Connected Learners Share

A blogpost written by one of my students put a huge smile on my face. I was pleased to read that Henry who loves reading and writing came to a realisation that when he blogs he is not only sharing his thoughts and feelings with the rest of the world but he is helping others with their learning. 

As he points out , "I may be assisting little youngsters stretching their own vocabulary." when they read his blog and, "I help kids extend their reading skills by just writing this post." 

This is the Manaiakalani pedagogy of  Learn, Create and Share where we strive to engage our students with others locally, nationally and globally so that we all learn for, with and from each other. 

Here's Henry's post: 

Session 9: Last Seesion

Today was our last DFI session. I came into the course with some digital knowledge and skills. Today, I feel I have gained more in these areas and am more confident in using a variety of google apps.

I am pleased that I sat the exam, because now I have a good idea of what I need to do better next time.

• Work and think faster. 
• Don't dwell on things you don't know and move on - you can always go back to the question later.
• don't waste time googling information - just do the clicks and eventually you click the right one.

I have forgotten what it's like to sit an exam but today I got a first-hand taste of what my students are going through when they are sitting their e-asttle and PAT tests: stressed, awful, memory block. etc.

In future I am going to be a bit more sympathetic towards my students. 

Session 8: 3-D Pen

This afternoon, I had a fun day.
I spent time using a 3-d pen. It was a little bit difficult as I had to learn to control the flow of the filament coming out of the pen. Initially I was a bit wobbly, then realised that in order to be successful I had to learn to control my thumb (which was controlling the button flow), slow down and to do it in small amounts.
I created a bow and I am proud of it. Here it is.

 Then I became a bit more confident and decided to make something a little bit bigger. It was a butterfly, but it was not too successful because I took a bigger step than I should have. Had I made the butterfly smaller, or made something bigger than a bow, but smaller than a butterfly (example: a stylish ring), I may have had more success. Actually, it was a good learning experience that can be transferred to my students to take smaller steps than I might have initially.

Reflection
What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani Kaupapa and pedagogy?
It's important to slow down and take small steps especially with learners who have difficulty with controlling their fine motor skills and co-ordinating their hand and eye movements.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
Using the electronic pen was a skill I had to develop first. It was not an immediate success. It took some time before I could control the pen as I had to train my brain to control my thumb which I found rather difficult to do. And I realise that there will be learners who will go through the same experience as me (slow) and of course there will be other learners who will take this exercise like a duck to water. So it's important to always cater your programme to all styles of learners.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
An important strategy to use with students who have problems with picking things up quickly is to take small steps and to do it slowly. Once this has been achieved, then move onto a bigger step to achieve a bigger goal. If that big step is too much to handle then take it slowly again.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Life has its many challenges and maybe if I slowed down and take small steps things may not look so burdensome after all.

Session 7: Google Hnagout

I haven't done a video call since my daughter graduated and came back from Purdue University, USA. She was a young 17 year old on a 4-year full tennis scholarship. During her years there,  I skyped her on every available weekend to talk about her educational progress, watch her sporting achievements, give motherly advice and just to have a natter so that she could feel secure in the knowledge that I was only a video call away if she needed me.

So today's session was familiar but different. It was different in that I had a conversation with all my DFI colleagues and our  course leaders in google Hangout. I haven't done a video call with so many people in one place simultaneously. It's an online open forum where we can talk,  see each other and the  work (document / map) we were talking about through screen-sharing.

The whole conversation can also be recorded.

Reflection
What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani Kaupapa and pedagogy?
I can see that this would work well in the classroom. It would encourage students to take turns, listen carefully, speak clearly, and be coherent. They would also use key competencies skills such as Managing self, Relating to others, Participating and contributing, and many more other skills required to undertake any activity where a lot of people communicate at the same time such as in the Hangout.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
It would be a useful tool to use in my school. The senior block is located a fair distance from some of the teachers in the junior school. It's now clear to me that Hangout will be much easier, faster and efficient to communicate with a teacher from a classroom that's at least 200m from my classroom, rather than emailing, or physically meet. It's a much more effective method to achieve more in less time.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
It's great for group conferencing, oral language, group work, one-to-one conferencing, research, feedback, monitoring and many more.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
I can connect and Hangout with my husband and adult children in one place at the same time.

Session 7: Google Calendar

Today, we learnt how to use google calendar, this has now been bookmarked.

I discovered that I have a calendar linked to my school account, and that I can share my events and activities with my colleagues, as well as see other colleagues' shared calendar. Through this I can see their schedule by day, week or month.

I created my own event and timetabled my hangout with Dorothy next week in my calendar. I can see on my calendar that she has accepted my invitation ('Yes', in blue on the bottom right).

Reflection
What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani Kaupapa and pedagogy?
It's a great way to record your meetings, events and activities. My colleagues and I can see what is happening in our professional life, and they can see where each of us is in school.. There have been times when I needed to see my colleagues after school but only to find out that they are in another meeting which I didn't know about or there has been a clash or someone was double booked.  How frustrating!
 
