Manaiakalani Session Two: Workflow

What did I learn to increase knowledge of Manaiakalani Pedagogy? What does LEARN look like at WHS?

We started the day by pedagogy of learn drives a real need to infuse digital skills into your teaching; we often talk about 'digital natives' but I wonder about how much kids 'get by' rather than know the whole capability. They are driven by a needs must approach, so we need to create the need in our classroom practices so that they pick up the strategies to use digital platforms as a powerful learning tool, rather than a 'get by' tool.

Woolf Fisher has suggested that effective practice is summed up by the acronym RATE:

R- recognising effective practice

A - amplify effective practice

T - turbocharge to take it next level

E - effective practice; what is that so that we can identify it?

Some thinking / reflection on what I'm / we're doing at school:

1. Learning by reading from authentic texts - not teacher generated texts; on our websites there are lots of authentic texts and this really fits well with this idea and I have noticed that this does help to drive student understanding. I would question how school wide this is and I think it depends on how much our previous involvement with the Information Literacy TLRI with Massey has impacted on teaching practice.

2. Learning by sharing ideas in discussion - Socratic dialogue provides a good structure to drive this forward; in terms of my classroom practice, this is limited because student choices of texts are unlimited - it's hard to talk to someone about your text deeply if there are no other students reading and engaging with the same texts.

3. Learning by thinking critically and developing strategies - strategies are important and thinking about my senior this year, a focus going forward is to teach academic reading skills - ie don't read the whole 1578099 million pages - use skimming and scanning and then read more carefully where there are answers to your questions.

4. Collaborating and making choices in learning, creating and sharing

What does learn look like in our school?

In some places, we're still very teacher led, but we're becoming more digitally platformed, more student led across the school. Departments sit on the continuum dependent on their artefacts and content demands. We could potentially work towards a common thinking, but it does look different across different departments so how can we find an overarching ideas? The RATE acronym could help with this whilst still giving mana to each subject.

Websites give time to work with kids - which is true and we've been moving towards this; the way we've set it up means that it is authentic text driven. It has also meant that I can 'clone' myself by doing recordings of key instructional learnings. I am worried about the talk aspect because the students doing different pathways so I really do need to cut down the open slather approach and build up the group so they can build each other's knowledge and understandings because I can see that it definitely works .

Some professional resources:

• Woolf Fisher Manaiakalani blog

Learnings about professional confidence, capability and workflow:

Google Meet (Hu ataata Kuaha) Learnings (Phil Margetts)

• Key webpage
• Use Present A Tab to optimise sound and picture quality
• Captions are really good - help out hearing impaired kids; also just good to reiterate it (our listening comprehension is really bad so this might help to boost it?)

Google Keep (Cheryl Torrie)

• Note maker / organisational tool (good to have on the app)
• Add as the extension and moves across all Chrome things
• Similar to Microsoft One Note in some ways - the inclusion of images etc. Has a transcribing feature which could be useful
• Use google keep as a comment bank

Gmail (Kimera)(Maria Krausse)

• I like the idea of moving emails to tasks. At the moment, I just keep them as unread emails.

Google Calendar / Maramataka (Vicki Archer)

• Add calendar to side bar
• Some useful short cuts

• Can set up appointment slots - good potential for 'office hours' appointments

Taming tabs (Makaore Wilson) 

• Am managing tabs through bookmarks at the moment; here's a wee beginner video for kids
• On tab, as an extension, will automatically save all tabs open in a window - potentially good for research etc
• Toby Mini
• Can use Tab Snooze to help keep people focused 
• Pinned tabs will reopen automatically - could be good for workflow to keep key 'working on now' docs til they're done with 

Google Meet

• This could be used by students to create assessment evidence and/ or learning