DFI - Day 5 - Collaborate

Visible - Making teaching and learning Visible.

Today's korero from Dorothy was all about Visible teaching and learning.  emphasizing the 4 key aspects of it as being ...

• Visibility to the learning, 
• visibility to the whanau, 
• visibility to the teacher,
• visibility to our colleges.

Visible teaching is ultimately about "Can you see it or can you not? It's actually that simple.

Dorothy reminded us that succuss use to be for those students that could read the teacher's mind, and know what the teacher actually wanted, how they wanted it to be presented, and so on.  Visible learning in essence is about making this thinking accessible to all so that ALL students know what we want and how to achieve an end goal.  The introduction of WALTS and Learning intentions being made clear to students was a step forward, but even so, the intentional use of technology to create visible learning is a GAME CHANGER.

For high shift teaching that engages students to become kaitiaki of their own learning, this visible learning needs to also allow for discussions to be had between teachers and learners about what the end goal is and what it should look like.

Dorothy also used the analogy of walking through a maze - if you struggle with your directionality and maps/maize you really struggle with this journey.  The power of visible teaching is like leaving breadcrumbs behind for our students to follow.  In saying this it means that the entire learning journey needs to be visible.  This means not just the LO's and AO"s but all the progress markers and assessment process.

Therefore as teachers, we need to have our teaching pedagogy, ideals and practice DEFAULT set to VISIBLE.  For some teachers it is about changing their teaching mindset, for others, it is a very exciting and empowering step forward.  However, the question still needs to be asked constantly ... What genuinely needs to be private (hidden or limited to only a few), and why. 

There is 2 levels of visibility.  e.g. Visibile to learners (e.g. sites ...) and Visible to teachers (e.g. via blogs and Hapara).  Hapara was designed specifically for us - to create visibility and make the process more accessible for teachers.   (Parents app coming - didn't know parents could access it through Hapara, - and a student app too???)

The digital environment can erect barriers between a child and their learning, a child and their parents and not accomplish what we set out what we wanted them to do. - PASSWORDs are a key part of this. - What genuinely needs to be private. - if it needs a password is it necessary. - Emphasis needs to be on being brave and taking off the blindfold and make learning visible through visible teaching.

In short ...

Visible teaching is ... Accessible, Available and Advance  (No surprises)

Hapara Hot tips - Sharing

The sharing tab shows the documents that students haven't filed into the right folders - this should be empty if they have been filed correctly.

Don't let children make your own folders - Can create an extra folder in Hapara that children can file things in but not creating them themselves - do it through the Hapara management.

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Deep dive

Priority goals 

• Engagement
• Personalized learning, 
• Acceleration
• Visibility
• Empowerment

As educators, we need to rely on more than our personality to hook students in.  Students have had access to digital technology right from the time they are born, therefore we are competing with things like Youtube, TicTok which capture our students' attention and motivation.  Therefore we need to ensure that when we are creating our class and learning sites we need to capture this attention back.

Increased visibility in the teaching and learning process enables accelerated shifts in student learning.  By creating Multimodel sites we can hook in the behavior engagement and design for increasing cognitive engagement that can be achieved by providing access to multiple texts.  T shaped literacy is one approach to increasing cognitive engagement while still providing self scaffolding and enable students to become independent learners.

As always effective teaching practice with technology is vital.  One way to look at this is that eventually, the novelty of a device or app will wear off, and when this happens we need good pedagogy to back up and continue to enable continued learning.

New sites enable us to quickly and efficiently create engaging sites that are only limited by its content.

UDL - Universal design for learning - design to hook students into learning a range of ways (behavioral)

Google Site creation to support T-Shaped Literacy

Here is a link to a site I created during the day.  It is designed to be used with Year 2+ readers.  It is based on a topic that we have recently covered in class.  My main issue with this creation was structuring the site to work and be easily accessible for this younger group.  I also needed this site to be compatible with iPad use.  Although many of the sites that were shared for us to look at, were aimed at a higher age bracket, one site gave me the idea behind how to structure this.  Although we were asked to only use the information on a spreadsheet we were given I have included other resources that we have recently used in class and other links that would support the create section of this site.

I also shared this with Year 3/4 teachers at school for further feedback/feedforward and they too liked the structure and how the butterfly resources were collated were very useful.  They sounded keen to trial it when they had finished with their current T-shaped literacy work.  Am actually pretty happy with what it turned out like.  

My next step is to create another T-shaped literacy site, that SJ (Teaching Buddy) and I can use.  It would also link well to our Play Make Create units that we have been running on a range of topics.

Monarch Website