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
Just creating my own event and timetabling it in the calendar has helped me understand better the purpose of the calendar.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
The calendar would be a useful tool in timetabling my one-to-one-conferencing with each student every day after lunch. Students can see when they will see me.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
I can see the usefulness of this calendar such as sharing it with my family so that everyone knows where and what I'm doing on the weekend especially and we can organise our family get-togethers through this.

Learn, Create and Share my Learning at DFI with my Students

Last term, I learnt how to use and create google Forms through the DFI course. I showed some of my students this new learning this week and, as part of their Inquiry Learning, one of my students , Pupuke conducted a Road Safety survey amongst his siblings. I was very pleased with his efforts and I am expecting more surveys coming next week.

Here is his survey.

This is Pupuke's survey form. 

He asked his brothers and sisters the following questions:

1. Do you put your seat belt on every car trip?
2. Do your parents use their phones while driving?
3. Do you or your younger siblings sit inside a booster seat?
4. How do you think we can reduce risk of a car crash?

 

 These are the responses Pupuke received.

 

This is Pupuke's survey chart created through the spreadsheet of google Forms.

Session 6: Feedback from DFI

The above is a feedback from my colleagues at the DFI course today. This feedback tells me that my viewers find my site limited in its multimodal features and disengaging to my students and their whanau. I have set out a couple of goals to remedy this situation this term. They are:

• Multi-modal
• make it more engaging to my learners and whanau by including more colour, videos, images, screencastify and slide presentation.

Right now I need to fix the following problems:

• organise the site’s navigation and buttons 
• school name 
• have one link to the site and keep that link for the whole year. 

Reflection:

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

I need to make my site more visible and user-friendly to my learners. At the moment it looks disorganised and unprofessional.

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

I learnt a few more skills in using the new google site and feel that I can make some of the changes to improve the ease in which my learners can navigate the site

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

I've noticed that my learners hardly use their class site to access the resources, documents and any other tasks I have shared with them. Instead they either go straight to their gmail or drive search. This is not good. So I need to reorganise the site and make it more easily accessible and navigable.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I know that if I don't organise my day well, things can fall apart, such as, being late for a party because the

cake wasn't ready to be taken out of the oven, because I started late, because I hadn't organised my day better, because it all starts with me. 

Session 5: Google Keep.

Google Keep is a great tool! It's better than using the printer and using the scanner's OCR function. Instead with Keep you can create the same function using your own camera and taking a photo, click on the photo, click again to take you to the 3 dots on top right hand corner, grab image text and viola! Done. It's recognised and converted a photographed text to normal character text - ready for editing.

Professionally it has made my task easier as I do a lot of OCR through my printer at home, especially old textbooks. I'm just wondering whether this function can recognise students' handwriting and translate the character image into normal character codes? I'm going to try this as soon as I get back to school.

Session 4: IPads and Chromebooks

I was absent from this session. I was especially looking forward to this week's session to present my Pepeha as I had been working hard to perfect my Te Reo pronunciation, and I wanted feedback from Ngaire on this. Never mind.

Despite my absence, I was able to catch up on my missed learning by going on my colleagues' blogsite. Through this I know the course covered the following content: learn, create and share with the emphasis on sharing, pepeha presentation and using screecastify, ipads and Chromebooks.

Reflection
What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani Kaupapa and pedagogy?
I found being able to refer to my colleagues blog posts - as a result of Manaiakalani's pedagogy of Learn, Create and Share - was very helpful in growing my understanding and covering anything I had missed. The posts also gave me comfort because I learned I was not the only one feeling anxious about presenting their Pepeha in Te Reo. I also learned the iPad's Explain Everything app existed and can be used by the Juniors to learn about Maths and Reading,  and that screencastify is great as a rewindable learning tool that my colleagues will use more often. The importance of Sharing allows learners to continue learning during illness and it helps learners to create their own thinking about what others have written and to learn new things.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
Having access to my colleagues blog posts helped reduce my stress and anxiety levels when I was sick. That means I can feel more confident that my students, and even I, can continue with our learning journey through shared blogposts and  screencastify.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
My learners can create their own screencastify about their learning, and they can go back to it at a later date to review or practise for an upcoming test, or simply remind them of what they forgot.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Sharing (helpfulness, emotional support, communication flows etc) can be applied to my own personal situation. It's important to maintain good family relationships by connecting and sharing ourselves with not only my immediate family but also with relatives whom I haven't seen for a while.

Session 3: Toku Pepeha

This week's task was to create a google slide as well as using screencastify on my Toku Pepeha (Family Tree).

I'm a little anxious about this task because it requires me to talk about myself in Maori. I'm hoping that I can do the Maori language justice by being as accurate as possible in my pronunciation.

I think it's a great task, one that my students would love to do - in Maori, Samoan, Tongan, English, or their own language.

