DFI Day Five Reflection

 Kia ora koutou, 

Today we talked about visible teaching and learning. For the whole journey to be visible for learners, whanau, the teacher and colleagues it needs to include the planning and learning intentions. This is because we want our learners to know what they are learning and where they are heading to next. 

In our team we do planning on slides that are accessible and visible on our learning site. 

Multi-Modal Learning 

This was good to re-visit as it is something we have been doing as part of our literacy programme this year through t-shaped literacy. I did an example of a multi-modal t-shaped literacy task during our first DFI session which you can find here. Multi-modal gives learners the opportunity to be critical thinkers, is choice based and gives student's the opportunity to collaborate. 

Throughout our distance learning our student's have been using a range of different tools to create and share their learning. Last week we gave student's a challenge to create a rocket; some student's made straw rockets, others drew them, some collaborated and worked on minecraft.

Google Sites

Today we collaborated to put resources together that we could then use to create our own learning site. My groups focus was on New Zealand and War. I planned to create a site based on Learn, Create, Share for the Musket wars, Treaty of Waitangi and the Land wars but it's a work in progress. So far I've only put some of it together for the Te Tiriti o Waitangi page. This will be a great resource for our school to use when we focus our inquiry on New Zealand history. 

Click on the screenshot above to check out my site

DFI Day Four Reflection

 Kia ora koutou,

Today we focused on the share within the Learn, Create, Share model. Here is a snapshot of Share at Wesley Primary.

We focus on sharing with an authentic purpose such as our Market Day (to raise funds for school camp) in term one and our Science Fair in term 2. Whanau were invited to attend these and classes were either involved in presenting at these or coming through to get involved. We also share our learning at assemblies and celebrations such as language weeks and Matariki. Our students share on Class Dojo and their blogs across the school. Going wider than just within our school, some of our student's shared at the Ako Hiko toolkits and the Albert-Eden Cultural Festival annually. Within our team of Kea our student's create and share school news through Kea News which we share on our blog - Kea Team Blog  

Google Mymaps

This was new to me but I could see right away the great ways this could used in learning particularly in Mathematics. I used it to make the track we ride during scooter club twice a week at morning tea. As you can see in the screenshot below you can see the perimeter/distance travelled and the total area. 

Google Forms

We use google forms often at our school to collect data and have used it to collect Mathematics dispositions also. We also have it on our school site as a contact form that collates on google sheets. Currently we are using it for whanau to collect information on support needed with learning packs, devices and kai boxes as we are in Alert Level 4 lockdown again. 

Google Sheets

It was great to learn more about google sheets, particularly around the functions option as that is something I rarely use and it's super useful! It is definitely something I will be using a lot more in the future. It was also useful to revisit graphs/charts in google sheets. This is something we have done with our student's before when collating earnings from their Market Day in Term one; however going into further settings and playing around with how the graph looks, titles etc is something they would enjoy. I found this challenging especially when there was more than two parts to the data, eg: year, month and blog posts and how it looked when displayed. Here is my blog post analysis graph:

Commenting: Positive, thoughtful and helpful commenting is something we work with our students on doing and model this through our own commenting. 

Another great DFI session although I had to duck in and out a bit I've played catch up since! Looking forward to next week.

DFI Day Three Reflection

Kia ora koutou, 

Today in our third DFI session we focused on Create within the Learn, Create, Share model. Here is a snapshot of Create at Wesley Primary. 

   

As we have been using the Learn, Create, Share model for at least 5 years at Wesley I feel it is strongly embedded in the way we teach and learn. We encourage our learners to express their creativity and work collaboratively. Student choice is at the centre and we see how this empowers them as they lead their own learning with our support. 

Youtube Playlist

Here's a playlist I created with songs that our students enjoy listening to. Our students also do news every week that we share on our blog. I think it would be great to make a playlist of all of these as we are planning on watching them all at the end of the year. 

 

Google Slides 

We use google slides for all of our planning. I recently learned of the shortcut Ctrl+k (thanks Phil!) to add links to images/text which was a big timesaver. Today I learned the shortcut to order images/text in google slides - Ctrl+Shift+up or down arrows which has already helped me a lot when creating slides for our school's pepeha. 

Weteri Kura's He Pepeha Matihiko (Digital Pepeha)

I used mote to add audio to each slide here which is something that I will aim to do more of with google slides. This will make our learning slides more accessible for all learners. 

DFI Day Two Reflection

Kia ora koutou, 

Today in our second DFI session we focused on Learn within the Learn, Create, Share model. Here is a snapshot of what Learn looks like at Wesley Primary.

 

Our Learn is supportive, collaborative, integrated, authentic and student-led. The learn we provide is visible and ubiquitous (rewindable, always available) on our team site - Kea site. 

We enable our students to amplify and turbocharge their learning through offering student choice based tasks that allow them to use new opportunities through digital technologies such as tinkercad and minecraft. They often become the experts rather quickly and end up teaching each other and us!

Google Keep - an awesome takeaway from today!

This is an app I use frequently on my phone for personal use but that I have not yet utilised for work (besides the occasional to-do list). Being able to add what you've written on a keep note onto google docs is going to be extremely helpful when working on the go. The grab text from image and microphone transcribing is also going to be very useful and I look forward to utilising these in meetings.

Gmail 

We are signed up to receive notifications when our students post on their blogs or receive comments. With 70 children that ends up being a lot of emails to go through! With Jeremy's assistance I was able to organise those emails to go directly into a separate folder from my main inbox which has cleared out my Gmail nicely. :)

Google Meet and Create

We used Google Meet to share our thoughts around a blog post. Here is an example of a task a student did during lockdown that shows the Learn, Create and Share model.