Last day of the DFI

 Today was the last day of my journey attending the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive.

Our focus at the start of the day was on empowerment. Unfortunately many of the whanau of our learners exist with a lack of empowerment. This has been made worse by two years of Covid lockdowns and restrictions. Unfortunately that is reflected in many of the social statistics in modern Aotearoa. The challenge is to combat this and many of initatives that manaiakalani have are designed to combat these.

Our attention turned to the future of technology. In particular what does this mean for our young people. The world is shifting particually around the area of automation. Theere are break through technologies around the world such as Elon Musks' star link and even in New Zealand companies such as rocket lab are changing the dynamic as to what is possible. Increasingly, Robots are replacing humans and changing industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. The development of these technologies means that is crucial to have a conversation about whose world view is reflected in these platforms. Awareness is crucial of any biases that may exist in terms of Artificial Intelligence.

We were joined by some amazing year 6 students from Point England Primary who showed us real life examples of how the Manaiakalani Learn Create Share Kaupapa is embedded in their school on a daily basis. They were amazing ambassadors for their school.

An opportunity to explore coding software is always fun and I am going to challenge myself to find opportunities to use in my classroom.  The afternoon was spent exploring applications such as scratch to develop our coding skills. It was a lot of fun and I can see how students would enjoy engaging with this technology.

The DFI has been an amazing learning experiance and I feel more equipped as a teacher with my digital technology skills and look forward to embbedding this in my practice.  

Devices Day

 Day 7 of the DFI continued with a focus on Devices. Getting the opportunity to connect using the devices that our students use. 

Dorothy kicked things off remotely from Christchurch with a brief on ubiquitous learning. We have all become familiar with this as a result of the covid lockdowns and the need to learn remotely.  The idea of this is that students can have the barriers of time removed. The students can chose when to engage with their working. Students are empowered to extend learning at a time that works for them. It also enables students to live local and learn global. Students can learn at their on pace. Manaiakalani initatives such as the summer learning journey have shown that learning opportunities outside the traditional school day have shown to improve outcomes for students. 

We were then given an opportunity to use Chromebooks to explore their functionality. It was great to experiance how they operate and the various keyboard shortcuts. It is similiar (but different!) to the macbook that I am familiar with. We also got to experiance using a whiteboard style app on an Ipad which I can imagine is particually engaging for younger learners.

In the afternoon session we build a workspace - and learned how to make it engaging for learners. You can view it here

Getting comfortable building sites

 Day 6 of the DFI was all about google sites. 

The underpinning idea of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is the concept of Rangitamiro - being connected. The Manaiakalani Kahui Ako is a connection of different schools, primary, secondary, catholic, Kura Kaupapa and special schools. Since 2015 Manaiakalanai has expanded to involve schools from all around New Zealand. This collaberation allows for streamlineing of things like PLD. Manaiakalani runs a number of PLD connecting schools together - an example of which is the Secondary Connects that run once a term. 

Sites allow for Visible teaching. Dr Rebecca Jesson notes that if learning is visible, learning can be enhanced. There are 5 affordances of the Learn Create Share pedagogy in a digital learning environment. 1) Engagement. 2) Teaching conversations 3) Cognitive challenge. 4) Visibility and 5) Scaffolding.

There are a number of purposes of the learning site. It is a one stop hub for learning. It makes learning ubiquitous. It allows for rewindable learning. It personalises learning. It provides for visible planning and teaching. It allows parents and whanau to engage with the learning of students. It provides an overview of the learning ahead and it also, obviously, allows for distance learning while needed. Google sites allow for consistency across learning levels in schools. It is important that the sites being created have visual appeal and functionality to both engage and make it simple for students to engage with their learning tasks. 

We were given the time to explore a number of learning sites. It was good to experiance sites as a visitor and think about what works and what doesnt. This is useful for planning my site with a view to the user experiance. Following this, we shared our sites and got feedback.

We were then given the rest of the day to work on our own subject sites   

Collaboration

 Day 5 of the DFI begun with a focus on visibility. Can the learning been seen or not? Visibility for the learners is crucial, particularly in a post-Covid environment. Visibility for whanau is crucial. But also visibility to other teachers to allow for collaboration and the sharing of ideas. Teachers should consider the default setting of their learning to be "visible to anyone with the link"

We then turned our focus to Multi Modal modes of learning. The purpose of this is to engage learners in a variety of different ways, harnessing technology. Our class sites needs to be both differentiated and inclusive for our learners. This can help with diversification. A useful site can help with the engagement of our learners. Our sites need to be created in such a way so as to entise learners into their learning. It should reflect the current learning in the classroom. It is, essentially, the shop front window to the learning. 

A multi modal site should have personalised learning using the UDL framework. What engages one learner may not necessarily engage another learner. This will help with cognitive engagement of students. Designing Learning with the end in mind to get accerlated achievement. Site design needs to be framed from a pedagogical perspective.

We were given the opportunity to browse some learning sites that are examples of best practice. For me I like sites where the learning is clear and there is more than one way of the information being displayed. Following this we started to create our own site, and learnt how to create links and use the button feature on google sites.

For the afternoon session we spend the afternoon creating a multi modal site based on critical reading skills. Click here to view the result