Digital Fluency Intensive

DFI Collaborate - Sites | Week 5

Multi-Modal Learning

Kerry joined us this morning and connected us with multi-modal pedagogy. I really liked the priority goals that she identified: engagement, personalised learning, acceleration, and empowerment. 

We watched a short video clip about liberty's shop windows Kerry connected the home page of our class sites with the windows of a store. She mentioned that the home page is a reflection of us as teachers, and represents our class and our school. Hooking children in with the home page of our class site is really important, and Kerry suggests this will engage our students further in their learning.

Kerry shared with us a few quotes that I really connected with. We strive for learners who are behaviorally engaged and actively engaged with their learning, and "...initially the technology itself does a mighty fine job of engaging our learners, but the novelty wears off..." We want effective teaching practice for a digital learning environment based on knowing our learners...

Kerry then talked about our class sites, and our teaching pedagogy, and highlighted the difference between design for behavioral engagement and design for cognitive engagement. This really resonated with me and I was very inspired by Kerry to make some changes on my class site, to empower my learners to become independent and self-scaffolding learners.

Manaiakalani Pedagogy - Visible

Dorothy talked to us about visible learning, and put it very simply: either it's visible or it isn't. As teachers, we need to consider if our learning is visible to our students, whanau, leaders and colleagues. We don't want invisible learning journey's for our students, and we also don't want children to be successful based on their ability to read their teachers' mind. As educators, we need to ensure our learning is available and visible for our learners and their whanau.

Connections and visibility:

• Communicating with a real audience and purpose in mind
• To inform others about learning
• To enlist others to my point of view
• To get others to think something they never think
• To make a difference

Google Sites

Most of today's session was spent learning and creating sites. We separated into groups to collaborate on site planning, prior to making our own sites. My group worked to find multi-modal resources around animal migration. We discussed the importance of spending time planning our site prior to putting it together, to ensure we have the information we want our learners to receive. We talked about main texts, scaffolding texts and challenging texts, and additional texts. 

We used jamboard to collaborate and plan our ideas, which I have never used before. I really liked this tool as I could see how easy and effective it would be for my learners. 

I also really enjoyed working collaboratively with others and I've been flooded with ideas of how this could be implemented not only in my own classroom, but across the school. I really like the idea of planning collaboratively with colleagues to deliver topic-based units to our learners, who have the opportunity to self-scaffold and self-extend based on their own abilities. 

Here is my new site I started to create about animal migration. I actually only used 3 of the resources my group and I collected due to time, however I can see how crucial the planning stage is before creating the finished product.