Angel's Learning Adventures

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