Tuesday 26 June 2018

Digital Fluency Intensive (DFI) : Day 4



Today we had a very interesting and busy day. We started with Dorothy talking to us about share. She took us way back to April 2005 when YouTube (where you are able to broadcast yourself), Twitter (empowered the rich famous celebrities), Bebo, and Facebook, (where friends share their lives) was born and brought about a new form of sharing. This brought about a new form of sharing and is what our children use to make themselves known.
At our school children use Blogger to share their learning. A blog is set it up where every child's blog is owned by Board of Trustees.Teachers can see what children share because all their work is visible through the teacher dashboard.
The Blogger app is used by both students and teachers. Blogger is a tool for supporting the Cyber Smart curriculum. It has specific guidelines that teaches children how to behave appropriately when sharing with to an  audience.Children learn how to be positive, thoughtful and helpful commentators.


I have a class blog and the children in my class have their own individual blogs. They love looking at photo's of themselves, their friends and their learning. It is powerful learning tool that shows a snapshot of their learning journey. Children like looking back at their older posts, for example, when they started school or the time they did something special. It shows progress of learning over a period of time and for many children it is something that they can be proud of. Family/whanau and friends can visit their work (anytime, anywhere and anyplace).



Dorothy talked about the Summer Learning Journey. Researchers at Wool Fisher looked at data and found that children who blogged two times a week (maintained their learning) and children that blogged three times a week (results were high). As teachers we need to encourage and set tasks to keep the children engaged in their learning so that we can maintain/accelerate learning and raise achievement.

The second half of the day day focussed on Multi Modal learning. We had an opportunity to visit some sites. The key idea is hooking the learners both behaviourially and cognitively, making children excited about their learning and engaged with the curriculum in many ways: watching a video clip, using hyper studio to draw, create animations, dance and drama.Teachers can be creative as well by hooking the learners for example: Immersion assembly.

Our task for the day was to create a site and the theme we used was "Garden with Science." The teachers worked in age level groups to collaborate, share ideas and resources. Susan and I worked collaboratively on this site. I found this task really easy as I have been using sites for more than 3 years. As a school we started with Classic Sites and now with the New Sites. I prefer the New Site because it is much easier and also looks nice on an iPad. I found that managing my folders and labelling my work helped me access what I needed easily. Our school has a shared folder of projects that teacher have created. We can download the activities or add to it (repurpose) and re-share it again. We keep adding to the shared folder and now have a wide range of activities for all year levels. This  makes workload easier and allows for children to have a wide range of learning opportunities.

The children in my class access their learning through their class site. I use visual images and symbols to hook and engage my learners. They can independently go to the class site and download their tasks for the day.