Empowered Learners & Conceptual thinking

If I'm being honest, listening and reading the slides on conceptual thinking at 8.30am in the morning had me a little bit frazzled and muddled, but as with anything new, when I start allowing time to think and unpack this idea I'm sure my understanding of conceptual thinking will improve. My biggest take away was giving our students the opportunities to not be passive consumers of technology. To not always just consume, consume, consume, but to actually be active creators and innovators of digital solutions. Getting our tamariki to thinking deeply about digital solutions to modern problems, or creative alternatives allows our students to not only develop problem solving and critical thinking skills, but it also is setting them up with the foundation knowledge and digital fluency skills that they will take with them throughout their personal and future professional lives. 

As we know, the diversity of our classrooms is ever growing and ever changing. Not only is there diversity of culture and language, but we are facing a huge diversity and difference of students oral language skills, social skills, communication and readiness to learn. Some of our students are sometimes set their fates due to their home life. Some of our tamariki come into school already disadvantaged and are not available to learn, perhaps because they had share a bed with their siblings and did not get a good nights rest, or perhaps haven't had a meal in a while and they are hungry. The sad reality of poverty in New Zealand is truly reflected in our classrooms. And I am sure every teacher can think of a student that suffered at the fate of their life at home which they cannot control. I'm always asking myself what can I do? How can I help? 

One way that we can help these tamariki is teaching them and helping them to become digitally fluent. Giving them the tools and the strategies needed to work online gives all of students the skills for the workforce. Its giving the power back to them and allows students to decide their own fate, because now they have the skills that our current and future workforce requires. They not only gain the skills but also the work ethic. They learn how to finish their mahi to a timeline, and they can also learn how to not fall victim to easy distractions and how to critically reflect and consolidate their learning. Not only this, but digitally fluent children can then pass this learning onto whānau. I am often helping my grandparents with their computer and iPad, and I can guarantee students will also be educating and helping their whānau with digital problems too. 

Today we learnt about the basics of coding. Straight away my mind thinks back to my learners and one in particular who has a love of coding and anything computers or digital. He is always checking in to see what I have learned on my DFI days, and tomorrow I cannot wait to show him what I have done, and what I have learned. Using the minecraft code website I am able to get a real basic and easy introduction into the schemes of coding. While having a go and doing this task I was reflecting on the type of thinking and processing that I was doing in order for my code to work. Its problem solving mixed in with a bit of critical thinking. If we can give our tamariki these skills early on in life, it very well may just open up the door for a potential career path for them in the future. Websites like this is a great positive way to engage our kids in not only problem solving, but also reliance and perseverance. I know this because I felt giving up a couple times when my code was not working!

 

Ubiquitous Learning

 Ubiquitous learning 

Anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. 

When we share all that we do in our classroom on our class site, we are opening a big beautiful door that has often been closed in a standard classroom for many years. Through the help of digital devices, we are able to open a window and take a sneak peak into what we do in our classrooms. This lets our learners, whanau, colleagues and anyone who is interested access to see all of the fantastic learning going on in the classroom. Not only does this strengthen the connectiveness of our learning community but it also makes learning accessible for anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. 

I have had a brief stint of experience working in a year 5/6 class at Wainui beach school as a reliever. When I walked into the class for the first day, the children showed me their classroom site, their groups activates, their time table and of course their learning. It truly was amazing to see just how well practised the students were. I simply followed their timetable, took the lessons that were scheduled and followed the learning intentions on the planning slides that their teacher had left them. The students were settled, focused, and motivated. It was like taking a sneak peak at the happy ending of a movie. It was clear that this pedagogy has been ingrained over time for the learners, and that both teachers in the space had a lot of digital fluency. But for me, as the reliever, it was a dream. 

I can really see the impact this would have on children's learning. Whenever I am out of my classroom, I try to often leave my planning and tasks for the reliever. I know how a lack of routine and programme (especially disruptions that are occuring frequently over time) can impact learning. Definitely something to think about for my Year 3 & 4 students. 

