Talei's blog

It was great being reminded today about how we are all connected through Manaiakalani. I know for myself I need to remember to encourage the children to look and comment on other schools blogs more and not just our schools. I would also like to have the children engage more in Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu as it reminds our students that they are also connected to students in other schools. I believe this will also help engage some of our reluctant bloggers as it will give them more of a purpose and a bigger audience to share their learning with.  This week it was great to have a chance to explore and discuss some learning sites from other schools. It made me realise that I need to work on my site. During the time that we had to work on our sites, I focussed on making it more engaging for the learners, checking if the 3 clicks applied to my site and I looked at what we could change on our team site. In the next few weeks, I plan to work on making sure that the students have more of a choice in...

Today we focussed on setting up Google Sites. This was helpful for me as I haven't set one up since the beginning of the year with help. I now feel confident in being able to set one up and will be making some changes to the learning site I use in the classroom.  I really enjoyed learning about T shaped literacy and being multi-modal. I discovered that I have already partially been using this within my reading programme at school. One thing that I will be changing is the hook. In the past, I have used the main text as the hook. It was great being able to create a site using the T shaped literacy. I now have a better understanding and new ideas of how I can present the reading tasks to my groups so it doesn't look overwhelming to the students. Below is a link to the site I created today.

This week we looked closer at the Learn part of Manaiakalani. It was great to be reminded that this wasn't anything new. This has been something teachers and learners have been doing for a long time but now we have technology that can help us share to a wider audience. With the use of technology we now have an authentic audience for the learners to share their learning with.  Learning more about Google Forms was really interesting. I enjoyed hearing about the different ways a form can be used to enhance a child's learning. I want to try and attempt to make a Google Form Quiz at some point for my students. I would like to do this as the students enjoy quizzes, they are engaged and it can show me what information the children have retained.  Exploring Google Sheets and learning how to formulate averages and create graphs was great. I always knew these things were possible but never knew how to do them. It was interesting to look at a students blog and investigate how often they ...

Today we looked at My Map and the different things we can do with it. I liked learning about being able to take information from a Google Sheet to add location pins on the map. I find the zooming in and out function slightly frustrating but I am guessing that over time I will get used to this. 

Today we looked at the Create part of Manaikalani. I agree with this because I know from my own experience I learn and retain more information when I create something myself. I also enjoyed learning about SISOMO and how that hooks a learner in more effectively. I enjoyed learning about youtube, creating my own channel and making sure I knew how to change the settings so it is appropriate to be used at school. I have now created several playlists to use at school. This will be very helpful in the future as I now know how to add videos to playlists. This means I won’t need to leave them open as a tab until I have finished with them. It was great to be reminded of how effective our digital tools like google draw can be. I really enjoyed having a go at creating a game with dice in google slides. Below is the game that I started to create and will finish throughout next week.