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.