Week 9

 What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa
and pedagogy?

Overall in the last 8-9 weeks I feel I have increased my understanding of the

Manaiakalani kaupapa in many ways.

The Learn Create Share pedagogy along with making learning accessible anywhere at anytime for tamariki is essential.

The Learn/Create/Share pedagogy moves us towards visible and ubiquitous learning, strong learner agency and

connectedness..

 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a

professional?

A range of tools to have in my toolkit for digital learning. This DFI cohort has given me a chance to

reflect upon what I know and also extended me in my knowledge.

Throughout these last 9 weeks I have been able to increase my confidence in learning tools

and implement them in my classroom, which has also challenged my student in their digital learning.

 Within the last 9 weeks I have been able to try new learning apps, had support from DFI tutors and extended my knowledge around digital learning.

Today I sat my Level 1 google exam and happy to say I feel more confident within my teaching and learning of digital technologies. Ready for the rest of the 2021 learning year and challenging these tamariki with their learning also.

DAY 8- EMPOWERING

 Rangatiratanga - chieftainship, the right to exercise authority....voice/choice /ownership.

The catch phrases used to start our sessions today. The key idea being education can empower people to boldly step into uncharted experiences and opportunities.

 It takes relationship and safe parameters to build trust for risk taking, even in a digital educational environment.

Google exam prep:

This week we looked into what we need to be prepared for next week exam.

This was refreshing as a few tips and tricks were mentioned and good to note ready

for next week exam.

CODING:

Coding seems to be a lot of fun for the students. This was great to explore as my classroom

and team are looking at going to the mindlab next term.

We have also talked about purchasing robotics for our school,

having time to explore these coding sites gave me a heads up as to what we could use these for.

Today during the create task I created a pong game using scratch.

I loved how there was a tutorial for each step on scratch, this will make it easy when giving this as a learning task for students.

Students who are digitally savvy will be able to go and explore in their own time and not have to wait for explicit teacher instruction.

I didn't finish my game, however here is a snapshot of the task I was creating.

DAY 7- DEVICES

 DFI Ubiquitous

DFI ubiquitous means that students, whanau, family and schools (anyone) has access at any place at any one time to learning, This is important for whanau to have connections and support their tamariki in their learning.

Students are able to rewind their learning from school and share/ complete/ continue any mahi at home/ or anywhere that is not their classroom learning space.   

This links to the digital curriculum within New Zealand, and teaching our Tamariki how to be safe online. This is an important tool that must sit behind the learning anywhere anytime motto. Students need to know how to be safe online when they are out of school, understanding what to do if something goes wrong, and who to tell if this happens. This allows Tamariki to be connected, empowered, connected, creative and making learning visible. 

My classroom site is an example of how I make learning accessible to my Tamariki and whanau within my classroom. 

Room 7 Classroom Learning Hub 2021. (My classroom Site) 

Shortcuts on chromebooks is a great way to save time and frustration when working. Here is a slide I worked on today about shortcuts, I didn't manage to get it all done but I did learn a few shortcuts that will be good to know to teach my learners who use chromebooks each day in the classroom. 

My Shortcut slide link.. ☺☺☺

Explain everything is an app students are able to use to help them explore any device they use. This app makes learners once again accessible to any learning tasks.  In today's session we got to explore this tool as if we were a learner, this was great to see the learning that can be done by any student, limiting any barriers. 

The afternoon session I spent creating my own Hapara dashboard workspaces, this was successful as I was able to create things I will use within my classroom programme.  

DAY 6- DFI Enabling Access

ENABLING ACCESS

 For the Manaiakalani pedagogy aspect of this week, it was to be about 'Enabling Access' and being 'Connected'. Similar to week 5, connecting students, whanau and schools within learning. Making learning visible and accessible for all.  

This week we spent a large amount of the session on google sites.  It was useful to view educational sites that have been produced by teachers with different levels of digital experience. Also to receive feedback on my class site by those same people. No matter how experienced you are there is always something you can add and adjust to make your site more engaging and captivating for learners. A chance to also reflect upon our own blogs and make a few goals to achieve today was important, for me I realised I didn't have a button for my cybersmart section or a link to other classes sites from my team. 

I set myself the goal of tidying my class site home page, which was done by creating a new button to have on my homepage to connect our cybersmart page, to link two other classroom sites from my team onto the site and also to check all fonts are readable and engaging for learners. 

DAY 5- COLLABORATIVE SITES

 Making learning Visible 

The kaupapa of  day 5 was around making teaching and learning visible for not only the students but other teachers, whanau and community members. If teaching and learning can be found, easily accessible, expectations known and work exposed; all this could reduce any frustration of failure. 

