Week 5 - Collaborative Teaching and Learning

 Our connecting with Manaiakalani words of wisdom today were all about making learning visible. It really made me start thinking about how visible my teaching and learning is with my students and what I could change to ensure it is as visible as it can be.  Students should not have to jump through hoops trying to read your mind to have success, they should have the learning shared with them.  This is ensuring we are using WALTS, Learning Intentions and Success Criteria, anything that works for our students. A very important point to think about is that this needs to be visible at all times, so it can’t just be on the whiteboard or wall in the classroom, it needs to be shared and available digitally as well.  Then we go down that path of the students being part of creating the success criteria.  I feel like this learning journey is ensuring all parts of my teaching pedagogy is being covered and thought about and when I have it all set up and running how I would like it to be then it is going to be perfect!  I’ll let you know when that day arrives!

Engagement is also key.  How do we excite and ensure our children are interested in the learning opportunities we are providing?  Do they have enough choice?  Do they have all of the tools in their toolkit so they can make choices on how they will present their learning so they can share this with others?  I do see the importance of actually specific teaching of the tools, but being clever with this so they actually end up with a DLO that they could put in blog post.

We spent time looking at Google Sites this week, also dipping into T-shaped literacy which I am not sure I have my head around yet and so am gratefully checking out any examples people have to share.  My goal is to have a bit of a dabble for Week 6 and build on my knowledge and ideas from there.  I’ve learnt that you just need to start and then you adjust, learn, add, change etc. etc. as you go.  I currently have a Google Site set up for my classroom but my thinking was challenged with the idea that you can have several Sites running at the same time during the school year and that each year you should start a new Site. This means that the Google Site remains true to the year it was used in and is evidence of your teaching and learning for that school year.

I created a Google Site for a collection of ideas for an Arts Week that is approaching this term.  I also created some round buttons which I will now use on my classroom site - I was always intrigued with round buttons, rather than the standard buttons on other sites that I had browsed.