My Growth as an Educator

Ubiquitous Learning allows students to learn anywhere, anytime and at any pace. Making learning visible and connected allows for this. Ubiquitous allows students that are absent or need extra support to access their learning through rewindable learning. This could be a video, a site, a slide etc, that children can access any time. I was really excited to see the Woolf Fisher data from the Summer Learning Journey. My school has signed up to do this after the slump we saw last Summer holidays.  The gains were incredible. I will be using some of these infographics to share with parents on the 'why' of encouraging their children to do this. Today was the last day of the DFI course. I have thoroughly enjoyed moving my own teaching and learning towards being more visible for my students and their whānau.

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...

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...