It's that time already?!

I know I am not alone in wondering where on earth time has gone. The quote below represents progress. Day by day it would seem that nothing drastic has happened - no absurd changes. But, when I look back to the first term, wow - how I have grown, how WE have all grown as educators. It seriously amazes me. 

Our very last day at digital immersion was, of course, a highly practical one. We were required to create digital CVs - simply by creating a google site. This was an opportunity to showcase our talents, so to speak, to show what we are capable of, all the creative things we have done, all accessible from the one place. Another of the MDTAs, Chelsea, shared some helpful tips in creating her site. Like me, she is all about the aesthetics so I was excited to explore these sites she shared (I could have spent all day looking at these sites). The first is coolors - a site which generates perfect colour combinations for us to use in our every day designs! The second one is 100daysoffonts which is sort of the same concept, except it shares combinations of fonts. 

As for my CV... I'm still in the process of updating it and playing around with fonts and what not, but I will definitely share on here as soon as I am finished. Above is a little sneak peek of what it currently looks like. I love my colour scheme (taken from coolors.co of course!) Really excited to hopefully share this site one day soon. Yay for progression and all the HOORAY cheers in the world to the Manaiakalani Digital Teachers Academy! 

2016 Manaiakalani Film Festival

Have you ever had anybody pronounce your name incorrectly? Ever corrected them and had them not really care about making an effort to say it right?

Making an effort to pronounce words that we're not used to is SO important. It can be the difference between someone feeling worthless or valued, the difference between a language lost or a language revitalised!

Check out the strategies some of us in Hub 5 have used to make te reo Māori more accessible to everybody!

The question of courage

Term 4. Beginning Teacher survival mode is slowly being turned down and finally, finally, I feel I have some space in my mind to explore concepts and ideas  that would otherwise be subconscious beliefs manifesting themselves into my teaching practice. Today’s digital immersion session gave us the opportunity to reflect on the importance of engagement and the levels of engagement of which we provide to and receive from our learners. A 2 minute video of Chrissie Butler (Core education) talking Universal design for learning, challenged me instantly - we often default to teaching the way we learn - but who is to say that the way we learn is the way that others learn, as a matter of fact, we all know IT’S NOT! The challenge then is to design learning where a range multi-modal access points to the learning is provided so that no matter how learners prefer to learn, they can.

True to Manaiakalani pedagogy, we were given some time to CREATE to make meaning and apply our understanding of the elements we explored today. For those of us who felt like we already had behavioural engagement were given the challenge to achieve a learning resource which incorporated the following levels of text:  

When our Hub returns from Camp, we will be exploring the concept of courage, growth mindset as well as the concept of ‘dispositions’. In practicing creating a resource which covers the above elements, I decided to collate resources which explored the concept of courage in a range of different concepts. Below is a screenshot of the site page so far - will reflect on the unit along the way. Stay tuned!

Come on baby, light my fire!

The purpose of an ignite talk is to enlighten your audience, but doing so quickly! In an ignite presentation, Presenters get 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. The result is a fast and fun presentation which lasts just 5 minutes.

Me, standing by, as a video plays as part of my ignite presentation

Today the MDTA cohort were given the challenge of creating an ignite talk about a given topic. (When I say given, I mean drawn out of a basket a few hours before presenting!). There was one extra topic that could be chosen, had someone wanted to swap what they received - that person ended up being me and my topic changed to Carol Dweck's revisiting of the 'Growth Mindset'. I felt the actual presentation was a nightmare, with my preparation not feeling complete, my slides not automatically advancing despite my tinkering with the settings, and of course, me having WAY too many words to each slide, meaning I fell behind and what I was saying did not match with what was on the screen! Ah! It makes me cringe just thinking about it. Obviously this was a great learning experience and if I ever had to curate a quality ignite talk within a few hours again, I would focus on getting the technical parts working at the beginning, a word to represent each slide, and a script that was finely timed with the moving of the slides, rather than the aesthetics of each slide!

Below is not my live ignite presentation, but rather a recording of my presentation with some audio on top. If you would like to see how to do this, see this YouTube video!

