Digital Fluency Intensive 3 - Media

Digital fluency intensive 3 - Media

Connecting with Manaiakalani : Create

This weeks presentation from Dorothy was about the center of our Learn-Create-Share pedagogy.

Create is at the center of what we do, and as a New Entrant teacher very close to my heart.

This is a DLO - which I recorded of my learners embracing Create in our classroom.   This was a great activity which connected learners imagination with our teams Inquiry topic Watch this Space.  After an initial rich discussion about rockets the students went for it!  This activity was totally unstructured, a wide range of materials were put out with no explicit instruction.   This allowed me to make some really interesting observations of the children.  Some children naturally chose to work together and then had to negotiate all the interpersonal complexities of that.  Some children who find focus in the classroom setting difficult, spent the whole creating period (35min) working on intricate designs and were able to explain all the features of the rocket they had made.  Other children were quite challenged by the freedom and wanted the teacher to "do it for me".  But apart from that we all (myself included) had a great time.  Check out our classroom blog.   What I love about the manaiakalani pedagogy is that it provides me with a means to share this amazing learning with our whanau.

There is a huge amount of research which supports the importance of creativity in developing thinking, exploring, discovering and imagining in students. (Kohl 2008).  These are are building blocks of problem solving, effective communication and collaboration.  New Zealand has a proud history of educators who have embraced creativity and have achieved amazing results with diverse learners such as Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Gordon Tovey.  The movie "The heART of the matter" speaks of the learners creating individual content "whatever was in their mind".  I consider this to align strongly with the empowering of students which Dr Rebecca Jesson considers to be crucial to gaining achievement shifts.  Learners no matter what their age will learn more through creating because the artifact of that learning belongs to them, it is from them.  How much more satisfying must it be to imagine and bring into reality something that was just in their mind, than completing a worksheet which ring fences their opportunities to interface with the topic and looks just like everyone elses.

My personal teaching philosophy is built around a desire to get my New Entrant learners to LOVE being at school.  I believe that 'Hooking' them into learning in their first days of school is crucial to making them successful lifelong learners. 

Connecting with Digital technologies:

Youtube - making learning rewindable.

Youtube is a great tool for teachers use, to amplify learning for their students.  It allows them to provide a huge range of viewable, and rewindable content. To ensure privacy is maintained the default setting for any uploaded content is 'Unlisted".  This restricts access to only those who have the links.  This is also recommended for your teacher  playlists.

Students do not have school channels.  They can share their videos on drive and post to their blog.

Playlists - I currently have a number of playlists which I use frequently in my class which range from Waiata, yoga for kids, to counting songs which I use for warm ups in maths time.  I have often encountered videos which have been created for children and therefore don't have the save option visible. It was really useful to learn today the work around to add these to my playlist.  Another great tip that I learnt today was that by embedding playlists within your class site to restrict students youtube access to these video's only.

 Google draw - creating for teachers

Amy's presentation around Google draw was a great introducation to the tool.  I have to admit it is one which I have found a little confusing.  By undertaking the sandpit task of creating an gadget to add to my blog I was able to experiment with some of the simple features.  I was able to change shapes colours, text font and size.  I also added an image of myself.  In the break out group I was able to have a go at some other features.  I created a rocket image for my slides animation and a gadget that could be used in a blog.

Google slides - telling your story 

Can use in three ways - Presentation tool.  It is very important to have a clear simple message in your presentation.  What is the take away you want the audience to hear.   Ditch the templates and have a go using a blank slate.

Consistent formatting with maximum 2 fonts which are large and clear.  They are a tool to allow you to draw the audience attention to important aspects of your presentation.

Teaching and learning tool - a great tool to allow the embedding of student learning.  This is the most common way that I utilise Google slides in my classroom.

Creativity tool - I also use slides to create banners, labels and graphics for my classroom.  

I was really interested to see how we could use slides as an animation tool.  I learnt that  in older classrooms animation is used as a way of illustrating and responding to literacy lessons.   I thought that this would be a great way to create a writing prompt with my learners - we could work together to create an illustration, ie they choose the background, then we decide what image to draw, make decisions around colours shape etc.  They could dictate the movement ie get the monster to run, walk, jump.  Finally they could construct the story to narrate the animation. This could then be converted to text through google docs, voice to text tool.  This is the slide animation that I created today - Thanks Amy for the support!