Day 7: New Digital Technologies

 The New Digital Technologies 

This week we were enlightened with new digital resources and information about future technologies which can empower learners and their whanau on taking control of their lives. Technology is not a tool for learners to become a consumers it is a platform that allows learners to become creative directors in sharing their knowledge.

One way we can amplify students creativity and learning is through computational thinking. This teaches students to understand the 6 fundament stages of programming which can be adapted in many areas of knowledge and workspaces. Students become efficient decision makers through practising and following these stages in multitude of ways.

Today we practised programming through using Scratch and StopMotion. My creations are shared below. Programming on Scratch was a challenge as I could not get the backgrounds to change once I incorporated a song. I had to keep checking my sequence and iteration codes to allow the program to flow.

Enabling Access

"I feel like a website developer after the last two DFI sessions."

This week I had a Reading observation which looked at how I execute my reading lessons against the Manaiakalani criteria to find patterns. The feedback was to be more explicit in the purpose of reading. I completely agreed with this feedback as by the end I could of rounded the session better with my group. My goal from this observation is to make the reason for reading more visible and defined. However, I have questioned how and when I make the purpose of learning visible because I'm torn between giving the WALT right away and following an inquiry model that focuses on coaching students through critical questioning to have student think and develop the purpose of learning themselves. For now, I am going to work using both ways of teaching. For example; Students explore the topic to guess what the concept might be, then coach the students to 'create' the purposeful outcome before making it visible and going deeper into the learning. It is a discussion I would like to hear more perspective on.

Today's lesson was about making our class sites more visible and accessible for all to locate the learning in one place. It takes good planning and patience to create a site that has visual appeal and good user experience. I think an engaging site is one that highlights the personality of the classroom and clearly reflects the learning.  My goal this session was to create a math site that visually displayed stages and lesson plans, as well as differentiated learning activities all in one place to create student choice and be challenged in how they learn. On my previous math site, I had 5 subpages depending on math topic and activities uploaded to the page with no organisation or structure. Now I have one main math page and a subpage for DMIC work to be more visible to parents and viewers outside of school. 

I have linked my Class Site below if you wanted to have a look. 

Day 5: Collaborative Sites

 Visible Kaupapa

Today's Manaiakalani Kaupapa was about making teaching and learning visible to students. Enabling all students to navigate the education system for success by making the planning, process, outcome, assessment visible. In the term holidays, I made a technology reading page on my class site for my students with as much multi-media I could find to get them engaged. It was my proudest page because I find it really hard to create an aesthetically pleasing site to suit all my learners. I found that the kids were more engaged this term but the layout made activities and tasks hard to follow. I have really enjoyed this morning having a look at other people’s sites and how they layout their visible learning. It has been good to get some ideas on how to make it accessible to all learners, parents and other teachers following the Manaiakalani Kaupapa on learn, create and share. I'm looking forward to finding spare time to sit down and get my site organised to be engaged behavioural and cognitively. I would love to be able to add audio recordings to my site.

Here is a development of my learning during the explore and create sessions. These sessions felt very intensive and required a lot of patience and energy. I am quite tired now but happy I've learnt different ways to organise my planning and sharing with students and staff. It was also a bonus to see get access to variety of multi-texts already linked to themes.

Below you will find my planning, my digital creation and my site to follow. 

        

Here is the link to my site HC Maori Technologies

Dealing with Data - Day 4

 Dealing with Data 

Lately in my planning and teaching I have realised how often I follow the Learn, Create Share, learning model without realising. My goal this week is to adapt the layout of my weekly planning and small parts of my term planning specifically following this learning model so others and myself can quickly identify which stages of learning they are in. I hope these changes will enable my class and I to become better at sharing to our blog and finding authentic audiences. 

I really like the catchphrase "I'm ready to share, rather than I'm finished!" - This will be implemented first thing tomorrow! 

In these sessions, we get delivered soo much information. I find that  my brain is always firing with new ways to plan, new ways to engage learners for tasks or how they can share. I really need Google Keep because I’m always making notes during these sessions to add to my end of the day tasks or release minutes as things to include for the following weeks lessons.

Today we focused on spreadsheets. I believe spreadsheets is the one site that is constantly changing and evolving. It feels good to be updated with the new tools and will be very helpful as I get into Report data collection. When teaching statistics or literacy reports, I love using spreadsheets and watching students explore this site and show their creativity in work. I'm looking forward to giving them a similar activity about their own blogs so they can learn statistical literacy and make goals on having better time management in finishing their work so they can share with others. 

This is a graph highlighting a student in Room 11's blogpost across four years. This graph identifies the year that Ahipara School started their DFI blogger program in 2018. In 2020, this students blogposts increased significantly throughout the whole year, especially in the month of June. This student created 25 blogposts throughout the year. That is 8 more blogpost than was made in 2019. An anomaly in this data would be in the month of April where no blogposts were made. In April 2020, New Zealand went into lockdown and students were online learning however, it took a period of time for schools to get devices to students. This would explain why no posts were made during April and suddenly increased in the following months.  This data would be interesting to look into across all students to see the importance Technology played in students learning during Covid lockdowns.