DFI - Day 3 - Media

DIF Day 3

The CREATE part of Learn, Create, Share Pedagogy

Today was a beautiful reminder for us all about the reason why most of us got into teaching.  Yes, we wanted to make a difference, Yes, we wanted to see our wonderful Tamariki learn and have their light bulb moments, but most of all because we wanted to make a positive difference in their lives.

It made me think of my own learning process...

I remember going to school when I was little and I HATED it.  I hated writing, I hated reading and quite frankly I wasn't good at it.  One year in primary school I remember that writing pretty much consisted of needing to write a 2-page diary entry every day, and as a slow writer, I constantly had to stay in at lunchtime to complete.  To top it off my life never really seemed that exciting.  The learning really didn't engage anyone and I know for me I definitely didn't progress very quickly.  

Creativity was not encouraged and sharing was only if you finished on time and was only ever to your class (whom I didn't want to share with anyway).  WOW look how far I have come now!

As Dorothy talked she spoke of engagement being the key and that it is ALL about the hook, which in light of my own learning experiences was what was truly lacking during this part of my educational journey.  

Creating in a classroom provides both purpose and engagement and therefore becomes perhaps the most powerful hook that we as educators can utilise.  Create is right at the center of the pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share - It is there for a very good reason.

Dorothy shared a quote from Longlife kindergarten "a world full of playful creative people, who are constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities"  This is truly the case and gives purpose to the need to have 'Create' as a central part of our classroom practice from New Entrants right through to the end of schooling (and beyond).  

The digital age and where we are now with devices can only enhance this creative aspect.  It provides opportunities to learn and access information in ways we never were able to before and also gives us opportunities to create in ways we never had opportunities to do before.  The more we create the more we interact with information and the more we refine our knowledge and our final products or creative outcomes.  

Having said that creating goes above and beyond the digital device.  Often for us and our students, the digital device provides us with opportunities to capture our creativity in other areas.  This creativity then inspires further creativity and learning.  Creativity, therefore, can not and should not be limited to written tasks but to tasks that require students to create with their entire being e.g. creating a wide range of solutions, products, and outcomes that can then be reflected on and refined further.

Another quote I took away from today was by John Dewey who said "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn, and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results".  Creativity empowers learners and Digital technologies to empower creativity, but thinking is key to making this work.  To ensure thinking takes place most of us need to do something both whatever learning content or context we are covering.  This comes back to our learning styles in many ways but with thinking placed right in the middle.

Hapara hot tips...

You can search Hapara, if you hover you will see a preview of documents ... and you can also change the order of students e.g. Drag and drop priority learners to the top so they are the first ones we see.

Other learning areas

UTUBE - 

You can also share a link to playlists which means that students have access to a range of videos that you have preselected and it will run through them easily.  I think this will be something to embed in planning through the use of QR codes to make it easily accessible.  

Plan to do this for extending alphabet knowledge to some of my VERY new learners - I already have a large number of playlists created as this makes things easier but didn't know you could share a playlist in this way e.g. embedding it in sites/blog our through the use of QR codes.

Google draw

When changing the size of the drawing ... Use the pixels instead of cm so it helps with uploading quality.

We also explored format options.

Google draw I have used lots before to create learning tasks, instructions, posters.  Today's challenge was to create my own Avatar.  This is what it ended up looking like.

Google Slides

We also looked at animation using google slides. Here is the beginning of my animation- again totally based around the level and the content in which I teach this was added while it was still a work in progress (but a good start) as we were also looking at the ways to speed it up (e.g. by changing the HTML code).  Kerry shared a cool but VERY simple way to review changes we make in our code (as I have always just done it directly in the code lines).  She opened a new document, inserted the original code line.  She then pasted it again and changed the bit she believed needed changing - She then checked.  This allowed her to retain the base code if she still needed it.  Not sure if I will do this much but was an easy HTML coding idea that might be useful in the future. 

Greenscreening

On Monday evening Kerry emailed to ask if I could bring along my green screening equipment and share some examples of green screening from our class.  I shared the following document of examples.