Writing with Gemini AI

One of the things we have been thinking a lot about is how we include our Maniakalani Learn, Create, Share pedagogy with our BSLA program. 

This week, my Literacy class was reading the story "Staying Afloat."  We have been working to write complete sentences using lots of good detail and description. After we discussed the elements of the story, the class had 10 minutes to write their own retell. Then, they were shown how to put their retell into Gemini AI to get a picture based on their writing. They learnt how to modify their writing to include the best detail to get an image that properly illlustrated the main idea of the story. 

 Here is an example that was written by a student in class: 

  One day kele and Vika, also granddad, were going on a boat. Granddad told them to wear a life jacket but kele didn’t want to wear one so he told how a boy who was in tonga,  but strong  fell into  the sea. Kele gasped so he had to wear one at last. When they were fishing kele fell into the water too but grandad could get him in time. At last Kele was out  grinning because he got a snapper and said who is the best fisher now!! Here are our first two tries at an image. 

The first image didn't show grandad or the sister Vika and it didn't show Tongan children so we made a few changes (as seen in the above paragraph).

   

 But, we were still not happy because there were no life jackets in the second photo and they were in a motorboat. 

So we got back to work and this is how we modified it to get the best photo from Gemini: 

 One day a Tongan family went fishing in New Zealand. Kele, his sister Vika, and granddad, were going onto Grandad's vaka. After putting on his green life jacket, Granddad told them to put their life jackets on. Vika put on her pink life jacket but Kele didn’t want to wear one. Grandad told how as boy growing up in Tonga, he fell into the sea. Kele gasped so he had to wear one at last. When they were fishing kele fell into the water too but grandad could get him in time. At last Kele was grinning because he got a snapper with his blue life jacket on!!

Bitmoji Virtual Bookshelf

 Today, as part of the Maniakalani Create Clusterwide Staff Meeting, I attended a session run by two teachers from Glenbrae School about Virtual Bookshelves. We had great fun learning how to create our own interactive virtual bookshelves and we even learned out to embed our own bitmoji. Check out what we were able to do in less than 30 minutes!

Expand the slide deck to see in a larger view to get the full effect. :-)

PES PD: Manaiakalani LEARN

LEARN

Term 1: Dorothy Burt

This week was the Pt England Manaiakalani staff meeting.  During Term 1, the schools throughout Manaiakalani focus on the Learn part of our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.   Below is are my notes and personal reflection from that session.

Recognise Effective Practice

Amplify Effective Practice

Turbocharge Effective Practice

In the digital world of our learners.

Looking at effective practice through the RAT lens in the digital world.

Effective practice is the key, but effective planning and individualised student goals are the gold and the digital learning simply amplifies our practice.

The ability to see what others are doing allow us the affordance to amplify our own teaching practice. We do this is many different ways, Blogs, PENN, Learning Environments.

Turbocharging comes into play when we use digital affordances to provide ways for rewindable learning, ubiquitous learning to take learning into the next level.

As a staff, we split into groups of 4 and looked at various progressions for the Level 2 reading curriculum and presented mini-lessons that focused on a particular progression. The rest of the staff had to guess which progression our deliberate acts of teaching (DATs) was being used with that particular group. This provided an excellent way for our staff to amplify our effective practice through modeling.

Now that we have reaffirmed our understanding of how to link the progressions to our micro-teaching through our DATs, we can continue to reaffirm the understanding of that progression through our turbocharged learning tasks that will ultimately provide an avenue for an increased level of student understanding.