Category: Tohatoha | Share

Today we learnt all about Google Docs and discussed all the new things we could do that we didn’t know about before.

Our juniors spent some time learning how to make their words bold, italic and underlined. They also learnt how to change the font colour, size and style. They even got to add emojis, pictures and practice voice typing!

Some of the new things our Juniors enjoyed learning were: how to change the font style, change it to bold, that you can voice type, how to put emoji’s in.

Our seniors learnt how they could share a document with each other and work collaboratively – from anywhere. You can even share with your teacher so they can check your work or ask a friend to check and they can make suggestions that you can accept or decline. They also learnt how you can voice type and change the styles to heading, sub heading and titles. We also recapped on how you can add new fonts to your font bank if you don’t already have them.

We learnt that if someone else makes mistakes and we can’t fix it, we can look at version history and restore the correct version.

One of the coolest things our Seniors learnt was that you can translate the document in to lots of different languages!

They also enjoyed learning: how to add emojis, learning how to mention others and learning what justify means when you are  aligning something.

Today we learnt about public information (what is OK to share online with others) and private (what we shouldn’t share with anyone). We discussed that sometimes it is OK to share private information with a small group (like family or friends) but that we should ask one of our trusted adults about that first!

We then used google drawings for our juniors to add what they can share online:

We also discussed how what we do online is there forever. Our seniors used ctrl H to find their history to add to their google drawing to show the last 10 websites they had been on:

We learnt how to change the background colour, change the picture and shape as well as insert images or drag into the picture. Our seniors got a chance to use https://glowtxt.com/ to change their titles as well.

What sites are in your history? What do you think is OK to share online?

This term all of our class are participating in the cybersmart lessons!

Today we spent time getting to understand how our chromebooks work and what they can do.

Our Years 5-8 spent the morning working on their digital dig, where they had to find out different shortcuts that our chromebooks can do as well as what different buttons on our keyboards do. Chromebook buttons differ from Whaea Stacey’s computer so she couldn’t always help us! Luckily there were some tricks we learnt to help us find out!

Some of our favourite shortcuts are:
Ctrl + and Ctrl – to zoom in and out – this is really helpful if you need to see something up close
Ctrl, Shift and T to open a previously closed tab – this is helpful if you accidentally close your tab
Ctrl, Shift and QQ to sign out of our chromebooks – this is helpful if you are in a hurry to sign out or cannot use your mouse
Ctrl and T to open a new tab. This is helpful so you don’t have to put your cursor the whole way up.

Those of us who finished early also did some posters displaying shortcuts.

Our year 1-4’s spent some time learning how to use our touchpad. We did some activities where we had to drag an arrow to the target using both our hands – it was easier to do this with our writing hand. We also had to move different animals to boxes and using a jigsaw website to make pictures to join the jigsaw together.

We also had to highlight sentences to change the font and the colour, this is helpful when you are doing your own writing and can change the font to suit what you like.

The hardest activity was using the polyline tool to make a shape – we had to be very careful not to double click too early or we would have to start again or not have the correct shape.

Our juniors are really excited that they get to join in with cybersmart this term.

Today we started our own individual blogs. While some of us had used these in previous years, most of us hadn’t so it was something new.

We made an all about me blog profile which taught us skills using Google Draw. We learnt how to change the background and create our own gradients for the background. We also learnt how to mask a shape so we could have our picture in a different shape instead of a circle or square.

We discussed before we made our profiles what things we should and shouldn’t share about ourselves (private vs personal). Some of the things you shouldn’t share are your full date of birth, your full name or address. It is OK to share what things you like inside and outside of school.

Check out our individual blogs to see our all about me posts!
Kyla
Coen
Rosslee
Julius
Clinton

St Mary’s Foxton

Kia ora,

This week in Cybersmart we have been learning about creating animations or pick-a-paths using Google Slides.

We learned that for an animation you have to start with an interesting background (like space or under the sea!). We then inserted a picture that went with our background (like a rocket ship or car) or something that didn’t to make it even funnier (like a cartoon character).

With a pick-a-path we could do a quiz about something that interested us. We needed to plan what we wanted to ask and use control + k to link where we wanted our choices to go. Billy and Julius decided to work together and made a story pick-a-path with animations!

The next steps in an animation are to duplicate the slide (using control + d or control + c, control + v) and make one small change. Then you keep repeating this cycle until you are happy with your animation. We will finish these next week and share them on our individual blogs – so make sure you check them out!

We will continue working on our Google Slides next week to perfect them, but 2 of our Juniors (who joined us for this lesson) finished theirs and are shared below. We hope you enjoy them!

Have you ever made an animation or pick-a-path using Google Slides before?

We created a map of places that were interesting to us. We used the Google My Maps app. We learned how to zoom in and out of the map and how to find our way around the world. We put pins in our places of interest, then changed the colour and icon of our pins. 

Some of us chose to pin places we would like to go, some of us chose to pin places that we have already been. We learned about where Foxton is in New Zealand, and where New Zealand is in the world, while having fun creating.

Here is a slidedeck of our maps. We hope you enjoy them!

In this lesson we were learning how to use some tools in Google Draw. The tools we practiced using were the Shapes Tool, the Arrange Tool to send shapes to the back or bring them to the front, and the Group Tool. Once we had finished making our robots we added a background; we could choose from a coloured background or a picture that we chose from the internet. 

The context for this lesson is that we needed to make a germbot to fight Covid-19 in our school.

Here is a slidedeck of our robots. We hope you like them!