Manaiakalani Staff Meeting -SHARE

Today's P.D. covered aspects that I have written about previously during my DFI journey.

How has sharing changed over the years?
I remember being on my year long O.E. and my parents were not concerned that they hadn't heard from me in 4 months. Although I had sent numerous postcards, they hadn't arrived. Nowadays, sharing is instant whether it's via text, Facebook, facetime or email. It can also reach a lot more people instantly.

We share:

Blogging is a great way for our students to connect to an audience as it's free for them. Tuhi mai, Tuhi atu allows the students to blog to an authentic audience. They receive comments and feedback about their work from a buddy class.

Summer Learning Journey - negating the summer drop-off.
Not only does blogging 2+ times a week improve students writing, it also has a positive effect on their social and emotional well being as they have positive contact with the educators over the summer holidays. It also builds their confidence and establishes a sense of belonging online. Imagine what the impact would be if the students are blogging 2+ times a week in a classroom with a teacher.

The blog posts in the Tairāwhiti Cluster are connected to a Twitter feed. The learners themselves are not on Twitter; their link is there. Some people are embedding the Twitter feed onto their class site. 

DFI Get Together

Three of us from DFI intake #1, 2019, decided to get together and share ideas about our class site. Cheryl Torrie (Manaiakalani facilitator), kindly came along too, to help us with the wrinkles we needed ironing out. It was such a worthwhile couple of hours spent tweaking, learning, creating and sharing. I was able to reorganise a few pages, redesign my Reading slides for next week and change my theme. Cheryl also showed me how to use Hapara Dashboard to check student blogs.
Although my class site is still in its baby stages, I feel a lot happier about the direction I'm heading. I also loved the opportunity to listen to what other schools are doing. Thanks to Sherryl Gomm, Robyn Shaw and Cheryl Torrie for your ideas, creativity, knowledge and professionalism.

From...

to...

Pimp My Site

WHY: 
Learning how to create a site to lead learning.
Time to improve my site.
Sharing your good practice.

After exploring sites, I came up with a PMI:

At the moment, the things I am addressing on my own site are:

• students turning in work so I can access it easily
• planning - at the moment I am planning on paper (I was doing it on a google slide but found it difficult to show differentiation. The template I created was not good enough. I also found it difficult to put anecdotal notes on whilst teaching - I had post-it notes everywhere!)), planning for the students to see on my class site (they don't need to see everything) and writing it up in modelling books. It's too much and too time consuming.
• showing Maths on my site - I run workshops as well as have 'groups' for tasks/games. I can't work out how to put it all on my site and not have multiple clicks for the students to be where they need to be (2 clicks is my self-imposed limit).

Scrolling through other people's sites has answered some of these questions. I need more help with planning on a google sheet, hiding tabs for students (but not me) on that planning so it can go directly onto my site, creating a turn in sheet for the year. I know we covered that last one in DFI but I can't remember how to do it and the rewindable slides no longer make sense. Maybe they will when I'm feeling more 'refreshed'!

As always, Cheryl Torrie, Herman Fourie & Amie Williams were very patient and full of great advice. They all said to just concentrate on one thing and do that. The trouble is I don't want to crawl, I want to fly (now!).

Note to self: a tip from Herman - check out Tall Tweets (select presentation...)