Monday, September 14, 2020

Week 9 - DFI Finale

The end is here, we have made it and I am going to miss our Tuesday sessions that have been full of thinking and learning. What an amazing course, lots of talk about the pedagogy behind Manaiakalani, which then makes you think about your own teaching pedagogy and what needs to be adjusted to fit with your new ideas and beliefs.  I think the big learning I am taking away is that teaching needs to be:

  • visible
  • rewindable
  • a variety of multimodal content
  • ubiquitous access to learning, i.e. could the child learn by self 
  • connected (blog links, other sites)
  • creative - both in your teaching and learning.
Today we were exposed to the term Ubiquitous Learning - I now know how to say it, so that's a bonus. It means that learning can be Any time, Any where, Any place and From Anyone.  This of course became our Distance Learning from this year. I know after attending this course and what I want to achieve with my new Learning Site that I would be so much more prepared for this if we were to need it again. I think my students would also be more prepared and I really liked the idea of having "Google Meet Drill" opportunities while we are at school to ensure that if we were to go back into lockdown my students are ready and have the skills to engage in meetings by distance.

The fact that my daily teaching is becoming more visible, rewindable and ubiquitous I am loving the fact that if students are going to be away for any reason I can just let their parents know that the Learning Site will have all the learning for Maths and Literacy so they don't need to miss out. Eventually I want my students to know that they can just tell their parents that all the learning they will be missing will be on the Learning Site and there is no need to ask me for work.

So where to from here? I will continue working on my Learning Site and I want to change my planning so I am taking note of what digital areas I am covering, either in explicit teaching to my students or what they are using to create and then share their learning. I still need to think about how to integrate blog posts and commenting into my week and make it second nature for my students. I also need to make time to do blog commenting myself and how I see this fitting into my regular weekly timetable. I think these next holidays will be a good chance to have a catch-up and a think about how this will all look. Trial it for Term 4 and then be ready to hit the ground running for Term 1, 2021.

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Week 8 - Computational Thinking

A few years ago when I taught in a 1:1 ipad class our message to parents was that the ipad was 'just a tool'.  This was to ensure the parents weren't worried that the classes who were 1:1 weren't just going to plug their child into a device and leave them to it for the day. Back then it was just a tool, although it did have the ability to create a new eagerness and interest in learning for our students.  The only part it was missing was the Share part. I can now understand the whole process Learn, Create, Share and how important the Share part of this process is. The students in my class are really starting to connect with the fact that they do get comments on their blogs and they can reply to them. The replying step is quite new to lots of them but it is really deepening the connections that are being made to their learning process.

I found the information that was shared on the Digital Technologies Curriculum very timely and very informative. Something that really stood out for me was the fact that we can easily be keeping a record of what we are covering in the Designing and Developing Digital Outcomes part by just noting it in our planning. For example if the expectation is that the students will share their learning in a Google Drawing and insert an image in the background (playing around with the transparency setting) then this can be noted in your planning and there is the link and coverage of that part of the curriculum. As the children have more and more tools in their toolkit then the choice can be up to them how they want to present their learning. Just this week I have set my students the task of researching an item of technology that they feel has changed their lives or the lives of others and I have given them the freedom to choose how they want to present their findings. When we share these with the whole class the discussion can also be about what tool was used to present the information and this will help students make their choices in future tasks.


It was fun to have a go with some of the different coding resources available to us. I think I will make this part of my programme some how. I need to find out what experience my students have had in this area and then go from there. There was a fun Dance Party type activity in one of the Hour of Code online resources that would be quite fun to use as an absolute beginning point to coding but if my students already have some knowledge then this wouldn't be of any benefit to them at all - other than the entertainment value! Scratch is by far more advanced, and I think it would be quite a good resource to use as a whole class where I also learn alongside my students and role model being a learner, asking for support from others, struggling and persevering to complete the task. I think I will timetable this in over the next couple of weeks of term and see how it goes. I can then add it into my Must Do activities - where I set them a certain task or the Can Do area for children to work on when they have finished other tasks.




MPI - Create and Share in Mathematics

  Our last day of the Mathematics Practice Intensive for 2024!  I have to be honest and say that I will miss the sessions and all of the won...