Today I took the time to complete a digital dig. It is the same tasks that my learners have done in class as well. It was a great way to cover the basics, and to learn those all important keyboard shortcuts.

We also looked at creating our own cybersmart lesson using slides to help. I found this really easy and fun to create.  Using screencastify was a great tool in order to talk about the purpose of the lesson, and my thinking behind it. I now can also add this onto my class site, perhaps under a button/section called early finishers for those students who have finished everything and need to do something productive. 

  

 Week 6 - My Classroom Site

Connected pedagogy and connected learning. 

Human nature has depended and evolved on the basis of people working together, building relationships, and connecting. I believe this is the same for learning as well. Many moons ago, the most interaction that schools had with each other was the odd sports game or competition. Now, with the revolution of the digital world, we have hugely improved our ability to connect with not only other schools, but our colleagues within our school as well.  Not too long ago I was struggling for ideas around our inquiry topic, it wasn't until I visited a colleagues classroom site that I was able to critically think and plan. It sparked my thinking and really helped me to plan for the following weeks ahead. This connectedness helps us to feel empowered in the work that we do. We see and feel the value of our practise because it is visible and appreciated by others too. Which reminds me that I need to visit other class sites more often. 

My classroom site

My classroom site unfortunately had been untouched since the very start of term 1. On a teacher only day I created the bare bones, or structure of my classroom site. But today I was able to dedicate the time to update it, input value content and also practise the digital fluency skills around sites as well. 

I can really see the power in these sites and I understand the importance of them and the power that they have (see last blog post for more details). But my biggest challenge and hurdle around class sites is time. Time is the most valuable classroom currency in my opinion. Many many teachers are often struggling to find the time to do all the tasks that are needed. Were planning, assessing, teaching, collaborating, and learning PLD too. For me, I really struggle to find the time. Today was a lovely but also rare opportunity because we were given time. We had some of this precious time to find the content and then upload it to our site. I personally believe that I managed to get quite a lot done on my inquiry section of my site in that time. I worked really efficiently and tried to get as much done as I could. With all of that in mind, I still haven't put anything on for reading, writing, maths, celebrations, or classroom organisations. If anyone has some tips, or ways that they manage their time for their classroom site please do share them with me! If there is a work smarter not harder method out there for this I am all for it! 

 

Above is a picture of my inquiry page on my site. The above being the before, and the bottom is the after. I promise you there is lot more content than just a changed picture! Most of the content is further down the page. Click on the link here to check it out! I focused today on my inquiry so please don't be shy to check it out! 

(The learn page is where all the good stuff is). 

Week 5 - DFI

 Visible learning with google sites

As we know, we spend every week day with our students, we spend a huge amount of time with our learners and for our parents, this is a huge chunk of time that they are away from their kids. So naturally, parents are going to not only be interested in what their child does in a day, but they are also emotionally invested in their kids learning, and weather or not their child is happy at school. We all know that a strong parent and school relationship correlates hugley to students achievement and enjoyment at school, so understanding that VISIBLE learning is not just a couple pieces of art on the wall. It understanding how powerful it can really be. We can now easily make our learning visible through the mode of google sites. This allows easy access for parents to check in on what's going on at school in easy breezy beautiful kind of way.  

Google slides and multimodal learning

Google sites is such an underrated and underused tool, that I don't think a lot of people realise just how easy, and accessible it is to create a website for free. It can be used to not only share learning with whanau, but it can be used as a teaching tool, or a resource bank as well. Today as part of my learn, create, share, I was able to create a site filled with resources around the theme of Matariki. I worked collaboratively with some other teachers to create this resource that I am really proud of. We wanted to create a multimodal site, meaning we had videos for students to watch. We had books for students to listen too. Poems, songs, and even quizzes. We put together a bank of learning rich tasks that lets students choose their own path of learning. We wanted our children to, like I just have, to also learn, create, and then share. 

Google sites is such a fantastic place for all of this to be, as I can share this with colleagues, use it for years to come and also create other unit plans to eventually have a bank of teaching resources that is always and easily accessible.

Click here  to check it out ! 

(its not perfect  - still little touch ups here and there to do).