidation to competence in the five core domains of video, image, text, audio, and data. What follows is one example this year of integrating three of these into students experiences with poetry, by making it multimodal.

Multimodal Poetry

This work began by focusing on our Grade 4 students, nearing the end of a Writing Workshop focus on poetry. Instead of leaving it as a text only celebration, we asked the students to reimagine one of their poems, adding imagery—be it still or moving image. Some students were more literal in their interpretation, others more abstract, but the best skilfully combined both. Then they added the power of sound, choosing music and even sound effects to complement their own narration.

What I find really exciting though, is that as why I was able to take these videos to our Grade 7 teachers, whose students were ending a focus on poetry, only in this case they had been analysing and exploring an anthology of poetry. So we asked them to choose one... and make it multimodal. 

Grade 4

Grade 7

Whether it was a grade 4 poem the students wrote themselves, or a poem chosen by a Grade 7 student from an anthology, the teachers consistently commented on how powerful and insightful it was to see each students understanding of poetry made visual, made audible; made multimodal. 

Resources

If you're keen to have a go, here's a link to the site page where I collated the resources—I used the same resources with both Primary and Middle School classes. 

http://findsounds.com/ 

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/ 

These sites are fabulous for downloading music:

https://www.bensound.com/ 

http://freemusicarchive.org/

https://www.jamendo.com/ 

Spreadsheets for Everyone

Spreadsheets rock my world.

Spreadsheets are, at least in my experience, probably the least appreciated of the five core domains of ICT, unappreciated at least by people who have never used them. But, once you get a glimpse into the sheer mathematical beauty of the way these sheets of interconnecting cells, rows and grids can empower mere mortals to manipulate screeds of data like magnificent mathematical machines, well, you won't look back.  The ways that modern spreadsheets help people organise data from the miniscule to the massive, and free us to focus on the meaning of the numbers as opposed to the mere mechanics, is nothing short of transformational. 

5 core domains: Text, Image, Audio,  Video and Data - which ones are you weakest in?

And yet many, if not most educators languish in lethargic reticence; whether it's apathy or antipathy, who can say? What I do know is that the with the developments in terms of sheer processing power and refinement of control interfaces, the information and data management tools that used to be extremely complex operations, the purview of financial professionals only, are now suitable for anyone with or without a mathematical background. Spreadsheet applications like Numbers and Google Sheets have made it easier for the ordinary user, even kids as young as Grade 2 (Year 3) and below to manipulate, edit, and share the data stored in spreadsheets, using different functions and computations.

And no, it's not just about graphing. You can do that in a Word Processor or a Presentation tool. No. Spreadsheets are all about manipulating and managing data.

For examples of how I've used spreadsheets with kids as young as Grade 2, see this post. If you are a total spreadsheet noob and need to start from zero... read on.

So you feel like a novice when it comes to spreadsheets? Well it only takes 10 minutes to fix. Here is a labsite lesson I ran for our Grade 4 teachers, to get them from spreadsheet zeroes to spreadsheet heroes in one lesson. The whole thing is available below, in it's entirety (40 minutes) or in convenient bite sized attention deficit sized morsels below. You only need to know about 'Functions & Formulae' to get started.


The entire lesson took 40 minutes, here it is in sections:

Spreadsheet skill review:

Review cell address, and ranges of cells, eg: A1:B6

Functions & Formulae 

Review adding the contents of cells, by by using the SUM function and by writing a formula, eg A2+B3.

Critical to the 21st Century classroom model, is ensuring that you as the teacher are NOT a prerequisite for success. Students need to be empowered to resolve their own challenges. The sooner you establish this as 'normal' practice, the easier it will be.

The students should not 'need' you to learn.

This section is purely concerned with the appearance of the spreadsheet. No Maths required, resizing columns and rows, adding text,. and outlines.

Students build a framework within with they can insert relevant data.

Now that the framework is ready, this section guides students through 'telling' the spreadsheet what kind of data will be entered into certain cells.

IMPORTANT: In a spreadsheet you cannot just add a $ sign to indicate currency, symbols like these actually contain 'functionality' in a spreadsheet, so in short, nothing will work.

Instead if you writing dollar signs, let the spreadsheet do that FOR you, by telling it to format certain cells as currency.

This feature as other uses as well, for example making certain cells display percentages. You cannot do this by just adding a % sign.

Students enter specific data that need to be totalled using the SUM function.


As more information is entered, the total at the bottom of the sheet should automatically update, this allows students to begin 'modelling' 'What if?' scenarios:

What if we buy 15 of those?

Then students can write a subtraction formula to subtract the $20 that they were initially loaned from their overall total.

Student's that finish early, should be used as 'quality control' ie checking on their peers to make sure that they are finished properly, and that their sheets are working properly.

 

Challenger

This section is an 'extension' section.

This means that the spreadsheet will do what they need, but these features will make it even better... IN particular enabling more effective 'modelling'.

• Inserting additional columns to allow better management of multiple quantities.
• Refining the use of formulae to add and subtract
• Creating a 'ripple' effect whereby cells reference other cells
• Using conditional formatting to change the colour of a cell when the value changes.

Students will need time to 'play' with these interrelated features, in order to get to a point where the logical sequencing of calculations makes sense.

They may also use ways to get it working which are not the same as yours... it may even be better...

Google's Applied Digital Skills 

Google have created an entire curriculum devoted to skills acquisition, totally supported with video tutorials, that can lead you thorough lessons, step by step. The skills span the entire Google Apps Suite, but the Sheets focused lessons are particularly well designed. 

A great example is this lesson on budgeting to make better financial decisions: 

Junior School Sheet Activities

Our Maths Coach has created the following website to collate some of the core activities we use to integrate the effective use of spreadsheets into Junior School Maths lessons: