Aimee's Professional Blog

The DFI has been one of the most useful professional development courses I have been a part of. It was incredibly well organised, rewindable (which is excellent) and very hands on, which just like the kids is where my best learning happens. I really appreciated having the opportunity to delve deeper into the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa and feel I now have a much better understanding of the ‘why’ behind what we do.  I feel so much more confident using Google Tools - particularly sites, meet and forms which I had really limited experience with coming into the DFI. The explore and implementation time we have been given throughout the sessions was really useful for putting things into practice as well. For example, I have already made a lot of changes to our class site.  Some of the extensions we have learnt about like Colour Picker, Toby Mini and Mote have also been really great. Being able to save groups of tabs in Toby Mini has changed the way I work completely, and I act...

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...