Digital Fluency Intensive - Day 4 Tohatoha

Sharing - Tohatoha has been happening since the beginning of time and the possibilities have been amplified by technology.
 Our Manaiakalani schools have continued to use Blogger as the platform to teach our kids how to share and be an effective and responsible online citizen "Work with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning outcomes".

The Cybersmart Curriculum is critical component to ensure that every learner is " kind on line, internet-awesome, and positive" ...there is a common language that is explicit, consistent and deliberately scaffolded for our learners.

And a reminder that 'to get an audience you have to be an audience' ...


I had never checked out my maps before, this  might just be my new favourite App. I can see it as a cool way to start the year off when we are finding out about each other and where our whanau come from or where we'd like to explore in the future. So many possibilities in the classroom.


Dealing with Data ...
It was great to find out about some really useful add-ons in spreadsheets. My favourite two are rowCall and Cropsheet ...thanks for sharing. I love shortcuts!
I use spreadsheets all the time and it was great to look at using them more effectively and the data that can be generated out of them.

I took a closer look at one of our kids blogs to see what I could find out. The data collected by Woolf Fisher for Manaiakalani tells us that there are improved student outcomes if kids blog 3 times a week.
At a glance ...

What's Your Story? DFI - Day 3

A few key messages...

When using Google Slides ...

So What's your story? What are the key messages you are trying to convey?
Pictures really are worth a thousand words! So choose them carefully.
Ditch the Defaults. It's great to start with a blank slide and create your own.
Use consistent formatting and ...
Plan ...plan...plan!

"Keep the message to a tweet"

We had some amazing guest presenters from Panmure Bridge today, who shared their skills in Google Draw.

My first attempt  with Google Drawing ...learning to create yikes! Still a long way off from mastery level!

Thanks for the tautoko, Ms Tuiā!

'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.

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??

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.

Brainwave Seminar

I was lucky enough to attend a Seminar by the Brainwave Trust on Normal Brain Development in Infants and how to Grow Great Brains ...
The Big Idea was that consistency, responsiveness and loving care grows children's brains.
Although I knew that the human brain does a huge amount of growing and connecting up in the first 3 years I was astounded to learn that an adult brain weighs 1400g, at the age of 1 a child's brain is already 1 kg and at 3 a child's brain weighs 1200g. Great food for thought in terms of those early years and the importance of opportunities     

I was particularly interested in the power of play and the ability of the brain to make connections through repetition and that play to a child is work - great to keep thinking about how this applies to the development of a Reception Class.

The other big ideas that resonated were around 'attachment' and that it is the 'umbrella' under which all other development occurs.

Along with that the discussion around resilience ...Children are born adaptable but not resilient - we all too often talk about children’s resilience but they are not born resilient.

Ngā mihi ki nga kaiako o Pt England Kindy for hosting us, a great night of thinking and learning.

Confessions of a childhood Stutterer

I was privileged today to hear Judge Andrew Becroft speak and emphasise the need for us to ensure that we listen to the voices of our tamariki. Of course we think we do that in classrooms but are we truly actively listening and engaging with our kids? Are we really hearing or are we waiting to hear the response that we have intended to illicit from them?

He emphasised the  need to ensure that we have kids who can participate and communicate, so that no child is left behind.

"Are we getting it right?" Being child-centred and hearing children’s voices.

He went on to say "First we must help them find that voice then we must add it to what we are doing."

So how can we add children's voice to what we are doing? How can and do we gather voices/views/perspectives of the kids.

Perhaps from a schooling perspective there are more questions than answers but what a great challenge to think about how we can better work to capture our kids voices and really listen and include them as drivers of change and development.