DFI Day 3 - Media, Creating and Creativity"

-
“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... but maybe I could attempt to give this a go as I do enjoy making and editing videos.

Google draw was previously a tool that I had underused as I was more comfortable using keynote or pages to create my images, before having to save them as a jpeg/png/pdf, then uploading it to my google slides/site. Below is a simple blog profile image that I created today using Google Draw.


The session in the afternoon gave us the chance to create a slide deck that was filled with lots of tools to make the learning experience more engaging for the students.  Slides / Keynote have always been my go-to method of planning as it allows me to embed videos, songs, text, audio - the whole Sisomo experience.  I've created a slide deck for my next couple of RE lessons that I will be team teaching in the Year 7/8 class.  Being inspired by today's theme, I am flipping the content (what is normally a very dry topic) on its head to one where, hopefully, the students will be able to connect with and learn lots.  I have intentionally given my students the flexibility to choose the digital tool for their creation.  My next learning step is to embed more audio instructions on each slide so as to cater for all the learning needs of my students.


The biggest barrier to creativity is having the time and mental space to be creative.  I think that one reason why so many people were being more creative during lock down was because we had the time to breathe and let our minds wander.  So as a teacher, one of my responsibilities to ensure that I am intentionally carving out space in our time table to allow my students to have the time to get creative.

"Creativity is not about doing something better than others, 
it is about thinking, exploring, discovering and imagining." 
- Kohl, 2008

Comments

  1. Deborah Wallace13 August 2020 at 14:01

    Hi Angel. I completely agree with you where you said the "biggest barrier to creativity is having the time and mental space to be creative". We need time to play, explore and therefore understand a new concept. This is the same for our students. I really like how you have put this into perspective with your students and are thinking of how to handle this in the future. I look forward to hearing how it goes in your class.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DFI Day 7 Reflections - Devices

-
Image
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
Read more

DFI - Day 2

-
Image
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.  I
Read more

DFI Day 6 Reflections - Enabling Access

-
Image
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
Read more