Getting kinaesthetic with Keynote

I must admit, prior to today, I had never used keynote as a presentation tool and honestly had no intention of doing so. This makes me wonder what other gem of applications and programmes are out there that I just haven't given the time of day!

Today we discovered a world of opportunity to create and customise within Keynote! Despite not having the major 'ability to collaborate' Keynote has many other features which we were introduced to and given the chance to explore and experiment today! 

One of the awesome features of keynote that I had already used was it's ability to make buttons for my Hub Google site as seen below. The ability to insert a shape and put a picture inside it makes it perfect for customising your buttons so that rather than just plain old text, sites get a multimodal sort of feel to them! 

Another fabulous feature which I quite enjoyed but ran out of time to do was the 'magic moves' feature. This is an awesome way to display pictures within a presentation - I will definitely be trying it next time I have a need! See the video below for a really helpful tutorial.

I also had a play with using Keynote as a tool to create a stop motion animation using images. I used the instant alpha tool (okay, this might be my most favoured thing about keynote!) to remove the bird featured in the following 4-second clip from quite an intricate background. 

And there you have it, I am sold on Keynote! Am looking forward to exploring this really nifty tool further next week! 

Editing etiquette

Today we were lucky enough to have the WHOLE day to edit our Manaiakalani Film festival entries. Despite my last post of feeling quite unorganised, I feel like the entirety of this year's Fridays, up until now, have scaffolded us really well for this day! The iMovie little tips and tricks come in handy when splitting and merging clips and all of the filming has been done with the camera in a landscape position rather than a portrait one! Yay.

Although we had the whole day, I spent most of the day editing about a 5 second piece in my film because I didn't have one clean shot of a really significant scene of dialogue between two characters - this meant that instead of one clean shot, I had to cut to one learner's face, then to the other and then back to the original, all the while ensuring the voice over matched the image - what a mission! Had I been as organised as my last post fantasized, I would not have had this problem! Just as well we had the time to edit today!

It was brilliant to be able to play the small portion of my film that was ready to my colleagues to receive feedback about what could be done differently, Dorothy forewarned us that when it is our project with our lovely learners within the scenes it makes it hard to edit objectively! It also really helped to have the big loud speakers when playing back our film, as it made it possible to hear any discrepancies in the audio.

A couple of reflection points:

• As I was editing today I wished that I had taken more shots at different/interesting angles
• I think this year I addressed an issue that I noticed was quite prevalent within our school community. Next time, I would like more learner voice in the say of the topic of the movie. 
• I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge how easy it is to edit on iMovie. I can only wince in pain as imagine what people 'back in the day' would have to go through to edit films!

Filming for the Manaiakalani Film festival

I had a lecturer at university who always used to say...

"You don't know what you don't know until you know it"

My peers used to get annoyed but I loved the truth that was in it! As you might have guessed, this was my experience when Filming for the Film festival. We had been prepped in every way possible by Dorothy, but I still had no idea what I was in for!

I had the storyboard all mapped out, the props, the timetable of shooting, the sounds I would use...

What I hadn't anticipated was...

• The ability levels of my actors
• The haircuts they would get (we filmed over a number of days)
• The different shirts they would wear (short polos and then a long sleeve)
• The weather! 
• The technology breaking down (microphones not working)
• Learners being away
• The giggles throughout filming!
• The wind
• Finding time to re-shoot scenes when they don't work out the first time (or second or third time)

I guess my main learning in all of this is to be as organised as possible, test your equipment BEFORE you start shooting, get as much shooting done in one day to ensure continuity across scenes and start as early as possible so you not only have ample time to edit, but also to reshoot!

Really looking forward to editing the footage and creating my first Manaiakalani Masterpiece!

Below is my favourite blooper - so many amazing facials from this aspiring actor! 

 

5th Annual Manaiakalani Hui

Today the MDTA Cohort was blessed to join in the 5th Annual Manaiakalani Hui. Some of the MDTA decided to capture the highlights of the day through Sketchnoting their experiences, some via their blogs and others, like me, through Twitter! It was a good challenge and a test of my ability to present ideas in a succinct manner, as I attempted to capture the essence of each speaker within the Twitter character limit and avoid the generic "great ideas shared by ..." Tweet. I had to think about which ideas were the most valuable to a) remember and b) share with my Twitter audience!

