What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Making learning completely visible is hugely important and give students an authentic audience. If learning is not visible to whanau it can seem as though we are putting up barriers. Whanau having access to student learning through Google Sites has a very positive impact on home-school partnerships and gives parents an insight into what their child is learning at school and can prompt learning conversations between our students and their parents.Multi-modal- different modes of communication.
Engaging - the hook: using multi-modal raises student engagement e.g. videos, maps, text,
Once the hook is in - teach! Multi modal addresses behavioural engagement but multi-textual achieves the cognitive engagement - it gives the learning a purpose.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
I learnt a lot more about google sites. I already had a clear understanding of how to use it but now I feel more confident with the idea of what content to add to my site and to make sure I add instructions and explanations to do with the multiple modes I am embedding on the site e.g. make sure youtube clips have an instructional purpose captioned below. I am now motivated to create a range of google sites to run our class inquiry topics through.A few tricks for making images the correct size for google site:
-960x300 pixels header size for google sites
-200x200 pixels for buttons (make sure buttons are quite large for use on iPads).
What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
I created a school garden site with links to videos, google drawing activities, and digital text links. I also converted a junior journal text about gardening into a google slide to make it more accessible to my students. I plan to do more of this in the future to build my own bank of digital resources. Making texts into slides will make handling school resources more manageable as I won't have to worry about have enough copies of books for the students in their reading groups. They can also access these resources from home.
Link to the site I worked on today:
Link to my class site:
When kids are first starting out at year 4 with chromebooks, the instructions need to be specific with the tech e.g. what colour to add text to a shared doc, make a copy of the doc etc... The older students get the less technical instructions needed as they get used to using google apps.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Making digital books accessible through google slides will enable me to work from home more as I can access the digital texts for this like junior journals and school journals from home. I can update and add digital content from home onto my site also. I need to keep in mind that making digital resources is really worthwhile for using year after year. Building a bank of these should make my workload less as time goes on.
Great work with your post Dani. I can imagine it must be awesome attending the DFI when you have already set up your class Site. No doubt it makes things even clearer and you can fine tune things further on the Site. Your knowledge will greatly assist the teaching team. Maybe you could run a small workshop for the staff at school who are on the cusp of setting their class site up? Also, a small thing, could I suggest that your labels get updated to Standards of the Teaching Profession (STP).
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