Getting Creative

Creativity is not necessarily my strong suit. I love a good model in this space. However creativity is good for the soul and a key element of the Manaiakalani pedagogdy. In Dorothy's words 'as well as creating motivation and engagement cognitive and social engagement emerge..' I hope I have not misquoted you Dorothy. 

The key to this will be ensuring I add a least one new digital tool each term. Creating with digital tools is challenging for me as I feel I don't always have the problem solving tools when something isn't working. Being a Mac user I will need to be practising on a chromebook to get the user experience.  At least then I will know the fish hooks. 

When I think about it I am more comfortable with the physical create.. but in this case alot is ending up on the walls and not on the student blogs. I will need to task myself with ensing the i-pads are at the ready so this type of create can be recorded and is accessible to students to post. 

The starting place for me will be with short text responses. It seems more manageable in the short term. A tighter approach would be need for my least able. I can then be 'looser' with groups that work co-operatively and are task focussed. 

Using a site allows for a range of literary elements related to one text to be given to learning without it seeming overwhelming. I don't do many longer text with my learners but perhaps this could be an option for text term given that the fourth term can be disjointed,  and this would give learners an opportunity to work collaboratively.

The new curriculum is focused on recommending reading to others, thereby building reading communities. I enjoyed the task creating a one take film. But as always aimed for perfection! Here is my effort on selling 'Verdi', sorry for going overtime... I got a bit engrossed in what I was doing. The real laugh was I did hit record properly and had to do it again! I tried it this time in google meet. Hopefully this is a more accessible way for students. I think I will get them to film each other. A quick critique would give me an opportunity to discuss what not to do!

This leads nicely inot collaboration. There are many benefits of collaborative tasks and it is a way to overcome barriers that may be foet by less confident students  by assigning roles that suit their personality. To make it more manageable and accountable proabably smaller groups are better idea (pairs) To allow for co-operation but less distraction.

I have used Canva in the past but am looking forward to seeing how I can better use this tool. I don't feel. i have got the best out of it in the past. To offer choice anything rcreated here could be a physical or digital copy. I liked the idea of a blank template shared on the site for creating an info graphic.

Well lots of homework so I had better get my thinking cap on.

All about thinking

 My thinking has been stretched today... my task now is to stretch the thinking of my students. 

Reflecting on what I can do as an educator to ensure they become active participants of the world. In this time of misinformation, growing division and outright lying it is so important, going forward, citizens of the world develop their ability to make decisions about the thinking of others, based on bais, and prejudices the author may have. They need to be able to identify fakes and flawed analysis. Okay, now I need to get off my soapbox!

I have reflected on the questioning I can use to promote deeper thinking about text. I need to work on ensuring there is a range of question types. I need to continue to work on pre reading skills and modelling expectations so my students can work confidently and independently on the tasks assigned to them. Using the I do, We do, You do model to develop their independence. I will work on further developing text response tasks that will ensure that students are developing meta cognitive skills.

I like the idea of introducing them to the world of fakes.

This is a site I would like to explore further, along with the Tree Octopus story. I am thinking I will need to do this over the coming week to prepare students for the challenge of identifying dis/mis information. 

I liked this graphic that Dorothy shared, and will share it with the class to see if they can interpret it.

I also liked the analogy of the hawk, zooming in and zooming out.

Then it was on to figurative language and the impact it has on readers and writing. THis cause me to reflect on the narratives we have focused on in week 2 around Te Ao. Interesting all the text I choose had strong male central characters. I thought about if I had seen other text with strong female leads and what that says about the ones I chose to present to the class. I can see I will have to dig deeper to see if I can find those strong female role models. I am sure they must exist.

The next sessions had a focus on planning for our teaching. When faced with having to come up with a provaction I struggled with finding something that was not overtly racist.The Bok Choy text is all about racism. The provaction ' It is okay to judge people based on where they come from' or 'what they look like' first came to mind. In the end I focused on behaviour. But the whole concept of judging others still bothers me. Maybe something about 'Behaviour is a guide to character' would be more appropriate, but is that too abstract for my year level? Or do I go with the idea that the setting gives context to the attitudes? Even then this is not really true there are plenty of discriminatory behaviour toward all sorts of groups in the world today. Is this going to be to controversual for discussion at home? It has left me feeling a bit uncomfortable.. do I need to be brave?

Anyway I need to focus on the pre reading activities and making time for this in an already crowded space. Once this is established it will be integrating the writing into the reading programme. This will be challenging for my target students because whilst I can monitor the reading, independent writing on a given topic in any depth is a challenge that will be avoided. 

As always it was a day that challenged my thinking and  has let me feeling like there is so much to learn.