Allowing success for everyone, making learning achievable. 

WHAT TOOLS CAN BE USED:

The digital tools presented today were the use of multi modal (sheets), sites, blog labels and the teacher dashboard. Remembering that your classroom site is like a shop window, it needs to be capturing and inviting for users. I continuously reflect on my own classroom site and look at other schools, classrooms and teachers to find ways of creating a site that will capture my learners and keep them engaged. 

Here is the link to my current classroom site. 

I use a range of google forums when creating learning and planning for my students, whanau and community to access. Hoping that it will help to strengthen the home and school learning a little more. 

Multimodal Sites:

Unfortunately with internet/power issues I missed some of today session, however once it came back on I was able to go back into the resources provided and catch myself back up. 

Today we explored other sites that people have created for their classrooms then we got given the task to create our own site, based on a topic of our choice. As we are going to be doing a short unit on Matariki from week 7-week 10 I decided to join the group who focused on a multimodal site around matariki, this I can then link for my students can work their way through during our short inquiry focus.  

Multimodal is an accessible way for all learners to learn, with multi leveled text, a range of leveled text, videos, story recordings and multi leveled questions all make this way of learning accessible, engaging and challenging for all learners.  

This is a site I will be using within my classroom.

 

Day 4- Dealing with Data

 Tohatoha/ share was the pedagogy kopu of the day.

'Sharing sustains relationships' is a quote from the day that is transferable across a multitude of context.

This week learning was conducted around, google forums, google spreadsheets and google maps.

Google forums is a great way to find out information from students and whanau, whilst having the option of making it anonymous or  having names on response forms. Google sheets has the potential to reduce  double handling of data that currently happens within our school. With data, people seem to have their prefered ways of managing it. 

Google forums are a tool I will use within my classroom throughout the year, either as a review of learning, review of reading tasks or wanting to find information about how students learn best within my classroom. 

Click on this link to fill in the forum I created about teaching in our DFI session today

Today I created a google Map of interesting places around my community that I would suggest for people to visit if they were to come to Gisborne...

Google Sheets:

Freezing, averaging and finding sums. These are all useful tools when using google sheets within the classroom. Being able to order data by average, first or surnames are all tips to make data collection and interpreting easier.  Sum is a easy way to add columns up without having to use any formulas like the old spreadsheets from the past.

Conditional planning- monitoring students progress and completion of learning tasks, this is a easy way to monitor students within the classroom.  

Here is a simple analysis I did of 4 students at random and the amount of quality blog posts they completed in 2020.

Fun Learning...

Cool site- fast.com to check the internet speed... this is something  I will use often when my classroom is all on their devices, and also when I'm at home on the farm to keep data to then contact our provider who says there is nothing wrong with the farm internet (even tho it cut out regularly) 

DFI DAY 3- MEDIA

Creating with the intention of hooking and engaging learners.

Creative skills help learners become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators. Teachers need to focus on their creativity to engage learners and encourage them to express their ideas in a creative/ individual way.

Youtube- students should not have their own youtube channels, but teachers need playlists to share information safely for students. Making sure playlists are unlisted so students do not access the wrong things at the wrong time.  

Digital media holds a range of opportunities and pitfalls for education.What is encouraging to see is the creativity and passion that educators across mediums have. Learners love Youtube, and so do I as an educator. Creating playlists and using them as links for learning helps to engage learners. I tend to get a range of clips for my learners, from fun songs, educational videos and videos with cartoons to help keep learners engaged.

SiSoMo, Drop n Drag, Pick a Path are all ways of getting creative with slides that may help learners make connections with curriculum content. It was good to be reminded what I know and have the time to play.

I currently use google slides for majority of my classroom planning, its great as you can duplicate slides and adjust them for each weeks learning tasks, but also have the other weeks learning still there to go back and remind students of learning that has already happened. This is also great for whanau to connect and engage with classroom learning as it is visible on the classroom site.

Google drawing is a great tool to get students to engage and be creative with, I use this within my classroom in reading for students who are not confident in their writing to instead draw their understanding and reflection of the story they have read. To make this effective for my tamariki in the classroom, I need to keep encouraging the use of this but maybe inserting a podcast of a verbal recording of their understanding to sit next to their drawings.

This is the town I also created using google slide, exploring shapes and how slides can be used as a creative math learning task for students. This is a tool I will be using in my classroom to challenge learners with their creative measurement and shape learning.