I used Storify to embed the Tweets I made throughout the day using the hashtag: #Manaiakalani.

With an assignment worth 50% of a paper due last night, and a day full of deep brain stimulation my mind was well and truly inspired and exhausted by the end of the day!

Who doesn't want free professional learning?

Two things that I took from an Educator's Social Media Guide

1. You have more to say than you likely give yourself credit for, and your work is worth sharing.

2. If what you know or have can help educators, you have a moral imperative to get good at sharing it - Dave Burgess

This morning James Hopkins, Ako Hiko outreach facilitator, joined us via Google hangouts to give his presentation on the value of Twitter as a Professional Learning Network. I would highly recommend reading the link at the very top of the post if you are interested in developing your Professional Learning Network. As James Hopkins said, if you have an active Twitter account, you have an endless supply of Professional Learning.

Chats on Twitter are much easier to engage with than I had originally thought, all you do is tweet a normal tweet but use a hashtag that all participants of the chat are using. Today, we engaged in a group chat, responding to questions posed by Anne Sinclair. With five questions and fifteen minutes to engage with each question, posting our answers and responding to other's answers, we were all deeply immersed in the chat! What I did find a little tricky when engaging with a chat was keeping up with the questions being posted by the facilitator and the answers that other people were posting. At times there can be a significant number of people participating. I voiced my struggle in the chat and sure enough, someone posted a solution within seconds. Tweetdeck acts a social media dashboard for Twitter, making it easy to follow things such as lists and chats. See below for a thread of our first ever #MDTAchat. Our answers were in response to Anne Sinclair's questions

Getting wise with Garageband

Today the MDTA cohort had Rob Wiseman of Point England School come and spend the day. Rob came into the education sector with 6 years of teaching music behind him so we were fortunate to have him as our Garageband guru for the day!

The practical tips I have compiled above have been done so with movie making in mind, with the fast approaching Manaiakalani Film Festival on the horizon. The most important lesson from the day was that you don't have to be musically inclined to create something that sounds good on Garageband or to have high quality voiceovers - as Rob made sure to point out, Apple has created Garageband so that it is user-friendly for the inexperienced, yet has the ability to allow experts to create complex pieces. I am eager to get some filming done so I can have some serious sandpit time with these new skills!

Intriguing infographics!

The practical component of the August PLD gave us the opportunity to have a go at creating an infographic.

Taken straight from the PLD Slides. You can find them here!

They provided us with a helpful website which features an infographic that helps you to... yep, you guessed it, decide which is infographic is best suited to your needs! At the bottom of the page you will find the first ever infographic I created using canva.com. I have used this app to create masterpieces in the smallest amount of time. Very easy to use interface and for the most part, free!

I was excited to use this new knowledge of using infographics to help present information in a way that is much more digestible with my learners. The following is what I created to use with my learners in a series of lessons about introductions to speeches. It was much more fun to create than a Google Presentation (I created it using Google Draw) and the learners seemed to be able to engage with the information with relative ease!





Aaaaaand for those with the 8 second memory span, see below for a summary of my Blog analytics...

Sketchnoting - Take 2

Behold, my second attempt at Sketchnoting. Hand on heart, I can honestly say that although more time consuming, thinking of pictures to represent the abstract consolidated those ideas in my mind more so than simply reading notes; not to mention this is a MUCH easier way of reminding myself about what the Summer Learning Journey entailed. See more on this empowering research here.

How do you see the glass?

The MDTA cohort was fortunate enough to join the August PLD for Teachers new to the Manaiakalani Cluster. During this time, we unpacked what sharing meant to us as adults, and then considered the importance of sharing for our learners. Considering the pedagogy of Manaiakalani, sharing is not a brand new concept to us, however, it did give me an opportunity to reflect on the opportunities I am allowing my learners to share their learning with an authentic audience.

