Fine-tuning

Our kaupapa this week is Collaborate ~ Sites

This week I'm onsite as we have a staff meeting on my usual day.  One thing is for sure - online sessions are definitely faster paced! It made a nice change to have more time to play, and explore a bit more thoroughly. It was funny to note how much more confident I am to ask questions when I'm in my safe bubble, rather than with 25 people I've never meet. I'm grateful I chose the online option. 

Visible learning

Again, Dorothy started us off with some words of wisdom and good reminders about best practice. So, visibility - can you see it or can you not? Visibility allows parents and whānau to be genuine partners in the learning process. We've kept so much of the learning journey hidden from children and whānau.  Break down those barriers to visibility! Dorothy talked about removing/limiting password barriers, share links, make files accessible!   If there's too many bubble wrap, barriers, steps etc... parents switch off, get locked out - more profoundly than in the past. Visibility also needs to be present between colleagues. Intentional use of technology to make learning visible is a game changer.

Dorothy explained to us that each kaiako in their kāhui ako had a professional blog. I wondered how this would go down at Hornby Primary! Maybe a goal for the future?

Multi-Modal Learning Tasks

Multi-modal always been a thing. Snail-mail, face book, you tube, phones, faxes, etc... As adults, we'd rather watch instructions than read them. The same can be said for our tamariki, surely? We have to compete with the bright lights and visual excitement from all the other digital exposure our kids get - gaming, tiktok etc.... so we need to make sure our hook is going to catch them and hold them for their learning!

There are 2 levels of engagement when using MM texts ~ Behavioural engagement and Cognitive engagement.  Behavioural engagement is the hook. It's getting the kids in the right mind-frame for learning.  The hook - it's all about window dressing! It needs to be a visual feast! Cognitive engagement is the deeper feature kinda stuff - the T shaped literacy, the cognitive demands. You can't have cognitive engagement until you have behavioural engagement! 

Some wise words from Chrissy Butler around Universal Design for Learning ~ Be careful we're not narrowing parameters. Create learning opportunities with lots of options for how to present. Otherwise we're doing the same thing we were doing pre-digital days, just with flasher equipment. Interesting point to note - when I'm planning activities, I set myself as the default. I plan activities in the way that I might like to do, or in a way I think the children might like. The teacher is not the default! There is no default! What engages one learning might not engage another. 

Something I'd like to try ~ scaffolded guides for kids to work through their MM tasks, eg colour in the circle when you've finished the task. This would be very cool if all my tamariki had email addresses!

Something that really excited me ~ in Slides - use the little blue camera on the top right side of the screen to record. The video is saved to your drive and automatically uploads to the page you are working on. Or use Online voice recorder (you will have to upload it to your drive to be able to insert it in to slides).

Click HERE  for some great MM learning programmes. Great time savers. I often forget (or maybe it's the anal retentiveness) that there's no need to reinvent the wheel.    

Google Sites

Some tips from Mark Maddren 

• Make sure kids can get where they need to go in 3 clicks or less!
• Create a new site each year so you have evidence of teaching practice.
• Buttons - get the kids to design their own!
• Use the immersive reader extension - tamariki can highlight text from a site, blow it up, highlight the nouns, verbs, etc...  

After morning tea we had the opportunity to play around with a new site. Mark suggested making a site rather than slides when creating a learning programme for tamariki. One benefit is that it's much easier to insert audio clips. I played around with my kaupapa plan on Tōku Tinana. I do prefer to use Slides when creating MM learning programmes, However I will definitely use Sites to link in new kaupapa from now on.   

Blogger Tips 

Our final part of the day was spent playing with our blog.

Make sure labels are used. It's a good way to link to your appraisal. Make sure you set the display to 'cloud' so that kaupapa you have written about more frequently are larger in size.  

Here's a game changer from Kelsey which was shared last week but I needed time to get my head around it.  Use this link to insert links into your blog post. 

<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>

Go to HTML view and past it in there. Add the link into the URL part, and the text in to the other section. So easy - Thanks Kelsey! 

Today was another full on day, but definitely got a bit more breathing space and time to reflect which was very handy. Looking forward to next sesison.

Ngā manaakitanga.