I am really enjoying delving deeper into the various components of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, Learn Create Share. Hearing directly from Dorothy is filling in any gaps in my understanding and also reinforcing why I was so keen to have Rāhwiti School involved when the opportunity arose.
My big take away from this week was about sharing with an authentic audience and what that looks like for learners.
When I was at school, and in my early years of teaching, sharing was of the Morning Talk/ Show and Tell variety. This evolved to sharing with another person in the class, sharing with the teacher, the principal, and sometimes even sharing with parents and others in the community via the school newsletter. Some children may have had the opportunity to stand in front of the whole school assembly and share their work.
However, what is missing from these scenarios is the authentic audience component. A school assembly is not an authentic audience because they have to listen to you – they have no choice.
Our involvement with Manaiakalani means that we make use of the Blogger platform to host individual student blogs for the public sharing of work. This means there is an opportunity for our students work to be read globally. Rather than completing work for the sole benefit of the teacher, our learners can share with others who share the same interests, or others who are invested in their learning i.e. friends and family.
Blogging is about sharing to learn. I thought the comparison between using Blogger and learning to drive was a great way of looking at things. Driving instructors use functional cars – they certainly don’t teach young people to drive in a top of the range Ferrari. Manaiakalani schools use Blogger as a vehicle to teach digital citizenship, it’s a bit like learning to drive online.
I am brand new to blogging – but I realised this week that if anyone actually reads my blog then they are choosing to listen to me, choosing to read, and maybe choosing to leave a comment. This has really made me think about how many student blog posts I read in a week (they come up in my Twitter feed) that I don't actually leave comments on. I am going to set myself a goal of contributing more when others are sharing to learn and setting time aside each week to comment on the student blogs from my school.
- Google My Maps: This was not new to me but I really enjoyed having another play with it today and using it to plan out our upcoming (COVID-Alert levels allowing) Northland holiday in the next term break.
- Google Forms are something that I use a lot - but there is always more learning to be done e.g. uploading an image as part of the form was an option that I did not know about. Click here to fill in my form and help me out with some viewing ideas in case we end up back in Covid-Alert Level 4!
- Google Sheets: Lots of new learning here for me. I spend a lot of time looking at data that comes to me on spreadsheets created by other members of staff. I can do most of the basics but I really want to spend some time exploring the Conditional Formatting options as I can see lots of potential for using these to identify priority learners and those who have made accelerated progress.
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