DFI - Day 2

As a teacher, one tends to get inundated with lots of emails, information and data flying at us from all directions.   Just like the comic above, I do tend to just drag and drop things into the infinite vastness of my google suite and just leave it there "to file or action when I have more free time".  Well no more to this, I say!!!  Today's learning, on Day 2 of the DFI, was all around improving our workflow and what it means to be a learner.

To improve our workflow, we need to understand how the various digital tools of the Google Suite work.  We explored Google Meet, Google Calendar and Gmail.  This triangulation of the tools help to make our teaching, learning and planning for ubiquitous as we are able to work anywhere, anytime.  These three digital tools have been widely used since the Covid lockdown and have changed the way we work and plan.  An example of this change was the way my school organised the parent-teacher interviews after we came back from lock down.  Instead of the usual face-to-face meet, parents had the option of meeting online (via Google Meet).  Meetings were set up with email invitations and teachers could organise the meets with their personal calendars. This meant that we were able to quickly gather post lock-down data to better meet the needs of students emotionally and academically.

In te ao Maori, the concept of ako means both to teach and learn.   like that how there is reciprocity between teaching and learning, and that as teachers, we need to be modelling this concept of being a life-long learner to our students.  This is the first tenet of Manaiakalani's pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share.

To help out students learn, teachers need to recognise, amplify and turbocharge effective practice.  Using the NZ Curriculum as our guide/roadmap, we need to first begin by recognising what "learning" looks like in our own school setting.  There isn't a one size fits all model.  The research done by Wolfe Fisher have also identified four ways to recognise effective practice through High Leverage Practices (HLPs).  This is currently a hot topic of discussion at the moment at our staff meetings.  By having access to the digital world, we now have access to wealth of knowledge that is just a click away.  As teachers, we need to find ways to spark creativity and excitement in our learners by turbocharging our practices.

One of the tasks that we completed today required us to look at a student's blog post and evaluate what they were supposed to learn, what their response was and how the wider community connected with the learning.  This blog was an example of how a previously ordinary and boring Geometry lesson that would have been completed with worksheets was turbocharged to a new level.  The effective use of digital tools meant that the student could share their learning, in an authentic context, with the wider community.  This was a good example of how the online platform provided students with a myriad of opportunities to continue learning, especially during the lock down.  Below is a recorded discussion that my partner and I had about this blog post and its impact to student's learning.

Another thing that stuck with me today was the use of Google Keep and the management of my tabs.  While I had been using Google Keep previously only as a daily to-do list, I learnt the vast use of its application today.  It is always good to learn new ways to use digital tools, both for my personal and professional lives.  I intend to integrate Google Keep and Toby Mini as a way to share planning ideas with my staff on our upcoming unit as it provides us with the opportunity to collaborate and jot down ideas in a collective space.