Each year I begin with a piece of writing about "Who Am I?" In the past, the students complete this task using a tree which they use as an organiser to plan their writing about themselves, then transfer their brainstorm ideas onto a document.

I'm going to use this alternative where not only will the students engage in passive writing, but they will also use their voices to express themselves. Moreover, it requires them to speak clearly, an important feature in Oral Language, and it is my school's professional learning focus.

Session 2: Google Sheet: SUM and AVERAGE

DFI: Session 2

I am so pleased to have just learnt how to get the sum and average of all data on google sheet. In the past I have totaled all the scores of every individual student using the online calculator. It was a very long and laborious process. Thanks to google sheet, I can now get the computer to do it for me instantly, by highlighting the row and clicking on Function: SUM. Magic!

Professionally this function is important and makes me more efficient as a teacher as well as a digital user. This knowledge now leaves me with more time to do other tasks. No more wasted time.

I can use this function with my students. It can be used in Maths, particularly Statistics. I get my students to use google sheets and the accompanying charts to record their Maths score. They can see through their chart how well they are doing. Now they can get the SUM and AVERAGE of their scores on a weekly/monthly basis.

I can use this function in my personal life especially in budgeting and household expenditure.


This image shows the data I created on google sheets.

Session 2: Mymaps and Voice Typing

This week's task was to create a Mymaps using the statistical data from a survey we completed this morning.  
The map shows the best international holiday destination in blue and the two destinations for our next
holiday in red.

The line that stretches from New Zealand to Indiana shows my longest journey I have ever taken.

This blog post used Voice Typing from Google Docs then the text was copied and pasted on this blog.

Session 1: Google Save and Explore: Digital Fluency Intensive

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

As a teacher, knowledge in using Doc is important. Some of the issues have been addressed in today's DFI workshop. More digital knowledge makes me a better digital teacher as it creates more teaching time for my students. I won't be wasting time searching in google HELP/youtube or asking my students how to perform a particular function on the Doc. I am doing my children a disservice when I lack this knowledge and it does not reflect well on me as a professional. I'm pleased to have been chosen to do this course.

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

I learnt to use various functions on Doc. I knew about them, but didn't know how to use them nor know their purpose, also I lacked confidence.

Particularly useful for my teaching are table of contents, bookmark, back to top, outline, explore and pasting without formatting from a website.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

When my students are collaborating on a Doc, the Table of Contents, Title and Headings, Bookmark and Back to Top are functions that I will teach asap.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I would probably use google save as I am slowly running out of google data space on my personal drive.

Effective Teaching

Thinking back on 2017 identify something that YOU did that made a difference for a child’s learning?

I consciously made an effort to use Talk Moves, a pedagogy that my school focused on for two years but was specific to Maths only. Last year I decided that I would include this in all learning areas and this became my professional goal.

I noticed after 6 months, after every question, one particular student automatically turned and started talking to her peers. She questioned her classmates about their understanding and then made them repeat and rephrase their learning.

It would be great if all students could perform this task with ease.

How might this impact your practice... or someone else's practice... in 2018?

I am continuing with the Talk Moves as the learning skill the student has developed is benefiting not only herself but her classmates. This positive shift has made me realise that Talk Moves is an important pedagogy that needs to be repeated again for the class of 2018. In addition it will be practised along with explicit Vocabulary teaching through the Oral Language which my school is focusing on this year.

I'm looking forward to the professional development on Oral Language as I feel that too many of our students are not talking enough at home with their family but instead focusing too much on playing games on their digital devices..

My 2018 Teaching as Inquiry

“Recognising and spreading sophisticated pedagogical practice across our community so that students learn in better and more powerful ways...”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning.

In 2018 for my inquiry I have selected the following CoL achievement challenge 

#5. Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts

The teaching as inquiry framework I will be using in 2018 has been specifically co-constructed for Manaiakalani schools using our familiar Learn Create Share structure.
The elements in this framework share close similarities with other models New Zealand teachers use.

I will be labelling my posts as I update my inquiry throughout the year to make the content easy to access.

Labels:

LEvidence, LScan, LTrend, LHypothesise, LResearch, LReflect,

 CPlan, CTry, CInnovate, CImplement, CReflect,

SPublish, SCoteach, SModel, SGuide, SFback, SReflect

Label Key:

LEvidence	Learn - Gather Evidence	CPlan	Create - Make a plan	SPublish	Share - Publish
LScan	Learn - Scan	CTry	Create - Try new things	SCoteach	Share - Co-teach
LTrend	Learn - Identify Trends	CInnovate	Create - Innovate	SModel	Share - Model
LHypothesise	Learn - Hypothesise	CImplement	Create - Implement	SGuide	Share - Guide
LResearch	Learn - Research	CReflect	Create - Reflect	SFback	Share - Feedback
LReflect	Learn - Reflect			SReflect	Share - Reflect