Nga Wero - Culturally Responsive Learning Spaces

Nga Wero Our School Pepeha

Reflection

Reflection Week 4, Cohort 2

Once again, I learnt a lot from our sessions today. 

Dorothy talked this morning about "Sharing" as one of the "legs" of our pedagogy. Sharing is such an important aspect of our pedagogy, especially with implementing a Future-Focused curriculum in a digital environment.  Our parent community became more aware of sharing in a digital environment during the lockdown period. Students were able to share their learning not only with the world out there but also with their parents! While many parents were working alongside their child at home during remote teaching and learning, they became part of the whole Learn, Create, Share process. 

As Dorothy stated sharing online also promotes "learning to finish", in other words, to get something ready to present. With sharing their learning online students see the end product and enjoy the feedback they get from others. 

L, C, S pedagogy is not only linear. Sharing is actually part of an inquiry cycle and can spark a new cycle of learning. 

Dorothy also talked about blogging as a vehicle to teach our students good online citizenship and to be cyber smart. I like the analogy Dorothy is using about using a safe car to learn to drive. That is indeed what it is. 

I found the session on Google Sheets very useful. I use Google Sheets as well as Google Forms very often for administrative purposes and especially in terms of presenting data as part of Achievement and Effectiveness Reports.  

I would like to explore MyMaps further, especially for teaching purposes and maybe to map out our bus routes with more detailed information. 

Below is my attempt to present a snapshot comparison of the number of views we get on a post about a school trip versus a post containing information for parents to read. 

Reflection Week 3

Reflection Week 3 Cohort 2

Tuesday 19th May 2020

Great sessions today as well. 

I really enjoyed it and I suppose it is because the emphasis was on "Create". Dorothy is right, this aspect of our pedagogy is very important. "Create" is basically the link between "Learn" and "Share". It is a simple pedagogy that can be understood by everyone, including our tamariki: Students "Create" to demonstrate what they have been learning and then "Share" it with the world out there. 

I'm quite interested in using YouTube Live to stream our Assemblies/Huis. I have a wide-angle webcam that I can use for this purpose. I just need to find a way to share it out and to get out parent community connected. In other words, our parents are not in our domain and that might be tricky. I emailed Kent in this regard. There might also be issues with privacy and we need to keep this within our parent community only. 

We use Google Drawings quite often in creating images for publishing on our Class Sites as well as on Google Slides. It is also a great place to use and apply your creative skills and to engage students. Below is my attempt at using Google Draw. 

Using Google Draw

Thank you to the facilitators for all your efforts. 

Nga mihi

Casper

Reflection Tuesday 12th May 2020 Cohort 2

Reflection Cohort 2

It was great to revisit some of the things we learnt about in the previous cohort. 

Using filters with my Gmail account is a priority for me now. I receive a lot of emails on a daily basis and I spend a lot of time going through all my mail. Some of the mail is not important at all and I can look at these at a later stage if necessary. They can be filtered out to folders. 

I also like the fact that you can access "Tasks" directly from Gmail. There are sometimes important activities to follow up and it is easy to access "Tasks" from Gmail. I use "Tasks" every day and it helps me to be more organised. 

I will go back to "Toby mini" to see how I can organise my tabs better. I just need to find out whether "Toby mini" stops processing of the tabs as well while they are in hibernation. My computer sometimes slows down as a result of all the tabs I have open. Maybe, I should look at the "Great Suspender" as well, because that might stop the tabs in hibernation from processing. 

I think it is important for me to see how I can use all the Google Apps, extensions, etc. more effectively to save time with administrative tasks. 

Thank you for another great day!

Week 1 Blog Post

Week 1 Blog Post (Revised)

Cohort 1 Wednesday 11th March 2020

Reflection:
The Manaiakalani kaupapa makes it possible for all students to have equitable access to learning and that includes access to digital technologies. It makes it possible to effectively implement the Learn, and specifically the "Create" and "Share" approach. I learned about the importance of using simple digital technologies specifically for this purpose. There is no way that you can implement this approach effectively without using digital technologies in the 21st century. 

I leant a lot of new skills today and I am looking forward to using what I learnt with our students. All the sessions were fantastic, but I think the outstanding sessions were "Google Groups", "Chrome and Drive", "Chrome Extensions" and "Connect the Docs". I can definitely use it for both teaching and administrative purposes. 

I still need to spend more time on using tables on Google Docs. We usually use Google Docs for our newsletters, but it is just in a simple format. I will recreate our school newsletter for next week by using tables and then publish it on here. 

Thank you, Nicola and Dorothy, for a great day of learning.

Cohort 2 Tuesday 5th May 2020

My workspace at the moment when I'm working from home

Reflection:
It was great to revisit some of the learning we did during the first session we had when I was part of Cohort 1. I am now able to explore and use all the new skills in more depth.
"Connect to Docs" was again great, especially in terms of using index links to important parts of a document. I can definitely use this with documents like the School Charter, Curriculum Delivery documentation, Strategic Planning documents or Achievement and Effectiveness Reports to the Board.
I also redeveloped our newsletter again and included our school pepeha as well as some examples of the students' pepehas that are up at the entrance of the school.
It was great to work with Gerhard - very knowledgable and skilled in what he is doing.

A copy of the front page of our newsletter on Google Docs: