Aimee's Professional Blog

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...

Day 2 of the DFI is complete and I am feeling really good! I was quite nervous coming into this PD that lots of things would go over my head, but I am loving the format and structure of the day, where we hear about something and then have a chance to explore and implement.  I enjoy starting the day going deeper into the Manaiakalani pedagogy. I have been working at a school in a Manaiakalani cluster for a few years now, but already after two DFI sessions I feel my understanding of the ‘why’ is so much better. That in turn then motivates me to make sure I am putting it into practice. Vicki (one of the DFI facilitators) gave me some really good food for thought when asking us if we would be able to recognise and define what Learn looks like at our schools. I also liked what she said about effective practice: “good practice will still be recognisable as good practice” and the idea that we should be good at evaluating our teaching programmes and thinking “is this good and just needs tw...