DFI Making Connections

DFI Day 7 - Making Connections and Dealing With Data

I find it interesting how everything is to be transparent these days. Feeling slightly vulnerable with this imperative...  not that I don't want to share but it's more around ensuring that I am NOT inadvertently sharing sensitive information! I could see me posting sensitive info out there into the big wide world!

I love the concept of being connected - of my students being connected and that geography not being a barrier. I am most excited though about the change in  mindset among our profession. It did use to be that we only got together in competition, usually on the sports field. Now however, I meet with the NE/Y1 cluster of teachers each term and share challenges and successes, we meet through our Kahui Ako and share best practice and data. We investigate students leading learning through across school workshops. We meet each term with the ECE teachers and NE teachers and chat about transitioning, play-based learning and how we can support, not only our students but each other. All these initiatives show a strengthening of the kaupapa of connectedness.

New learning for the day involved a very quick and INTENSIVE (got slightly anxious!) seminar on the My Map. Had a great deal of difficulty keeping up, however I managed to get a few of the instructions followed and below is the map that I made using the destinations from the cohort, my longest journey and my school pin. However I must not have saved it correctly as some of these are not showing up!
via GIPHY








We also learnt how to obtain and analyse data from students blogs, retrieving the raw data and creating a graph.

DFI  - Day Two of New Learning...

The focus on the LEARN component of the Manaiakalani pedagogy.
The aim is to 

Recognise

Amplify

Turbo charge

Effective Practice

The learning is transformed through redefinition and enhanced modification and through augmentation and substitution. 

Perhaps the most important function of the Manaiakalani programme is the aspect of REWINDABLE Learning..students are directing and able to control their learning to a far greater degree and in greater detail than in learning environments that do not have the use of the technologies.

In my professional learning the use of hangouts will be a great tool! Joining professional learning hangouts and knowing the etiquette of this platform is going to aid me both in growing my capabilities and confidence. Using the Google keep is going to streamline my note-taking and ability to share information with my team. Also being able to manage multiple open tabs will be really helpful and time saving. 

The learning from today in terms of being used by my learners is limited. I have a class of 19 N.E who are somewhat limited in terms of their literacy abilities at this stage. 

The new learning will definitely impact my personal life, especially using multiple google calendars to keep track of both professional and personal commitments. 

I am going to spend a bit of time investigating the Toby Mini and see how I can use this extension to share online resources and readings with my team.

As part of our day we did a combined hangout and had to record our sharing of a child's blog post, the learning behind it and how the comments enhanced the learning. Unfortunately Robbie and I had a few technical hitches with first the audio recording...which didn't work and then it failed to record the video on the second attempt! Doing a trial run is imperative so you know that all the correct boxes are ticked. We had to use an apple computer which neither one of us had driven before!
We thought that the hangout could be used to help lessen the number of meetings, to connect with others from the same departments across the country and share learning. The Manaiakalani toolkits are a good example of using the hangouts to increase teacher capability and confidence.