DFI - Workflow Session

In today's DFI we focussed on workflow tools (e.g. Gmail; Meet; Calendar; Keep) and we had the opportunity to create a rewindable Google Meet video with a DFI colleague. In the video, we reviewed student blog posts featured in the Manaiakalani Mail Outs in 2020 and discussed the: teaching design, student responses to the task and any blog comments by others.

I found this session to be highly productive because the focus was on workflow affordances and the features that make Google tools highly integrative and promote efficiencies. I concur with Maria's perspective of workflow tools offering ways of enhancing both "professional and personal capacity". Early in the day, Dorothy increased our understanding and appreciation of the Ako element of the Manaiakalani pedagogy and thinking of the framework of the Manaiakalani programme in terms of an 'unfinished whare":

This visual metaphor was especially enlightening because - in Dorothy's words -  it acknowledges the nature of schools as independent Crown entities (whare) with their own 'feng shui'; where being part of the Manaiakalani Programme supports a coherent digital framework of three shared 'floorboards' - Ako, Hanga and Tohatoha (Learn | Create | Share). This coherence is important in leveraging collective strengths on two tracks: i) infrastructure access, and ii) effective digital teaching and learning for accelerated outcomes (i.e. pedagogy and practices).  

Although we covered quite a wide set of tools today, my workflow confidence and capability was particularly improved by the affordances of Google Keep and the Toby extension (as a way of accessing and tidying tabs). I look forward to spending time - and being deliberate - in setting up both. I can see how students would greatly benefit from bookmarking and pinning tab groups. Pinning tab folders will be HUGELY useful for facilitation, preparing for PLD sessions and lesson resources. Of course I can also see how all the tools we covered today could be used in our personal lives such as task lists, diarising tasks in calendars and saving retail pages we want to return to later!