Sunday 17 March 2019

'Don't throw the baby with the bathwater' ...Day 2@DFI

During todays DFI we focussed on  LEARN.

Putting it bluntly - "If you can be replaced by Digital Technologies then you should be!" Best practise or effective pedagogy are  still fundamental and indeed critical to improve student outcomes.
Effective teaching coupled with Digital Affordances will lead to accelerated outcomes for our learners.

In order for the learn to be effective  the following 3 things need to be in place.
Firstly we need to Recognise - what effective teaching practise looks like.
Then Amplify - to make a difference really great teachers use technology effectively and capitalise on the affordances. Looking to work above the line on the SAMR Model is ideal.
And if we are truly using the affordances of the technologies available we can Turbocharge - enhancing the classroom experience to connect our learners.

Rewindable learning gives us the opportunity to be Ubiquitous - "if it's worth teaching it's worth capturing." So it was great to look at ways to make learning rewindable today.

I was reintroduced to Google Hangouts and thought this could be a handy way of collaborating with my fellow students on our various share assignment tasks this year. Along with this we played around with using Quicktime for screen recording and my first go at creating a tutorial is a little lacking, but a great reminder about making learning rewindable.



We explored the various settings within Gmail, so I have been brave and changed my Inbox set up to see if that has an impact on my workflow.

Some great handy hints to use Google Keep and I was very happy to learn that you could convert an image to text. So am wondering if I am neat enough in my note taking whether I could use this functionality.

Another great day of revisiting the known and delving into the unknown.

Friday 8 March 2019

Back to the Future - Day 1@DFI 2019



What a wonderful day having time to think, learn, create, share and reflect. It was great to take a look back and be reminded of where it all began ...



It made me think about this group of learners that were our very first Year 8 Graduates  in our first 1 - 1 classroom using devices from Year 6 onward. How privileged I have been to share in their journey and what a long way we have travelled in a short space of time!
And a reminder from Dorothy that "Effective pedagogy via deliberate acts of teaching is the critical factor" to make a difference to learner outcomes.

So what did I learn ...I need to reorganise my Drive and was reminded about the power of Omnibox!

The tips and tricks were great and will undoubtedly help me to be more efficient!

I was also reminded of the challenge for our learners when trying new things - creating a Poster in Google Docs was a great chance to explore using Docs in this way and I appreciated the time to learn and discover for myself, with support on hand when needed for just in time learning.

And here it is, my data infographic - hopefully self explanatory??



Thursday 7 March 2019

Language in Abundance

"I can't say what I mean I can't tell you how I feel ...if I don't have Language"

Language In Abundance - 'it absolutely matters" another wonderful afternoon spent with Dr Jannie van Hees learning and being reminded about the importance of oral language for our kids!



One of todays resonating messages was the need to be very attentive to the sources that we are providing for our learners ...don't take things for granted - Quality matters! Quantity Matters!

You can have abundance without quality! We need to be "Champions of Oracy" for our tamariki and keep gifting new words and language groups for them deliberately and purposefully.


What else Matters - The Trio
Explicit attention to the Language that is carrying the meaning
Optimising Environmental Conditions - the social norms/expectations
Attention to Co-contributors

My wondering ...
We know that many of how kids have the Taonga of their home language that they bring with them - so how can we ensure that we encourage the ongoing usage of this along with being more inclusive of this richness in our classrooms?

As always a great afternoon of thinking and learning.