Manaiakalani Session Three: Media

 Manaiakalani pedagogy focus: Create

When talking about Create - that's the hook and is designed to lead to greater engagement. "Creative skills help student, communicators and collaborators" - so we need to nurture the creativity but there is a lack of understanding about what creativity teaching is, so how can we embrace creativity to enhance learning?

Creativity is inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities. A really important idea that in a lot of ways leads us back to resilience development - by consistently looking for new possibilities we are scaffolding hope and hope is the cornerstone of resilience - hope that we can make things better.

Create is about the doing so much that the head gets involved  - 'Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery' - Kohl, 2008. Manaiakalani is about harnessing the power of digital technologies to be 'creators of content, not merely consumers', or as I say 'you have a voice, so use it'.

Create is empowerment through choice, info / knowledge, developing skills, building capacity and scaffolding, including not using scaffolds. I had not thought of the scaffolds acting as a glass ceiling for kids' thinking (and, consequently, their achievement).

Creating content that has sisomo has benefits and has some potential around creating content that attracts readers - so driving forward that idea of content developers because a large part of that is making people want to engage with what you have created; almost a Victorian idea of making things beautiful. 

Media tools

YouTube / Tiri Ata (Maria)

- Playlists could be useful to arrange a whole bunch of videos that link to then embed into your website / blog; could search up playlists to help reduce workloads by copying them and then potentially adding to it.

Media (Kerry)

- multimedia has the power to engage - so how can we harness this power for create in the classroom?

- for my classroom practice, how can I use these examples to drive forward student creation, rather than the consumerism that I teach right now?

- some tips for the classroom; think about backlighting, tripod, think about the English visual text techniques

- green screening: get your sheet / camera + tripod / green screen app

- podcasting: we use anchor as a free app for this

Drawing (Makoare)

- Some good uses for visual essays; download as a PNG image to get rid of the canvas; can also embed via publish to the web (which will also change any updates). 

Google Slides / Ata Kukara (Vicki)

- As a tool for presentations; be mindful that planning is everything (post its could be great for this); use them as talking points

- Using slides to access learning: learning intentions etc; links out to work / resources

- Slides to create: some good ideas here but it's really frustrating knowing how to do something on Microsoft PowerPoint to do exactly this and then having to move to using multiple apps to do exactly the same thing in Slides taking much more time. So, some work arounds:

    - To make it autoplay, publish to web and make it auto advance

    - Use Google Drawings to manipulate images and then insert from there.

    - To add soundtrack, you can only really get it to play in the background so kids would need to record        the whole thing using screencastify, or something similar, to get the whole thing to work as       

       one. And use clicking through the slides as part of the screencastify.

          

Short cut tips:

ctrl + F = search bar in Google docs / Chrome

ctrl + shift + S = voice typing

Windows + = magnifier