My Growth as an Educator

It was interesting to learn how using positive phrases such as Cybersmart is empowering to students rather than using words such as Cyber Safety, in other words 'proactive rather than reactive'. Manaikalani's Cybersmart programme empowers learners as connected and confident decision makers. There are 12 areas that have a wealth of resources available for teachers and learners to use.  It is important to integrate this curriculum into everyday so it becomes part of the school kaupapa. This has made me think about how we can spread this to whānau. A parent education evening would be a good start and perhaps a blog post from tamariki about Cyber Smart.  Today we had a look at the devices that we are using in the classroom. Ipads in the junior school and chromebooks in the mid/upper school. We had a look at Explain Everything and then looked at the chromebook shortcuts.  Later we engaged with the Cybersmart curriculum while using Screencastify, although I h

Empowerment is not only for Learners but also for Teachers. Without the four pieces of the Manaiakalani puzzle, empowerment is lost.  Today we dug deeper into where Technology is going and how it is exponentially growing. We discussed how important it was to keep our values. Essentially we are the ones in control of where technology goes. As teachers, it is important to teach our learners to keep their values so that we keep our humanity and are not completely taken over by technology. We took a look at the Kia Takatu ā-Matihiko site and although I have already completed many of the pīkau it was great to refresh myself with this site once again. We also engaged with Code.org and Scratch and this has inspired me to hook into these over the coming week so I can upskill and really push my digi-club along.

When we think about making our students connected learners, most of us may think about connecting with whānau or connecting with other students. Digital learning and then sharing helps us take this concept further- connecting locally and globally, it gives the students a truly authentic audience to share and connect with. I loved the idea of live streaming students' sporting and cultural events for whānau far and wide to view. There's also the gain of connectedness for educators, connecting teachers to not only whānau but other teachers and schools, sharing ideas and resources. Today we focused on using Youtube, Google draw and slides. I really see the value in keeping our learners focused on what we are trying to teach and out of the Youtube rabbit hole! Uploading playlists of what we would like our learners to view is a fantastic way to do this. Today I linked a number of clips into various google draw pictures so students can click on the picture to get into Youtube, b

Sharing teaching and learning with children, (or Visible Learning) is a relatively new concept. Not something I was lucky enough to have in my own education. Now, students can access their learning autonomously, anywhere, anytime. For most children, this is a real driver in their success as a learner. The Manaiakalani view on Visible Learning takes this concept even further... teaching and learning is visible for not only students but for whānau and colleagues as well. A great example of this is the Hapara Parental Portal- basically a way to share students' 'books' with their parents directly. Using Google sites is a way of sharing planning to children and whānau. In our hub we have begun a site and the process of making our teaching more visible. This is a work in progress. Today I built a Digi-club site so students could do rewind learning and access the resources for Tahi Rua Toru Tech club. https://sites.google.com/view/marshlanddigiclub I can really see the v

I was absent for this DFI but from reading through what was covered, multi-modal was introduced. I have just begun to use multimodal in my literacy planning- where I try to make tasks engaging for my students by adding pictures, clips and links to take them elsewhere. I made this decision based on some of the examples of planning shared with us in this course. I felt engaged with the material and so I felt that my students would be too. I plan on introducing children to sites so I am pleased that next week's session runs on from this one.

This week in our DFI we learned all about Google Forms, Google Maps and Google Sheets. Google Forms are a great way to gather student pre and post data about a topic or gather feedback about an area you have taught. I like the idea of using Forms to collect student names and year levels for extracurricular activities or workshops and then having the Form collate the responses into a Google Sheet. What a time saver! In Google Maps we learned how to layer different locations, even using the information gathered in a Google spreadsheet to do this. I can see advantages to using Maps in Maths, particularly for area and also it could be used in a lot in Inquiry or Reading so students can think about context.  The Google Sheets aspect of today's session was particularly useful for analysing blog posts and is something I hope to use this week in class as a challenge to students. Can they better their number of 2018 blog posts by halfway through this year? Today we foc