Manaiakalani: Sharing Tools

Today we met as a collaborative group to discuss how Blogger is working in our hubs and we created digital learning objects to share our favourite teaching strategy for having learners share.
I've found Google Slides so versatile and allows us to share in lots of different places.  There are so many different types of object they can create from a slide deck and they transfer well to places to share.

Learn, Create, Share

So I have a confession.  I've always been pretty good at the learning part and the sharing part, but I really struggle with the bit in the middle.

Historically, "Creation" has always been the aspect of whatever I do that is a bit 'messy' and haphazard, out of everything.  In fact, I didn't really call it creation, but maybe lumped it all together in 'learning'.  But that has changed.  Recently, with the idea of Learn, Create, Share while part of the Manaiakalani Pilot Teacher programme, I've been looking at my goals in slightly different ways, and have found that 2018's goals can all be tied together quite well.

1.  Enhance my knowledge of the NZ Curriculum
2.  Create visible, rewindable, digitally accessed tools to support learning and our tracking and planning templates (OTJ sheets, Learning Pathways etc.)
3.  Utilise the access to facilitators to maximize my Manaiakalani journey

From all this, hatched a plan to tie all my learning together, so that I was using the Manaiakalani  "Learn, Create, Share" model, to explore my goals and present back my findings.  In order to do all this, I knew it was going to be vital to use some planning tools that could support me in actually getting into action with my inquiry, every day.  Currently, I'm in the process of creating a plan to help me create action daily around my goals.  This gives me a very clear direction for my inquiry but also enables me to check out the big picture before I get there and look into potential upcoming problems before they arise.

My goal is to create lesson content for our learners that is visible (available on our Hub Landing Page), rewindable and maximizes teacher's time by tailoring learning around the NZ Curriculum and our OTJ planning sheets.  It will also enable learners to have a greater degree of agency over their learning and the ability for them to more clearly see the progress they are making around their own goals.

Watch this space.

Reflection: Using Digital Tools to support Writers

Google Docs for Writing

Using Google Docs for modeling and planning has been quite helpful in working with our students who require additional support but are not asking for it, as well as for those learners who struggle with spelling.  The new voice to text feature really aids students in the process of transferring information from 'brain to paper'.  Or in this case, brain to Doc.

To begin with, with our reports, we used a Google doc for accountability and to support with modeling.  Students had to write an introductory sentence to their report that including what the 'thing' was, the groups that it belonged to and where it could be found.  Having the student's writing all in one doc meant that they could use others' work as support but also, it was easy to track who had completed the task, and a quick look over the work highlighted important next learning steps for me.  For example:


I could see from this work that there were still some major capitalization issues, so we spent a quick hotspot session recapping these, before moving on. Following this, we used an existing planning template but adapted it for use in Google Docs, which was helpful in the planning process. Especially when it came to feeding in new vocabulary. 




I'm interested to see how this progresses with repeated uses.