Today was a very successful day. I haven’t really had time to do more with my site and although it was pretty bare at the start of the day, there is some content on every page now. I changed the set up a bit as Kerry and I had embedded a playlist. One of our presenters mentioned the “3 click rule”. I thought it might appeal to my learners to be able to play the video they wanted straight away. A lot of my students do not really do homework, so if they are away from school, they are able to review what we have learned through a video. There is so much great content on YouTube and I find the videos from Japan Society NYC are really clear, accessible and have Romaji (Japanese in our Roman Alphabet ) as well as hiragana (for Japanese words ) and Katakana (for borrowed words).

It is really great for me to be connected to so many other schools and teachers. It is nice to know that I can reach out and help will be there. It is so funny to me that I ended up finding out about my colleague’s site online rather than in person.

Here is the link to my site

Today we focused on Google Sheets. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to this as I have never really been taught how to do spreadsheets. I had a brief introduction many years ago, so I knew what the columns, rows and cells were. I have never really been a confident maths person, so I think just thinking of all of those numbers in one spot put me off.  I was pleasantly surprised after Vicki’s session at how simple and manageable it seemed.  It gave me the confidence to give it a go.

After a few goes, I was able to screenshot the information from a young girl’s blog posts to be able to input her data and make the chart below. We can see that in September of 2024, she made the most number of blog posts from the data I had.  We can see that she has made a good start in 2026, and has exceeded March of 2025already.

As a visual learner, I am really excited about making use of this in my classroom.  I am not sure how, but I was thinking I could get the students to record how many times a week they go to the cafe at the Polytech next door. Once we have the information, we can change it into Japanese sentences using time.  Some examples could include, the following.  1. Everyone goes to the cafe on Monday. 2. The girls buy chips two times a week. 3. No one buys coffee at the cafe.

I would also like to try the My Google Maps with my class to plan the ultimate trip to Japan.

I am really excited to make some YouTube playlists for my language classes. It seems like such a basic thing, but I have never really gotten to it, just bookmarking the world! Hahahahaha! I seem to have some issues with sorting that at the moment, so I am looking forward to having some time to figure that out. If that doesn’t work I will be seeing Kerry in the middle of Feb. to help me out with that. I am also going to have a go at archiving years in my emails since I have an overload there, too. Reader, are you seeing a trend?

This is my first time working with Edublogs, and I was quite nervous to try all of this. Now that I am in, I can really see how using the edublogs will help with my classes.  It is a great way to save work and share the many things that they have learned. I am quite excited to get going and try some of these things out and am happy we have some time to do that before our next session. I look forward to using it for feedback as well.

I have briefly been introduced to adding some animation into a presentation before this, but really did not have the time to imbed the learning. It is always something that I have wanted to do as Japan has so many cool characters, but really haven’t had the time to experiment with it. It is really great to have the time right after we are shown so that we can have a play around.  For today, I found a picture of Gudetama that I have taken. He is popular on Netflix and my students love him. I am working on getting the alien to go over and land under the phrase, ” It is a Gude, ne”- for “It is a good day, isn’t it.”

I learned so much that I think will help improve my confidence, capability and workflow as a teacher in this DFI. I have been wanting to learn about how to present, record and do break out rooms myself, so this was a great lesson for me. Learning about Keep was also amazing. I think that will save me so much time creating and editing. I really like that I have a new tool to share with the students, if they do not know about it already. This will enable me to teach them how to take notes explicitly, as many have not been taught before. This means they are cutting and pasting line by line and calling it their own.

In terms of my learners, I will be using Keep with them- when I get them. 🙂 I will specifically be using it for note taking as a start, and going from there as I learn what else it can do:) I am also going to do think, pair, and share in my smaller language classes via Google Meets. This can be done as well as spontaneous classroom talk, so I can see how they are progressing.

Lastly for today, I can really see that I am being empowered in the digital realm and why that is so important. It is good for the students to see teachers as life long learners, and I can really see ways that I can interact digitally with my students better than I could before. I also really enjoyed tidying up some space in my Gmail, and I look forward to carrying on with that. I have been doing our usual summer spruce up at home so EVERYTHING is getting cleaned up! Ha Ha