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DFI Day 9 Reflection

I am surprised how satisfying it feels to have passed the level 1 google educator exam. The course has been of great benefit. I thought I was reasonably competent with online tools but I have learnt something new every week. Huge thank you to the Manaiakalani Team for all the effort they have put in to this. Thank you to Dorothy and Gerhard in particular as the main presenters and Gerhard as my bubble group facilitator. Thinking about how our school responded to the lockdown: What are you proud of? I am really proud of the way our teachers stepped up to online learning. For some this was a steep learning curve but everyone got stuck in and did a great job. I am incredibly grateful for having Elizabeth to manage all the behind the scenes technical issues and the way that she supported teams with all manner of help and advice was incredible. I also think that our teachers had done a good job of preparing many of our students for online learning. There were reasonable levels...
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DFI Day 8 Reflection

Agency vs Empowered - I like what Dorothy had to say about why they dropped the word agency and just went with empowerment. I agree that teachers often talk in fancy language with a whole lot of TLA's thrown in for good measure. Empowerment is an interesting word when we think about the things that children get into conflict with adults about at school. How often are the problems at school related to children not wanting to do what an adult has asked them to do? Mmmmm. Do they have agency? Maybe. Are they empowered? Interesting. Seems to me there is a nuance that might differentiate agency and empowerment. Both words are begging a word or phrase that belongs inherently in the meaning of any sentence you create with either agency or empowerment. It seems to me that "agency" infers having agency or authority over something while empowerment has a nuance of "power to do". Maybe I am reading to much in to this but empowerment seems to me to have more of a focus on...
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DFI Day 7 Reflection

Devices Devices are often used for consumption or connection. Learn Create Share keeps the focus on Creation and Sharing. Good to have some time to play with both iPad and Chromebook. I get pretty familiar with my own device and don't spend any time on a chromebook and only use the iPad for viewing things never for creating. I don't find it at all easy to sit and create something on demand. I need time to think about it and plan what I am going to create. I can see how screencastify will be useful though so I will play more with that. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XdH9luwv8lntaDB7EeMdnMt6-cLBd-Pg/view
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DFI Day 6 Reflection

This is what I have been working on REaL Toolkit This site is the development of three ideas. Back in 2017 when we first set up the school web site I created a page that I intended to house inspiring resources for Rāwhiti teachers. I dumped a whole bunch of my favourites onto a page but I never got back to sort this out into a usable format. Being part of the DFI has given me the time to come back to this page and plan out how it can be useful for teachers.  The second purpose of this page is inspired by the manaiakalani philosophy of making learning visible and rewindable. I have been thinking that while our teachers are learning to create sites that make learning for their children visible and rewindable we don't always make it that easy for teachers to rewind the PD that we present in staff meetings or make other resources easy to locate. This is my attempt to start an accessible archive of teacher related resources and PD materials.  We often send out emails with...
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DFI Day 5 Reflection

Google Sites Wow! My brain hurts today. There was so much stuff in the morning session that I really struggled to stay focussed for the afternoon. Initially I got lost with the explanation about multi modal vs multi textual and behavioural vs cognitive. Dorothy's session at 11.20 helped clarify that for me (thank you). I do agree that one of the most powerful aspects of using sites is to make stuff visible and rewindable. I think there is probably quite a bit that we do in terms of staff development that we have not done as good a job of making it rewindable as we perhaps could have done. This is something I will think about some more as to how we might achieve visibility and rewindability for staff. The DFI agenda is a great example of both of these aspects. Cool new things Google tab groups Google Earth projects and voyager stories Google sheets filter view To do: Create my pepeha as a google earth project. Share the REaL Toolkit website with key staff at school wh...
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DFI Day 4 Reflection

My brain is pretty full today and I need some time to come back to some of this and revisit the learning. This course is a really fantastic example of why we ought o be making learning resources rewindable for our learners. How many of our children would be able to learn much more independently if they could rewind the instructions as many times as they needed to with no stigma attached? Share: Dorothy makes the point that we are wired to share. But I wonder where TMI comes in to this.  How many cat videos does the world really need? Also, people are different. Not everyone cares so much whether anyone else has read their blog. I do get it though that sharing is important as part of the learning process. I think the power of blogging comes from the feedback and interaction with readers. Questions that lead to further exploration magnify the learning. Conversations add to understanding. Learning to finish is a life skill. Sheets cool things I didn't know before today F...
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DFI Day 3 Reflection

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Create - All about the hook Don't dismiss create as an incidental. Don't think that it isn't part of the main event. Creative opportunities get children reengaged in learning. Good question for staff reflection. Where are the create opportunities? Create improves problem solving, communication and collaboration. https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/lifelong-kindergarten/overview/ Aha moment!!!! There  was a time when creativity was integral to what we did in primary schools. What happened? Did we lose some of the "Create" impetus that we used to have? Was National Standards the creativity killer?  Or something else? Much of what we have seen over the lockdown has been about create. Useful Learning today: Youtube playlists Masking an image in google drawing Format options for an image in google draw
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