Angel's Learning Adventures

  Having empowerment gives one the confidence to tackle any challenge that lies ahead.  The DFI course empowers teachers to become fluent and more confident in the digital world so that they can in turn engage and empower their students.  Empowering our students is about giving them a voice, ownership and choice.  Over the last 8 weeks, the DFI course has unlocked several digital tools and new ways of thinking so that we as teachers can do just that for our students.  Another way to positively impact our students is to active engage the parents and whanau in their child's learning journey through leaving positive, helpful and thoughtful comments on their blogs.  We can empower our students by teaching the appropriate skills to blog by upskilling them in ways to navigate the internet, making choices, developing and having their own voice, and sharing their ideas and opinions online.  Ultimately, we hope that our students will become empowered through their learning so that they will

Today's session was all about the effective use of devices to enable the students to learn, create and share.  Being cybersmart is one way that we can empower our learners and support their digital learning.  Manaiakalani have developed the Kawa of Care as a digital citizenship programme to empower our students and community.  The Kawa of Care allows us to navigate and harness the power of the device, while teaching our students and community the responsibility and skills that are required to connect and work in cyberspace. One thing that stood out for me was how the principles of the treaty of Waitangi have been woven into the Kawa of Care.  Partnership, participation and protection transcends time and challenges us as educators to ensure that our students have rangatiratanga (sovereignty), equity and access over their device.  To be honest, I have never thought about these themes in light of the treaty before, but it has struck a chord with me.  When the students own their own de

Manaiakalani's Kaupapa has four tightly interconnected ideas - learning has to be connected, visible, empowering and ubiquitous.  Today we unpacked what it means to be connected.  The ability to connect is really powerful.  When teachers and students harness the power of connection, the richness to be able to grow from each other is exponential!  There are already several networks established to facilitate the learning connections between schools and clusters.  Our school is part of the Te Ara Tuhura cluster in Christchurch.   We were able to spend most of our day with our bubble team mates creating, working on and improving our sites.  After reviewing our current site with our bubble, I realised that the site was created for the wrong audience.  In my role as DRS, I am predominantly supporting my staff with their understanding, implementation and delivery of the RE curriculum.  When I created the site the day before we moved to level 4 in the first wave of the lock down, I aimed t

The affordance of technology gifts us a whole different platform to learn, create and share our content.  As such, we are now able to collaborate in real time, in different spaces and time zones and the best part, the paperwork never gets lost!!!  While online collaboration has become so ingrained in our everyday teaching (and personal) lives, I still marvel at the process.  I'd like to spend this blog post reflecting on some of events that have happened in the past couple of weeks. On Monday, I had to give a presentation to a group of new parents and families to our school.  It was the first time that we were able to organise one this year.  So as you can imagine, we had quite a big crowd (while still maintaining the social distancing, of course).  I was able to confidently use slides to enhance my presentation, while integrating Google My Maps, images and videos.  The tips that I had picked up during the DFI meant that I was able to prepare the slides more efficiently and made it

Today's theme was all about managing data and using the tools in the google suite to increase our productivity.  Dorothy began the day by exploring the final component of Manaikalani's pedagogy - "SHARE".  Sharing is instinctive to human nature.  It is not something new.  We are simply tapping into the sharing that makes us human and what connects us.  Digital tools give us an additional, and much wider spreading, method to share the learning that is done in a classroom.  Having an authentic audience who comment positively, thoughtfully and asks helpful questions significantly enhances the learner's experience.  While the three tenets of "Learn, Create, Share" naturally follows a liner progression, it is important to remember that this is a process that is supposed to spiral and inspire us to begin the next learning project.  Sharing can sometimes be the launching pad for the next learning step. There are three Google Suite tools to help with crunching d

“Creative skills help students become better   problem solvers, communicators and collaborators.” - Everyone Can Create, Apple 2008 Today's theme is all about creating and exploring various media tools that we can use to bring to life new ideas and creation to demonstrate our learning. Creating is all about the hook - the hook that is intended to engage the students intellectually and behaviourally. This is what makes the lesson come alive! I personally liked having the opportunity to play and create during our sessions. It was all about lifting the game with our technical skills. We learnt to create an account on youtube and select our own playlist. This is a game changer for me as I am often having to share song files with my staff. Now, I intend to create a play list for our different RE themes and add my staff as collaborators so that we can collate a play list that will be appropriate for our students. The notion of sharing my content on youtube sounds very daunting... b