For a very long time, I have felt that having a hub-wide blog rather than individual blogs for the learners has meant that we are on the back foot. What I have only just realised is that I have been looking at the glass as half empty, when I could have been seeing it as half full - seizing the opportunity, allowing the learners to share their learning with an amazing, connected cluster, through the medium of our hub blog. Luckily, it's never too late to change!

Consolidating knowledge by Sketchnoting!

Absolutely loved creating today! Today we were introduced to the concept of Sketchnoting. When I first caught a glimpse of a sketchnote I immediately thought 'doodling". However, as I attempted a go at creating a summary sketchnote, what appears to be a doodle with a few words seem immediately more complex! Sketchnoting is an effective way of consolidating knowledge as you have to translate ideas into images while extracting the most important parts of the bulk of the information you are translating.

Originally, I had downloaded the app, Procreate, for approx. $9 to create my sketchnote on. I absolutely loved how easy the interface was to use and all the different tools that were available to further customise and personalise my sketchnoting experience. Eventually, I made the executive decision to move onto paper, but simply because I was spending too much time playing around and exploring on Procreate. I just wanted to get my ideas down and be able to complete this task before the day was up! In saying that, had I had the time, I would have loved to delve deep into procreate and happily lose hours creating a masterpiece! I have heard of a feature on Procreate (but not yet tried) where you can export your creation as a video, so it documents the process from start to finish. I can't wait to give this a go! 

I am really looking forward to introducing this way of notetaking to my learners. As many educators who use Sketchnote have mentioned, scaffolding them into how to best use sketchnoting is paramount to the success and effectiveness of it. Thinking ahead to when my learners leave to highschool, sketchnoting could be a very effective way of taking notes when they are exposed to lecture style learning. 

Dorothy Burt shared with us a really neat youtube clip of what sketchnoting is:

I will definitely be practicing my sketchnoting skills as much as possible! Excited to use this!

Term 2 Reflection

Where have I come from? At the beginning...

• I was an experienced observer
• I was capable of reflecting on the effectiveness of the practice of others
• Unsure of myself as a teacher
• Viewed myself as a ‘fast learner’ and expected that I would ‘pick up’ how to do teaching quickly
• Thought I would throw myself wholeheartedly into teaching and not do anything else
• Saw being in an MLE as three teachers doing three separate things but sharing the learners
• Attitude towards high decile schools was quite stereotypical

How am I going? Where am I now?

• Not afraid to get in and lead
• I have confidence in myself as teacher, learners respect me as a teacher.
• I have realised that you can have so many ideals about what effective teaching practice is and looks like, but in the thick of it when you have ten million things to do and another ten million going on it takes more than simply having those ideals to make it them a reality.
• I have gained pedagogical content knowledge- and in depth - a lot slower than I had anticipated but I now realise I am progressing at a realistic rate.
• I have realised that if you don’t look after yourself and emotional wellbeing first and foremost you cannot give your all to your learners and those around you, so self is most important
• I have been conditioned by my own personal educational experience in terms of one teacher teaching one group of learners - I am now aware of this and am lucky to have colleagues willing to experiment and try different things in terms of co-teaching and drawing on the affordances of three teachers.
• I understand now that just because high decile schools are made of people who may come from a higher demographic, kids are still kids and people regardless of their demographic still have many similar problems.

Where am I going? Where to next?

• Knowing learners better in terms of their learning, e.g where they are currently achieving at and the next steps they need to take etc. and subsequently being able to have quality conversations with parents about their children’s learning.
• Use of provocations to engage learners, getting buy-in and providing learning contexts which are authentic, applicable and transferable to their wider lives.
• Facilitating literacy in a different way (not much idea ‘how’ this might look yet!)
• More co-teaching and a less single-celled mindstate.

Appreciation post

These last few weeks have probably been the most character testing that I have endured in a long, long time. With an intense school term, my first Learner Led conferences and my personal life seemingly falling apart - (sleepless nights from a relentless toothache, the pressure of moving house, it goes on and on!) I have been trying to balance my life so that come the school holidays, I don't crash and burn.

