Today we explored more about visibility in the Manaiakalani pedagogy, taking the learning out of just the head of the teacher and allowing learners to be able to see what they're learning and where they're going. One of the quotes that really struck me was:
Success means knowing what the teacher is thinking.
It's something I've heard many times before and again, this really was something that affirmed for me what we do with our facilitation and our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Future learning needs to be about moving away from the knowledge all being in the teacher's head and learners feeling like their ideas are only valid if they're the same as the teacher's.
We looked at a video of Will I am, visiting Point England School in Auckland and how he was there supporting STEAM learning within their school.
Deep Dive: Multimodal Learning
In the beginning weeks and months, the learner's own device seems to be enough to hook learners into learning. It engages them simply by having their own device. In time, when this wears off, the potential is that we ruin the engagement of having the device simply by using it for learning if the learning is not engaging itself.
Multimodal opportunities for learning is important and Woolf Fisher suggests that multimodal literacies are important.
Behavioural engagement and Cognitive engagement are both important. If we don't have the Behavioural engagement learners won't even engage with the learning at all, but for many the cognitive engagement comes AFTER the behavioural engagement has occurred. The cognitive engagement comes alongside MultiModal texts.
I was really excited to see how the multimodal text has been transformed from just links, to a richly visual text including the multimodal texts, which was far more engaging. I've seen these type of multimodal texts in text docs before, and was worried about how boring it was. So this is awesome!
I'm excited to start creating some of these of my own.
I know many of our teachers will have appreciated the affirmation that core texts are still vital. Guided browsing on Hapara is so useful
Chalk and Talk and Google Sites
Here we revisited how to build our sites and add buttons etc. As I use this tool daily with the teachers and learners I work with, nothing here was new. As usual, I'm caught between keeping sites quite simple and 'clean' so learners can navigate them easily but also keeping them attractive and engaging. I wonder how the best way would be to do this with our younger learners, who really seem to get confused otherwise. I'm always looking for more ways to do this.
Levelling Up:
Today we used a Google Slide deck as our basis for a MultiModal Google Site. Today our slides were to do with Gardening in Schools. Our team worked on a site for Year 9 and 10 learners and we looked at three unit standards that could apply to the learning these students could do around horticulture relevant to our place. It was challenging being part of a collaborative process with a short amount of time, because the planning of a site is fundamental to how useful it will be for our learners and that planning process took up a lot of our time. It would be great to have longer to revisit these and get them finished off. Some examples of what our site looks like can be found below.
There's definitely a lot of extra work to be done and it makes me reflect on how we might need to do that when I'm looking at how to collaborate with our local community resources in the project I want to do with Google Innovator. The purpose of these sites would be to lead learners and teachers through the exploration of our local resources and related resources that could support undertanding around this, but it's challenging to decide what content is most useful to everyone and relevant to as many learner age levels as possible. Possibly there will need to be a site for each topic and pages for each of the different age levels?
Today's reflection questions:
What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?
Exploring how multimodal texts have been developed - moving from the Google Style multimodal texts that are found in the Google Certified Educator Level 2 content was really exciting. That sort of thing really interests me - how we can think carefully and design for our learners. The analogy to the shop window was really useful.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?
Some simple tips I learned today were to preview my Blog to ensure I've copied text over properly. I felt a bit touchy about this today, so it was interesting being in the learner seat and noticing how I react to the way feedback was delivered and how I felt about that process. Sometimes when we're tired we react differently and in my new role, I'm always conscious of the people I work with throughout the process as well. The learner seat is an interesting place to be when you're feeling challenged. Particularly when you're playing two roles in a space... of the coach and the learner at the same time and doing them both justice.
What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
Multimodal texts are great! I love the idea of content being presented in many different ways and using visuals and graphics that help keep kids engaged. It's not easy to keep learners interested in tasks these days with all the other stimuli they're used to. Trying to meet this need and still keep the learning integral to the process is a great challenge.
What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Reflecting on blogging needs and ideas and technique and making sure I check up on the formatting and preview my site will help with a lot of the blog work I do in other areas of my life too.
