So, I have spent most of the week revising some area of our DFI skills learnt over the past 8 weeks, thank goodness for the rewindable learning! Have also been revising via Brett Perillo on YouTube Google Educators Prep.
Labelled & organised all the notes I've jotted down each week so I could locate what I need quickly.
Registering for the exam was a bit stressful as we needed a voucher code to proceed. Kerry came to light with some unused ones and we were in!
Early start today, had to leave home at 7am, as I sat the exam at school. My first exam in 40 years was a bit daunting!! The introduction today calmed our nerves and we were given some more exam hints by Jeremy who had already sat his exam.
We began the exam quite calmly with a fairly quick run through the multi-choice section. The scenarios section took up the whole of the remainder of the given time! In fact I skipped about 3 sections towards the end, knowing that I was running out of time! Fully intended to go back to do those ones but couldn't beat the clock. Hei aha! It is what it is...!
Some areas I wasn't too familiar with or we hadn't covered in depth, but I know that there has been a huge shift in my attitude towards digital learning, my knowledge, my skill level and my confidence. The Covid-19 Lockdown has forced me into putting my digital skills into practice. It's also forced me into doing the DFI course remotely from home and made me solve the problems I have encountered. Had I not been on the DFI course I think I may have been sneakily driving around & delivering reading books, worksheets & maths booklets to all my class whanau letterboxes!! Instead two thirds of my class have been engaging on-line with Google Hangouts, following their set work on the weekly learning slides for reading, writing and maths, engaging in new PE and topic videos I have embedded into our site, emailing photos of their home learning activities, parents, grandparents and whanau have learnt how to access our on-line learning, children have been reading their assigned PM E-readers on-line.
So when we return to school I plan to keep up my skills by implementing many of the great digital 'power tools' I have learnt.
All in all I am so grateful that we were on DFI at this critical time in NZ's educational history when all our classes began on-line learning from their homes!
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ReplyDeleteCongratulations Donna on completing the Covid19 DFI, it has been quite a journey!
ReplyDeleteI really admire how you took up the challenge to join us online, there's nothing quite like putting it all into practice as we have over the past nine weeks. In this short time you've already made some great in-roads with your students and their whanau building positive memories that they will have with them to look back on. Keep up the good work Donna and keep sharing here on your blog. I'm looking forward to reading how it's going in the coming months.