Helen's Professional Blog

"Whew!" is all I can say!!! The Google Educator Level 1 exam was intense but, as the screenshot image above shows, I passed.  Completing the exam was two hours, 58 minutes and 33 seconds of intense concentration, intense completion of tasks and a bit of googling on the side to find out how to do tasks I couldn't automatically do.  The parts of the exam that got my blood pressure rising to places it should never go were:  creating You Tube playlists filtering data in descending order in Google Sheets  The final thing to stump me was performing tasks in the Google Omnibox.  What the #@%& is the Google Omni box?  I asked my facilitator & was promptly told to google it.  I thought to myself through gritted teeth 'What the #@%& do you think I've been doing for the last seven minutes!!' After reading and watching YouTube clips I discovered that the Google Omnibox is just the search bar - something I frequently use!!! Anyway, r...

Today I arrived a wee bit late after having flown back from a Manaiakalani Convenors' Meeting at Grey Main School in Greymouth.  Before boarding my plane from Wellington to Gizzy I completed the WWW in prep for today's session on Media & then flicked through Dorothy's slide deck on empowerment.  The whole Manaiakalani kaupapa of empowerment really resonated with me - especially when as a school leader I want education to empower not just our students but also our whanau - to give them rangatiratanga!! Being connected with digital technology, having visible learning & being ubiquitous (anytime, anywhere & global) empowers our tamariki.  This brings agency and also helps our students create their digital footprint and supports them to collaborate.  This is true for teachers too - utilising the kaupapa to empower them (us) too! I've had some new learning on using the Google Draw tool.  The wee animation above is an image I created on google draw...

Today we've had a deep, but very quick dive, into google forms, google maps and google sheets. I'm pretty comfortable with using google forms & have previously used this app.  I've recently made the shift to google sheets from excel & have been using basic features for my own purposes of data analysis.  My new learning today was pivot tables.  These will be useful for organising data in different ways - particularly if there are selected points of interest to analyse & interpret. I'd never used MyMaps before.  We completed some simple exercises of pinning locations, using the measuring tool & uploading data from a google form database to the map.  The teachers in our group may find a fun use for this with their classes.  As for me, maybe I'd use it for tracking or measuring personal travel.  Time will tell. Here's the map I created.  The pins show my DFI colleagues best holiday destinations.  I've also pinned my school. ...