Today the keyword was "Visible", and we had the lovely Danni Stone from Point England School in today to talk to us about the power of visible learning. I really enjoyed listening to Danni as she shared her story with us, a lot of what she had shared reminded me of my first year in class. A lot of what I have picked up from google sites I owe to my colleagues and some of the other wonderful schools in the Kaikohekohe network - shout out to Ohaeawai Primary School & Paihia School.
Danni touched on the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blogging programme that some Manaiakalani schools are currently involved in - this is a platform where 3 schools connect with one another through their classroom blogs - In 2016 & 2017 my class participated in this programme and my tamariki absolutely loved it. I am definitely signing up for TMTA Term 3 now that my students have their blogs ready to go (Thank you, Tania Coutts & Mrs Henare).
Danni also shared a tip on how to get increase traffic on your blog. She mentioned another teacher who posted prompts on her blog page and encouraged children to share their ideas in the comments. This is something that I am definitely going to explore.
We explored multimodal sites and had a go at making one ourselves in groups. I was grouped with Shelly and Deborah and together we started planning and looking into a multimodal site based on "The science of gardening." I managed to finish the homepage, but there are 3 other pages that have been created, maybe we bit off more than we could chew? - so I guess the best tip I could give someone who is creating their site (especially with a time frame of fewer than 2 hours) is KISS (keep it simple, sweetheart).
Some things that I will definitely try in the next week:
- Post a Prompt onto our class blog, to encourage more writing in my classroom, and maybe get more traffic.
- Post a reflection giving an update on student agency forms and voice typing.
One last thing - something else I have been doing is visiting other blogs from our Taitokerau DFI members - and tonight I visited Vanessa's blog, I was so happy to read that she completed her google educator level 1 exam. You can read about it here
Hi Sally,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed working with you and it is great to read your reflection about the session. What you created with the Gardening site will really help you with the session next week with Clarelle - it was great that you pushed yourselves in terms of your learning, but I agree when first creating a site; KISS!
Danni
Thank you for your comment Danni, really appreciate you all coming up and sharing with us your experience, it makes me excited for our tamariki and their future. Oh and thanks again for the examples of the different multimodal sites, very inspiring indeed.
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