Growth Cycle: Inquiry Focus 2022

To incorporate extended discussions within reading through Reciprocal Teaching, to accelerate students' overall comprehension of multimodal texts, therefore building students' communication skills. My focus is on developing their ability to explain and justify their thinking, as this is an area of weakness for my students.

Target students

My target cohort is a small group of 5 tamariki who are just at the expected level for reading. I chose these students as I feel they lack some of the communication skills required to progress more and that it is holding back their ability to confidently move ahead. 

I believe these particular students will pick up the reciprocal teaching strategies quickly and we should soon see positive results. Then these students will be able to become mentors within the class to help establish reciprocal teaching and extended discussions with their peers.

Film Editing workshop

I took part in a film editing workshop run by Harley Alexander for the Te Hiku Cluster. Harley is an award-winning filmmaker based in Northland, New Zealand, who has worked for major broadcasters and video production agencies in London, Auckland, Sydney and Hong Kong for over 25 years.
The workshop was a great way to pick up some skills around movie making and editing.
The workshop covered setting up albums, iMovies, manipulating audio separate from video, and other editing aspects.
Now I just need to find some time to play around and experiment with using iMovies.

Online Digital Fluency Intensive: week 1

For term 3 of 2020 I was asked to take part as a coach for the Online Digital Fluency Intensive. This is Professional Development offered to teachers who work within a Manaiakalani Outreach School. It is a fantastic opportunity to join a professional learning group to learn together, following a programme designed to meet these four key goals:

• Our teachers are supported to acquire fluency using the basic tools our young people use for learning
• Our teachers are supported to acquire fluency using the basic tools required for effective teaching, planning, assessment and professional learning
• Our teachers are supported to understand how digital technologies used effectively can have a significant impact on accelerating achievement outcomes
• Our teachers are supported to understand how the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa has been co-constructed over more than a decade to maximise the impact of effective teaching and learning in a digital learning environment. https://dfi.manaiakalani.org/

I am working with 5 teachers in a 'digital bubble'. They are from different schools and different year levels all across New Zealand. 

It was a full-on first day, but highly enjoyable. They learned lots of new things and I did too.

Post Lockdown ponderings and Professional Development

Over the lockdown period I took some time to re-evaluate my skill level and decided to do some online courses. 

I decided to start off with something that is relevant for my job as a Manaiakalani facilitator. Something I would use, teach and support others to use. I started working through the modules in  Screencastify: Class is in session 🎓. I finally did the test today and achieved the Master Screencaster certification.

The other one I am working through at the moment is the Apple iPad Certification. This has been valuable for me getting familiar with the new iPad I have purchased. It required me to learn about tools I had never used much, such as Keynote, Pages and iMovie.

Some other ones I am interested in doing are Scratch Jnr: Teach and any other coding ones I come across, as some of my teachers are wanting to focus on coding next term.

KEN Orientation Day 2020

Learning Together is Empowering

The 2020 KEN Orientation day started off with Kerry presenting "A Taste of Manaiakalani" and providing information about implementing Learn, Create, Share within the classroom.
We talked about the importance for students about being connected, ubiquitous, empowered, and visible.
The primary focus for the day was around Google Sites, and supporting new teachers in setting up their class sites. Chrissy Smith (teaching DP Paihia School) and Jess Henare (teaching DP Kawakawa Primary) presented their class sites and how they use them within their teaching practice. This was quite valuable for the new teachers to better understand how they themselves might use sites in their own classes.

Explain Everything 101

Today I attended an Explain Everything workshop presented by Khismira Lal, a year 1 teacher from Pt. England School.

The workshop PD was initiated for the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe Clusters to support teachers who are new to using Explain Everything.

I have been using EE a lot this year, and supporting teachers and students within the classes I facilitate in with using it. It would have to be one of my favourite applications for Learn Create Share due to its interactive nature which enables both "the teacher and learner to create and share learning artefacts"

I am really enjoying being able to take part in this PD, and especially supporting my teachers on their journey into implementing EE within their teacher practice.

Up-skilling with DLO's

I have been taking some time lately to up-skill and teach myself different types of DLO's (Digital Learning Objects). The reason I did this was because I had reflected on my own practice and realised I was lacking in this area. I felt quite behind in comparison to the other Manaiakalani facilitators and decided I needed to act on it. I made contact with some facilitators who happily shared their planning with me.
Today I decided I would teach the collage making using Google Draw. I really enjoyed learning it and teaching it. All of the students and teachers I worked with enjoyed it too.
I even came home and taught my son, practice, practice, practice!

Below is one of my completed pieces, Tui.