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!