Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 2 - Workflow

Today, our first session was about connecting with the Manaiakalani Pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. 

The photo above taken from Kerry's slides today talks about the Manaiakalani programme being evidence based and highlights the use of and move from the analogue world to the digital world. It also highlights the importance of teacher effectiveness in accelerating learning outcomes. 

Throughout Kerry's presentation we were reminded of how important the teacher is and teacher actions are to the digital learning world and in accelerating the learning of our students. 

'Teacher actions are vital in engaging students in positive learning experiences'

The acronym RATE was also discussed which encompasses how teachers can be effective in their practice in the digital world of our learners. 

The four recommendations from WFRC are very valuable in my teaching practice. I am glad it was discussed in Kerry's session today. I have implement these recommendations in my practice to a certain degree but I know I can do more to be more effective in my practice. 

Last year as a CoL teacher, my inquiry was in Reading. Authentic texts to me is more than about students reading about topics of interest to them. It is about enabling students to have access to texts which challenges their current knowledge and enables them to read beyond what they know and how they read. The texts can be multimodal. As Aaron has shared wide and deep focus. A wide variety of reading texts with a narrow focus by zoning in to texts through discussions. 

The value of discussions are so crucial to how students learn. However, I feel there is a lot of work to be done in building an environment of inclusiveness where children feel their opinions are safe to be voiced and are valued. 

Again, I absolutely value the recommendations from WFRC and the data they provide for our cluster. 

Here are my learnings about the Google Apps we learnt about today:

Our last session today was about Taming our Tabs

I learnt today that you can delete the text when you are saving a tab to your Bookmarks and it leaves the icon to show on your Bookmarks bar. Great for saving space. I downloaded the One Tab extension and it is great. So much better to have a tidy work station/screen. I have yet to explore the other extensions Gerhard was presenting to us. 

For our create activity today, we had to create an invitation to a buddy from our discussion bubbles. My buddy was Elizabeth from Rawhiti school. We also had to choose a blog post from a selection of blog posts to share with our buddy during our Google Meet. I chose to share a blog post from Benjamin H at St Mary's in Gisborne. 

Here is a recording from my Google Meet with Elizabeth

In conclusion, it was another empowering day with the DFI team. Looking forward to our next session. For now, it is the putting what I have learnt in action.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive Day 1 - Core Business

Digital Fluency INTENSIVE. The world intensive often makes me feel uneasy because it brings about a sense of urgency and a need to be competent to work at a certain speed to keep up. When I first signed up for DFI, I was very excited because I have wanted to do this course for a long time. However, when Dorothy starting sending through the correspondence I started to question if I was really up for this course.

Today's first session wiped those fears and anxiety away. The 8 am - 3 pm day programme was not daunting at all. The day was very enjoyable and I felt very empowered. Considering this is the first day, I am so eager to see what else the DFI team have to offer me for my teaching, practical and personal life.

Dorothy, retold the story of how Manaiakalani came about and I felt a sense of gratitude for these principals who met in Novemer 2006 and decided to do something for this area of Decile 1 learners. I have been in the Manaiakalani cluster since I started my teaching career 11 years ago. I know and have met a lot of the names which were mentioned today which adds to my gratitude for being in this digital learning whanau. From the story of how Manaiakalani came about, one word strongly comes to mind, EMPOWERING. The Manaiakalani pedagogy empowers not only the students but also the teachers and our community.

I can see myself using Google Groups at school for our school sports teams, clubs, cultural groups and my class leaders. It will save me a lot of time in corresponding with the students. I tried to find voice typing when I was writing my reports earlier year but couldn't. Now that I have learnt how to access voice typing, I know my report writing will be much more manageable and enjoyable. I can also envision many of my students using voice typing for their learning activities. I am so eager to put the use of voice typing into action in my practice.

The session which I really found fascinating today was the Google Docs session. I have used Google Docs for a long time and have just learnt about some features today. For example the table of contents and using the different headings. I will implement the use of these features with my students when they are writing information reports and explanations. I will also use the Explore tool more in my teaching as I found it was very useful and practical to use today.

