DFI Session 4

Hangout with Dorothy

Today we started our morning with  a Google Hangout with Dorothy to discuss the concept of "share."The main ideas behind this was that we have been sharing our thoughts and ideas forever but as time has gone on and in our digital world now we now we have the ability to share with a much larger, far reaching audience than we ever did before. It was refreshing to hear that there is no right way to share, that it was up to the individual and the needs. Sharing is such a normal part of school life and now we are able to reach a far wider audience and interact with these people. Dorothy made  a really good point now that sharing has changed we are sharing with people who want to listen. I liked that she emphasised the fact that all of this needs to come under of the umbrella of accelerating our children- this has a purpose. We had an interesting discussion about the children's blogs and the comments that they get. The idea was that the posts should be open to receive feedback without the teacher checking the comments are suitable with the idea being that we are allowing the children the chance to solve and react to the problem if it arises- teaching them how to deal with it. I sit on the fence with this idea as I feel that some comments could be quite damaging to certain children , as well as that some of the parents may not be so happy. I understand the idea behind it but am not 100% I am comfortable with it.

Multi Modal Learning 

Next we moved onto multi modal learning. We looked at how we could personalise learning for students and how this can help with accelerating children’s learning. It is important to sell learning to children and make it fun and exciting and it can’t be the same each week. One thought that did come into my head though was that we need to be conscious that it is not all about looking flash. It is ok to put on pretty pictures and  videos but we still need to make sure the teaching/direction is there. It is fine to have it look great but the learning is the main point.

DFI session 3

Google Hangout: We started the day with a google hangout with a west coast DFI group. This was interesting to touch base with other people who are on the same course but further along. It was good to see what they were feeling about the work and how they have used some of their skills. It was great to see how comfortable I was using Google Hangouts this time. CREATE: The next focus was centered on Create. It was a reminder of how important the create part of the curriculum is and that it is not about telling kids what to do but instead giving them a platform to create and using those teachable moments for you and students to guide and collaborate with learners. Not putting too many confines on the learning and allowing students to delve into lots of different thinking and concepts allows them to best create. After discussions it was easy to see that there are so many different ways in which you can incorporate “create” into your classroom program.

DFI Day 2

Dorothy We started the day with a google hangout with Dorothy Burt . Again it was an interesting and informative chat. I liked the idea that we are not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the recognition of that all schools are different with different needs. It is always a worry when a new idea or direction is taken up in the education sector that we will have to start from scratch and/or completely change the way we teach when some things are definitely working well and making positive changes/acceleration. The question -” What are the effective practises?” Is a question that would be really interesting to put to all staff and see our differences or similarities in responses. This would be a great way to see if we are all heading in the same direction. Dorothy brought up the thought - Can the children articulate what ‘learn’ looks like? This is something that we ask the children all the time at our school and it is very powerful to see what the children actually do understand and if they can articulate it. This is a way to show that the learning is deep learning. Great teaching + digital affordances = acceleration I think sums up what our learning journey is about for our schools at the moment. Lastly Dorothy talked about rewindable learning .- This is a very crucial and highly effective tool for for all learners. No longer are those children that take a bit longer or need repetition at a disadvantage to the others in the classroom. Also it is a way of catering for different learning styles. Google keep This was a place to add notes, save sites/docs. Another way to further organise things. Looks like a one stop shop to be able to collaborate and store important notes and resources. This is something that I will definitely explore further. It seems to be a more compact way to incorporate information held on bookmarks bar, notes, google docs etc. Gmail The next area we concentrated on was gmail. This was an interesting part of the course when I discovered the 1000s of emails sitting in my inbox !! It was great to refine my labels and learn how to add filters !! If I had only learnt this today I would have been a happy lady. Calendars Exploring calendars, bookmarks and tabs allowed another chance to give organise, discard and generally get a better command on what resources/documents I actually have. Some of the apps such as google priority Hangouts We also explored Google hangouts. This was great because although I had been a participant in them before I had never had the opportunity to actually present so this was beneficial. I think this tool could be helpful for my age children for contacting experts / other schools as part of research. We then used it as cooperative group activity. This was an interesting experience. I have been part of hangouts before but never set one up myself or had to record one. This was good to have experience for future reference but unfortunately the recording part was not successful. Alot of learning took place there! We did end up with a beautiful blank video with no sound that was very impressive…...NOT. But I now know how to record the right way and have learnt by making mistakes : )