Although it has taken an exceptional exertion of effort to stay on top of teaching and learning through the obstacles listed above, it has ultimately been the support of my beautiful, empathetic, and supportive colleagues, mentors, friends, and family that have pulled me through and allowed me to see through to the end of the term without a (big) breakdown! To the people who have shared words of encouragement or inspiration or even just a smile, to my peers who have struggled alongside me through the term, to the people who dragged themselves out of bed before 6am to come to boot camp, to my lovely mama who has sent me little gift packages, thank you, thank you, thank you; for it is you who has helped to replenish my spirit and allowed me to love and serve from my overflow! 

Tiki tour around the Manaiakalani Cluster

Being a part of the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher's Academy has meant that we are blessed with many opportunities to extra professional learning. One such opportunity happened this week when we were given the chance to visit 2-3 other schools within the cluster.

First the first school visit, Myself and another Teacher of Year 7/8s, Chelsea, decided to check out Tamaki college, to get a sense of the environment that many of our learners would be moving into within the next one to two years. We had been arranged to observe an year 9 English class. As we entered, I noticed the desks were arranged into rows and the teacher stood at the head of the class, behind his desk. I wondered how the learners found this transition, some of them coming from open learning environments, full of colour and furniture that yearned to create opportunities to collaborate; to this room, where they were no longer in Primary but in a hot, baby blue room with desks in rows and the door locked. It all sounds very bleak but it picked up from here. The learners were putting their built knowledge to the test, engaging in a Kahoot about particular functions of certain punctuation, the winner winning an Up&Go, which seemed to be great motivation. 

After this, the learners moved into their reading, using a programme new to the school. This new reading system, the teacher said, had meant that he had seen learners progressing to new levels faster than ever before. The system required learners to take a test, placed them at a particular level and then they were able to choose a book from that level. Upon completing the book, the learner would take a test, with a certain percentage right, the would 'level-up' but if not, they would remain at the same level, until they could pass. The learners could take the test whenever they felt they were ready, which meant that they were working at their own pace. Not to mention, the tests and some of the texts were available online which meant more ubiquity, more visibility, more empowerment. 

I think my main wondering from this mornings experience would be - How am I setting up my learners so that when they get to this environment they can still experience success. How am I designing learning in a way that familiarises them with the way high school will function/is structured, without taking away the integrated benefits of a Primary School setting? 

6 Month Reflection

I loved making this reflection into something more digestible than your average doc; in the times that seem so hard and you feel so frazzled, you can look back on the things you have achieved and think "it seemed hard at the time, but I've come this far and I'm still growing" - It's an encouraging feeling so it seems logical to document it in such a way that is easily accessible!

Presenting my 6 month in reflection of being a beginning teacher in the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher's Academy...

Inspiring Innovators

I have had an epiphany. At 25 years old, still considered young by many, one would expect that indoctrination in the ways of old, teaching wise, isn't a lived out truth. However the reality is that my journey as a learner through the education system has affected me in ways I wasn't aware of. Until I am challenged by a belief, by myself or by my colleagues, everything is done in an unaware, subconscious machine like manner. The question of purposefulness is one that needs to be asked, and just as pressing should be the questions of what else can I do? and how else can we do it? Comfort is a beautiful, warm and fuzzy feeling thing, yet comfort does not create change.

In a provocation to the University of Auckland, Google Class On Air participants challenged the University to reconsider what effective 21st teaching practices looked like and how they might provide teachers in training with the opportunity to develop these particular skills which compliment effective practice. Innovation.


As Russell Burt, Pat Snedden, Dorothy Burt and company work to move the community of Tamaki from subsistence to a position where they can experience capital growth through education, they have questioned other social aspects along the way - they identified that education needed to change and then they asked, well, why not housing? Why not the health system? Innovation.

To be surrounded by such an unbounded amount of innovation jerks me from comfort and inspires me to take risks in the learning environment in an asserted effort to make learning purposeful and authentic.

