DFI Day 5 Reflection

Visible Learning. Making Teaching and Learning Visible. 

Can others see it? I often forget to make sure that my slides etc are all shared. What is visible to learners, whanau, teachers and colleagues?

People may have a mindset of not wanting others to see what they have planned or made online. However, since my teaching career started at Point England School, I've been very open with what I have planned and shared with others. I admit, not everything is perfect but I do look back and reflect to see what I need to change for next time. I welcome positive feedback and I don't mind others using what I've created. However, it would be nice for people to acknowledge others on their work.

What do I do to hook and engage my learners?

I remember when teaching at Point England School at the beginning of every term we would have our Immersion Assemblies. This would be a chance for teachers to share what the inquiry is through a short play, quiz, skit, dance, drama etc to hook learners into the topic. It was also a lot of fun for teachers but also great to see our learners faces light up!

Watching the Universal Design for Learning reminded me of trying to do things differently with my learners to capture engagement. For example: homework and how one sheet just doesn't cut the mustard. The video talked about how learners need lots of different modes to engage in learning. What works for one learner, doesn't always work for others. This has challenged me today. Can we change what we do to help engage our learners? Yes.

Creating a site for our learners. We were given a chance to look at some other examples of sites. I liked this one here. It had both English and Samoan activities on there. Here is another example for Matariki.

CyberSmart with Vicki reminded us about Smart Parents. Do parents know about their child's individual blogs? Do they know how to leave them a comment on their posts? I created a QR code for my learners blogs and shared this with parents.

Most of the day was spent working on creating Multi Modal resources in groups. I chose to go with Ocean Health with Amie. Here's my planning template.

The last part of the afternoon was spent creating a site around the theme of Ocean Health. Click here to see the site that I created. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like. I had a lot of fun making it. It was my first time using and making an image carousel and dividers. Now that I've started this site, I can't help but continue editing it. I'll share it with my learners to get their thoughts.