Core Business – DFI day one.

Intros
It was great to meet everyone. I like that some schools have more than one person in the DFI, I think that would be helpful for processing all the new information.

Today I had my youngest, Helen, home sick. She was working and playing at the table alongside me for most of the day. I’ll soon be teaching part days in her class, so it was interesting to see the things that caught her attention. (She likes the voice recorder option, and the @today and @(name) smart chip).

Listening to Dorothy Burt, I hadn’t understood how very closely Hāpara was linked with Manaiakalani, and how it had been created out of the needs identified by Manaiaklani schools & kaiako. That helps me understand – and feel better about the fact – that a company who seems to be based overseas has a kupu māori as its name.

Favourite hacks of the day:
docs.new – type into address bar – brings up a new google doc! Maybe this will change my life in the way that Snipping Tool did when I first learned about that? (Which was when I was managing Forest & Bird’s Kiwi Conservation Club, so that’s 10 years ago).

‘@today’ -type it in and voila, the date appears!

Make Chrome my Own:
Managed to change my name from Tiffany to Tiff. This is awesome, I have been wanting to change this for ages but have been going in via the large rather than the small Tiff icon. I am really NOT a tiffany, I am much more of a tiff, so I am feeling more comfortable now my profile name matches to me.

Google Groups:
Looking into this I discovered I am a member of 63 groups, which makes me think I need to do some managing and clearing up! I will check in with Amie and our Manaiakalani Lead Teacher about whether we archive or delete old class groups, etc.

Thinking that using Groups might give us some options for communicating more effectively with our newsletter email list – I will be exploring this more. Directly Add vs Invite – I think it would be nice to invite our whānau rather than directly add, just to give them the option to deliberately participate. I think it would be a good idea to directly add our existing whānau, as they are already accustomed to receiving school emails, and then invite new whānau. I LOVE that I could choose settings and then not have to worry about remembering to use ‘BCC’. Also that new members can go back and see old messages – I can imagine teachers would really love this.

Pātaka Kukura – Google Drive

Learnt some useful shortcuts for searching for files – I will definitely make more use of the option to search in these ways:

And also this details option:

Google Docs

Yahoo, I FINALLY have got my headings, sub headings in my document sorted how I like them, as defaults. I had been frustrated by this not being intuitive, now I know how!

@Smart Chips seem really useful – I can see immediate in-school uses for @today and the timer function.

I had been meaning to explore the draft email option and I am so stoked to have had the time to do this, I often invite collaboration on an email and this is just going to make that so much simpler.

To explore further:

• Continue to clear up my Drive
• Double-check the simple way to add a table of contents (I missed the shortcut, and can currently only get there via ‘help’) – (update: now learned, thanks Amie! FYI: Click on ‘Insert’ the SCROLL TO THE END of the options!)
• Find out whether I archive or delete older google groups (because I am an admin), or whether I simply sign out of them and leave them sitting there… for someone else to sort out…?
• Have a good look at the extensions in the document: DFI Explore – Chrome Extensions
• Maybe organise the opportunity for all our staff to have some professional photos taken..?

Creating with Google Docs:
To finish our day (apart from the fun involved in getting the hang Snipping Tool…) I had a go at making meeting notes prettier. I think they are eye-soft and relaxing, so I’ll ask my colleagues if they want to switch!

I am sure next week I will be looking at adding alternative text behind my images, resizing images etc, but for today I feel I have learned and achieved a fair bit, and I have many work-ons, so I am signing off.