Enabling access with Google Sites

This week at Digital Fluency we worked on our Class Sites. I am trying to make my site more visually appealing and easy to use. 
We had an opportunity to present our site to the class and receive feedback so I took that opportunity.

We use a "Must do, Can do" programme in Room 3 so I have added some buttons to my site so students can easily access their "Can do" activities.

Constructionism, Constructivism and Collaboration

Our flipped task this week was to: Consider the differences between constructivism and constructionism and how collaboration relates to both. Create a diagram that captures your ideas on a single slide, then record a screencast of you explaining your diagram.

Here is my attempt (including a Coggle!)

In class we used Makey Makey to make a musical instrument. We then reflected on our  group's collaboration and made another screencast.

Relationship based learning

Kaikohe West School have regular Professional Learning meetings where staff have a chance to reflect on their pedagogy and share their thoughts with others. This week we watched a video about Community Responsiveness. 

Here are some reflections I shared at our staff meeting:
To be agentic teachers we need to understand ourselves and create a learning context which allows students to bring their knowledge to the classroom. For relationship centred education we need to be responsive to the students and let them know we care about their learning.
Agentic teachers reject deficit theorising and have high expectations of all students. They are able to use a range of teaching strategies effectively and manage the classroom so pedagogy includes co-construction of learning. They use evidence and formative assessment  to guide next steps. They can modify the curriculum so it is responsive to the community.

ITL Research

This week at my DCL course we investigated the 21st Century learning design rubrics designed by Microsoft in Education. You can find them here: ITL Research

Tracey and I worked together to make a video about how these rubrics can help us in our teaching practice. We used an iMovie trailer format as we had a very short amount of time to complete the project.

Screencastify, Chromebooks and iPads

This is my first attempt using Screencastify. It is a bit clunky but I can see it will be a useful tool in the classroom and I'm sure I will get better with some practice. I think my students will enjoy using this tool to explain their learning.

We worked through the Digital Dig which I talk about in my video and I learned some useful new keyboard shortcuts for the Chromebooks.  There is even a shortcut for seeing all shortcuts! 
Try it - ctrl + alt + /.

Khismira Lal, a year 1 teacher from Point England School was our guest speaker at the Digital Fluency Intensive Course today. She works in a 1:1 iPad class and gave us lots of new ideas to use in class. The best tip for me was to save everything as a video rather than a project so it can be saved to and used in Google Drive.

What is knowledge?

This year I am completing a Post-Graduate Certificate in Digital and Collaborative Learning through Mindlab. Our first task was to share our reasons for doing this course and to then choose a response we connected with. This was the one I chose:

We then discussed the concept of knowledge. It is surprisingly difficult to define as it is such an abstract concept.
First we brainstormed in pairs:

Next we made a 3-d model to represent our thoughts and teamed up with another group to combine our ideas and make a video:

We also learned about the importance of followership. Here are some qualities of an effective follower:

• Think for themselves and evaluate the leader's decision before accepting it
• Are active
• Have positive energy
• Give full support if they agree with the leader
• Challenge the leader and offer constructive alternatives if they disagree

Sharing and Google sites

Dorothy Burt joined us via Google Hangout to talk about Learn, Create, Share.

Sharing has been happening since the beginning of time - think cave paintings. Technology has allow students to have an authentic audience in class rather than just a compulsory audience. The audience is now global.
As a teacher, it is important to hook students into the learning because the thrill of a new device does not keep them engaged in the long-term. This can be achieved through the use of multi-modal teaching materials.

We practised creating a new Google site incorporating multi-modal material. Here is my gardening site:

I am planning to update my class Google site before the start of Term 2 to make it more engaging for students and whanau.