Digital Fluency Intensive #8

Manaiakalani: Cybersmart
The concept of being cybersmart brings together all four areas of our kaupapa and learn, create, share. Our students have not known life without the internet. It is up to us to make sure that our students are at home in a digital environment. Our cybersmart curriculum is full of specific language that reflects how to positively set up for digital success and not the list of the negative things you should not be doing.

Our Manaiakalani Cybersmart curriculum has 10 categories that teachers work throughout every year.  In the early days, it was decided that we were not creating a cyber safety course, but a cyberSMART curriculum. Google and ISTE have also decided to now go down the path of being awesome and proactive in the cyberworld.

Manaiakalani uses the blogger platform to share student learning for many reasons. Students have agency to write their own posts, but they are only set up as an author on the blog. The direct classroom teacher is the Administrator, along with a school administrator/overseer.  Students are taught from a young age to explore the learning of others and leave comments on the posts they read in a  positive, helpful, and thoughtful manner.

Hapara Teacher Dashboard: Making Learning Visible

Hapara was developed in Manaiakalani in Manaiakalani schools that has now grown into a global company.  Hapara allows teachers to focus on the teaching, not the technology. 

One of the most powerful things you can do, is popping a dashboard screen onto your television screen without even saying anything and simply carry on teaching. The students will immediately begin jumping back into the correct place in their learning.  

The Manaiakalani 1:1 Journey

There has been a lot of careful thought and planning behind the rollout of our devices.  The discussions have been driven by the treaty (Partnership, Protection, and Participation).  Partnership is seen that we work with the family and wider community in decision making and device ownership. Manaiakalani also has partnership with a wide range of stakeholders that are key to what we are doing on a daily basis. Participation enables an environment for every student to participate in their learning, teachers are supported to be digitally fluent when all devices are the same, and engagement through device ownership. Protection happens behind the scenes, especially with our partnership with Hapara and Linewize for filtering.

We want to be sure that every learner has the best possible device at their fingertips. It was great fun having some time to explore Explain Everything on the ipad and use Chromebooks for learning/creating purposes today.

Using Screencastify

We were asked to spend some time exploring the Manaiakalani Cybersmart curriculum and using a Chromebook create a Screencastify video explaining the lesson we chose. 

Spark MIT Reflection Session

Reflection of my learning this year and what I am going to take from it into my teaching for 2018.

This year has perhaps been the most reflective and personally honest year with my teaching since I began teaching in 2000. Looking back, I know that I was beginning to feel ‘burned out’ and ‘stagnant’ in my teaching before leaving the USA.  Although we had adopted and implemented a brand new literacy curriculum (that I helped to write) and a brand new maths curriculum (that I helped train others in our district to teach), I still felt as if my own creativity was being stifled and the demands to be on a certain page in the curriculum at a certain time were limiting my own innovation in my teaching.

When I began teaching in NZ, I had so much to learn about the different classroom models and curriculum. I often felt my previous professional confidence level challenged and I had many internal struggles over my own abilities. However, as my understanding of the curriculum grew and I was provided with opportunities to grow and sharpen my pedagogy I really began to see the opportunities that I now had as a NZ teacher to build my own passions and innovation back into my daily classroom teaching.

When I considered applying for the Spark Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher program for this year, I was very excited to be part of a group that would not only provide an opportunity for me to research and try new ideas with my students, but also provide an avenue for professional conversations and growth for myself.

It is so hard to believe that the year is coming to a close, but there are a few things that I know I will definitely be bringing with me into my 2018 classroom.

1. Students who are reading at/above grade level will be reading using multimodal texts from among the 4 Woolf Fisher Text Types (Scaffolding, Challenging, Complementary and Student Selected)
2. Students will be provided opportunities to simply talk (whether it be on a screencast, blog post or in a small group/buddy share) about what they have read.
3. Students will be encouraged to independently read novels of their choice and be provided time in class to do so in an effort to increase their reading mileage.
4. Students will be encouraged to dive deeper into topics of interest that are discovered when reading an assigned text...even if they lead to a bunny trail away from the original assignment for a time
5. I will continue my personal education that will enable me to implement various methods that promote dialogic conversations
6. I will continue to use the multi-textual database, while promoting, encouraging, and educating other teachers about the benefits of contributing to and using a database of this nature.

Personally, I feel that I have regained my own professional confidence, especially after presenting at various events throughout the year, and being a part of dialogic discussions with colleagues from across our cluster and outreach clusters. Although I know that there will always be room from growth and improvement, I am increasingly aware that what I am doing with my students and the passion I have for it are valuable and I will definitely continue to share my findings (positive and negative) on my professional blog.

Manaiakalani Digital Immersion Term 3

At today's Manaiakalani Digital Immersion we were tasked with exploring a CyberSmarts assignment that our kids could use focusing on the "create" element of our Learn, Create, Share model.  We decided to focus on the next Digital Learning Object (DLO) for the students in our team.  It was decided to use the Smart Values heading of CyberSmarts and focus on The Pt. England Way and the 3 P's (Partnership, Participation, Protection).

We have a very basic layout for our students at this point in time, but our main idea is to lead the students through the learning task of the Smart Values-Making Links assignment prior to beginning their DLO animation.