Aimee's Professional Blog

Today we looked at the final Manaiakalani kaupapa word: Empowered. Vicki spoke about how sometimes our students and whānau may not be empowered in areas like housing, money, healthcare etc, so it is really important that our tamariki are empowered when it comes to their education. This ties in closely with issues of equity and accessibility; we want all learners to be empowered, engaged and successful with their learning. Vicki talked about how students beginning school in low decile areas start with a mean academic performance of 3 years, which puts them nearly half a lifetime behind their peers in higher decile schools. This really hit me as a New Entrant teacher, thinking about how we can support students to ‘catch up’ so they can achieve their full potential. Vicki provided us with a quote “The greatest joy comes from empowering students to discover the treasure that lies within them” and then asked us to think about our own quote. Mine is “The greatest joy comes from empowering st...

It was nice today having the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of our learners, in terms of the devices and apps that they use.  Before we got into that we looked at an important aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa: ubiquitous. This is the idea that learning should be able to take place anytime, anywhere, at any pace, for anyone. Of course this is extra relevant now that we find ourselves in distance learning situations, but it is an important principle all the time. Vicki spoke about how ubiquitous learning means that learning can take place outside school hours for those who would like to access it. For some children who don’t necessarily have parents driving or supporting learning at home, being able to access their class site if they want to continue learning, is really powerful. These quotes really stood out to me too: “If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth capturing.” and “If it’s worth learning, it’s worth capturing.” That helps to inform the ‘why’ of rewindable learning...

  I have come away from Day 6 of the DFI feeling very accomplished after having a big chunk of the day making improvements to our Pūkeko class site .  This stemmed from what we looked at this morning; the Manaiakalani kaupapa ‘connected’. We were provided with heaps of amazing examples of how Manaiakalani schools are connected in many different ways and it was so cool to see how far the reach was in terms of types of schools and geographic location. Maria spoke about how it is really cool that we all have shared language and are paddling in the same direction. There are so many opportunities for our learners and us as teachers to be connected, which is so powerful for learning. I really like what Maria said that put it so simply: “Connecting is how we learn off one another”. She also spoke about how both parties need to share in order for there to be a connection. An important understanding and I reflected that you can really see how all aspects of the Manaiakalani kaupapa tie...

I really enjoyed this day of DFI. I thought lots of what we covered was both challenging and inspiring which was cool.  We started the day looking at a really important aspect of the Manaiakalani kaupapa: visible learning. And it was basically as simple as it sounds: can we see it (teaching and learning) or not? Vicki spoke about the fact that teaching and learning should be visible for learners, their whānau, yourself as the teacher and your colleagues. A good reminder that all of those groups benefit from when teaching and learning is visible and easily accessed. Vicki spoke about how the day to day should be visible on your class site. Later on Kerry talked about how your class site is like your shop front window - you want the response of your learners to be “Wow I really want to go inside”. This is something I previously thought of as more of a ‘senior thing’ but I am now inspired to see what this could look like for our class site for our New Entrant learners. My team and I a...

Our focus for today was Dealing with Data. I was a bit nervous about this day but have picked up some really useful tips and having time to explore and have a play was helpful as always. I had never created a Google Form before, so I really enjoyed having a go at creating a form, using different types of questions. It was great learning how to look at and analyse responses and knowing what settings to be aware of. I particularly found it useful to know about making an important question ‘required’ so it has to be answered and checking that the form isn’t on the default of only allowing users from your organisation to fill it in. Our digital bubble had some fun forms to fill in that created good conversation and it was nice to see a variety of uses for forms. Google’s My Maps was something I hadn’t even heard of before, so it was awesome seeing the potential uses for students. For older students it has great applications for mathematics such as working out area and distance. Maybe not s...

Today was another great day of learning at DFI. As always we started the day with extending our knowledge of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. We were focused on Create. Vicki spoke about the soft skills students need including creativity, collaboration and critical thinking and the importance of giving students opportunities to develop these skills. Being in a New Entrant learning space we spend a lot of time doing hands-on activities and learning through play and doing, so the children are beginning to develop these skills right from when they start school. I like to think that because of this the children do have high levels of engagement and enthusiasm at school. Only having our tamariki for about a term means we don’t have a lot of time to introduce them to making their own DLO’s (digital learning objects), but what we have learnt about today has certainly got me thinking about how we can at least expose and model different DLO’s to them and use them in a whole class context. This hopefu...