Digital Fluency Intensive - Devices

Today's session was all about using devices in the classroom and ensuring our learners are Cybersmart online. The phrase "Cybersmart" is a purposeful phrase, we are not teaching our students to be "Cybersafe" but instead "Cybersmart" and ensuring we are "empowering our learners as confident and connected decision makers". Devices and the digital footprint they leave needs to be taught in a positive light - students need to understand the wealth of opportunities online whilst also maintaining a positive digital presence online. 

It was great today learning about the different Cybersmart categories and the importance of teaching students about these categories i.e. Smart Learners, Smart Media, Smart Surfing. I will aim to make use of the teacher resources on the Manaiakalani Cybersmart site with my students. 

A take home message I took from today was the importance of ensuring that what the students are doing online is visible - nothing should be hidden. Hapara Dashboard is a fantastic tool to use in the classroom to ensure this. I learnt some great tips about how to use Hapara more effectively in the classroom, some of these include; 

• Sharing tab - allows access to all docs that are not in students specifically named folders
• Ability to access students blogs - both draft and saved posts
• Activity viewer - gives me the ability to record every URL - I can see what students are on and can take a 'snap' to record the time and date
• Guided browsing - I put in the web addresses that they can go to 
• Filter session - restrict students access to certain sites 

I intend to use these features with my learners in the future. 

A further element of todays session was using chromebooks and iPads. These are the devices our students use so we spent some time looking into their capabilities. I found it interesting using explain everything with the iPads. It was great to learn about the potential this app has across all curriculum areas and the benefits it will bring to the junior students. I can see how this has the power to transform their learning and give them more ownership over what they are doing.