My Growth as an Educator

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...

Work/Life balance is especially hard to find as a teacher (and as a teaching parent!).  Today's session was all about Work Flow. How can we use the G suite to make our life any easier on a daily basis?  Google Keep is a great way of keeping notes, reminders and sites all in one place. Taking a photo of text and then converting it is a very useful tool to share this text with students digitally. On a personal level, Google Keep will be great as the tasks and lists that I have made, will send reminders either during a scheduled time or even when I go near a location that I have saved! There will never be a forgotten shopping list item or email again!   As a teacher in a collaborative learning environment, we have to constantly be meeting and recording our minutes. I plan to introduce my colleagues to Google Hangouts so that as teachers are away or we would like to meet with our part-time teacher, we can have meetings whenever/where ever. Another g...