It's hard work. It makes your brain hurt. It's not always comfortable (actually, it hardly ever is comfortable!) BUT when purposeful, it creates CHANGE! Feeling so humbled to be in the presence of individuals and collectives who are courageous enough to take risks for the betterment of the tamariki and the wider community.

Screencasts & Accessible Learning

This week in our digital immersion class we used Screen recording in Quicktime player to create screencasts about how our learners and their whanau access their learning through our Hub Google Sites. The video highlights the major digital affordances of a Google site, through the enabling of ubiquitous learning and increased learner agency.




This was my first screencast using Quicktime, however, my learners and I use Screencastify, a screen capture software for Chrome, very often in the classroom. The main way I have used Screencasts as a tool has been to record myself solving mathematics problems and explaining my reasoning and the strategies I have used to do so. My learners have then been able to use this as a resource when they have trouble answering certain questions.

The learners have been using this tool to record their own thinking when solving mathematics problems. One really useful tool within Screencastify is the ability to draw/write on the screen you are recording. This enables learners to record their thinking live. Used in this way, their recordings become authentic resources they can use later for rewindable learning or even for their peers to use.

Inspiring Colleagues

It's hard to believe that two years ago the awe-inspiring world-class innovating Teachers of Google's ClassOnAir were in the same seat as my colleagues and I. Today we had Matt Goodwin come in and share with us some of the technicalities of recording and sharing his pedagogy for his ClassOnAir episodes. Their courage to lay the design for learning that they have created for their learners for a global audience is the ultimate visible learning experience and fulfils the SHARE piece of the Manaiakalani pedagogy by making their plans available for anyone to use, 

giving back to the community by sharing their take on what is effective teaching within their context for their learners. Knowing that we might have the opportunity to do this in a year and a half's time is SCARY but inspiring.

A Practical learning process

For breakthrough this term our Hub thought we would try something different. As a vehicle to explore effective communication in our Hub, we have embarked on a collaborative breakthrough project whereby the overall success of the project requires full effort and participation from each and every learner. From roles such as project managers, case creators, location managers, administration and travel team and a fitness team to prepare us for the big day, each learner has a vital role to fulfil. As the weeks progress, learners NEED to develop their skills of effective communication in order to collaborate. 

Today in Digital Immersion at the Tamaki Campus of the University of Auckland, the MDTA cohort experimented with Stop Motion animation. I decided to create my short movie around geocaching, and more specifically, the role that the Stonefields Learning process and learner qualities can play when we find ourselves stuck in the learning pit. Although quite time-consuming, Stop-motion animation is very easy to use once the content has been planned and all props are ready to go! The actual shooting of the photos took about 20 minutes, whereas the planning and editing took much longer. I look forward to sharing this with my learners and hearing what they might like to use this tool for. Video below...

iMovie 101

This week's highly anticipated session revolved around iMovie basics. Having never used iMovie before and having never been proactive enough to seek out online tutorials, I was thrilled to have the opportunity for small group mentoring on iMovie basics.

Not knowing anything about how the tool works, iMovie looks quite intimidating. You know what you want to do but you just don't quite know how to do it. Having some sandpit time to make a movie without any expectations of quality and content allowed us to explore and discover the many functions of iMovie, all of which were so easy to access and apply as long as you simply know how!

I was able to make the following movie within a couple of hours. The overarching theme: A day in the life of a Hub 5 learner. 

If I did it again, there are a few things I would have done differently

• Used a wider variety of shots
• Consistent use of Landscape shots, to avoid Vertical video syndrome
• Used a tripod a lot more for more stabilised raw footage

Putting on my reflective teacher lense, I took more than just the tangible skills away from today's session. Had we been put on the spot to create a video to be submitted for judging, there would have been more pressure on learning the technical skills and we would not have been able to put much effort into the actual content. Allowing us the time to play however, meant that we were able to build our confidence in using the tool so that when we are required to use it for an authentic task, we can focus more on the content. The same goes for my learners. When introducing a new digital tool it is important to let them play before hand so that when they are required or want to use it for a specific task, they spend most of their energy developing content rather than exerting most of their energy to learn technical skills. Definitely something I am going to be more aware of when in the classroom.