Week Nine: Revision

2020 has really been the year for those outside of education to understand that learning can happen anywhere, anytime or any place! The final part of the Manaiakalani pedagogy is ubiquitous - and we have had the perfect example of that this year.

I think the lockdown and quick move to remote teaching gave teachers a good opportunity to consider what was the most important part of their practice, and for our team it continued to be relationships - even though we couldn't be in the same space as the children and their families. We moved outside our usual realm of phone communication with whanau and used nearly every avenue - calls, texts, google meet and even facebook messenger for those families who needed us to. This continued communication throughout lockdown and level changes was something that families told us they really valued - as did we.

This week Dorothy gave us three points to consider:

What we are proud of: I would say that our communication with children and families was strong, we used multiple avenues to communicate and check in on how our children and their families were managing duirng this difficult time.

Regret/Hindsight: My thoughts in hindsight (rather than regrets!) would be I wish we had started our google site earlier! It's a great avenue for information as well as learning activities for our community. We grew as a team through lockdown - even from afar - but it also gave us fabulous points for reflection if we were to go into remote teaching again in the future. From a technical standpoint - I would use slides to present the weeks learning if I was to teach remotely again - after my new DFI learning this term.

Take forward - My takeforward from lockdown and from my learning during DFI would be an even bigger respect of how they have learnt, adjusted and implemented their practice over the past few years with the introduction of Manaiakalani and devices into our senior school. It's nice to understand the pedagogy behind what they do - and also be able to understand how our team can use the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy with our New Entrants and no devices. Here is an example of our Learn, Create, Share from the past few weeks - where alongside our buddy class we learnt the local story of Maia Poroaki, created an art display and performed a play for whanau/other classes to teach them the story as well! 

DFI Week Eight: Computational Thinking

Manaiakalani has the goal of not only empowering learners but also empowering their teachers. For a teacher who does not currently work in a 1:1 space, but has been working through DFI this term, I have experienced this by feeling alot more empowered about how I can use these newly acquired digital skills to make my way of working more efficient and begin to introduce more of these concepts in our classroom. I can only imagine that if you were working in a 1:1 space and were supported with these skills and facilitators it would be even more empowering! This type of digital fluency is not just important for teachers/learners, but also for other staff within the school. So many of these skills we have learnt during DFI are appropriate for the operational side of schools, improving communication and organisation.

It was also interesting to hear about the equity that has arisen over the Manaiakalani journey, and how they empowered their community by improving access to both internet and quality devices. I have no doubt that this would have been a complicated process but it opens so many doors for both teachers and learners.

Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko

This website had lots of great resources - in particular I loved the toolkit around Kaitiakitanga, as this is our school overarching theme for 2020/2021. It had great ideas for local connections appropriate for all age levels and differing levels of  devices in classrooms too. I will definitely be sharing this with my Team next week.

Coding:

I really enjoyed having a go at the early coding games! I can see that there are sooo many opportunities to integrate this into our current classroom teaching, especially with directional learning in maths. Children with particular interests in video games such as minecraft would love an opportunity to teach other children and be the 'specialists' with in the classroom space too. Even as an adult it was fun to create a 'Flappy Bird' game - I haven't had a go at coding myself since high school in the old computer labs!

In the second part of our coding today, I joined Phil's group to create a simple programming practice using google draw. I chose to integrate our classroom behaviour chart, and the child themselves for motivation. The child had to direct themselves to the starbox while collecting five ticks along the way, which we could use more simply with showing it on screen in class or on a grid drawn on the courts and using verbal instructions. Even New Entrants would love the opportunity to choose their own characters and