For our create activity today, we had to create a tool using Google Docs. I created a resource which my students can use next week in our Inquiry learning. First I changed the page layout to landscape and the page colour. I then created a table with three columns and three rows. I then merged the first row for the title. I also hid some of the lines for the table by changing the line colour to the page colour. I changed the remaining table lines to white. To insert the Youtube clip into my doc, I took a screenshot of the clip and pasted it to my document. I then linked the Youtube link for the clip to the image. I did an image search for an Iphone and a Chromebook then took away the background using Remove.bg. The rest of the resource, I just added more images and text. Mark our group leader suggested I put all the images into one row of the table which was a good tip for visual presentation.

Blog commenting by Room 7

When we signed up for Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu this year, I thought a lot about how we could make it work for our class. I then came up with an idea for the students to put the links of the blogs they comment on in a spreadsheet. 

At a glance, the spreadsheets gives me a quick indication of who has been commenting on blogs. The link also takes me directly to the blog post and the comment which was left my by student. Very handy to check if the students are leaving positive, kind and helpful comments. 

Since starting this, we have been able to make so many blog comments but I think the more important aspect of this initiative is the exposure to rich blog posts my students have received from visiting the blogs of our school, cluster and our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu buddy classes. 

For many of my students, blogging is more meaningful now because they know their peers are looking at their blog posts and learning from what they are posting. We have also encouraged teachers in our school to post comments on the blogs of students which is wonderful. We now have to work on getting our whanau to comment on our blogs. 

At the end of each week, I add up all the blog comments made and make a giphy to announce how many we achieved. Each week's total is different and looking into why it is different each week is an inquiry on its own. For now we will just celebrate what we are able to achieve each week. 

via GIPHY

via GIPHY
GIPHY

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

Thursday Zoom CoL PLG

Today we had our PLG via Zoom as we are still on lockdown under Alert Level 3. 

We were reminded today about the importance of profiling our students by finding out:

• gaps in achievement from time to time
• student voice
• whanau voice
• interventions put in my previous teachers
• student work from previous years (blogs, drives)

Aaron reminded us that profiling is formative and enables us to see areas which we can build on. We were also reminded that the information we collect can be quantitative - narrative approach. From today's meeting, I have added more detail to what I am doing in profiling students. 

Russell Burt challenged us to think about how the lockdown has impacted the way we think about our roles as educators. I responded in our small groups discussions that teaching from home has given me the opportunity to build on my relationship with my students in a more meaningful way. For example at school, there are so many complexities which requires my attention. Teaching from home, I can focus on a student who seeks my help and nothing else can interrupt the time I spend teaching this student. I have also reflected that teaching from home has given our whanau community more insight into the learning and teaching which happens in the classroom. Through the hangouts, the whanau of our students are able to listen in and participate more in their learning activities. 

Student involvement in hangouts

I decided to give my students the opportunity to do the hangout reminders for our hangout. First was Dwyane. She did a wonderful job of it. She used Screencastify to record herself then shared her recording for me to put into the class site. Confidence building activity and a great opportunity for students to take leadership in our hangouts. 

My class hosting our school virtual assembly

My class were assigned to host our virtual assembly for this week. It was a fun project where my students and I collaborated to put our assembly together. As we worked on this project, I kept on thinking about how wonderful it is to be in a digital learning community. Collaboration between the students and I went smoothly as we shared ideas and the students sending in their recordings. 

Enjoy!

Small changes bring about bigger changes

Sharing my love of reading with my students is a great joy. We have always had a bookshelf in our classroom which accommodated a lot of Duffy books. This year I have changed the contents of the bookshelf by putting books I have personally selected. The attention to the bookshelf has changed tremendously. There is always an eagerness amongst the students to read the books on the shelf. 

I introduced each book to the students and explained my rationale for choosing each book. Some of the rationale include authors, topics and historical links in texts in fiction texts, personal connection to texts. 

I have also noticed a shift in enjoyment of SSR. I am still trying to conclude if the shift is mainly among the girls or both genders.