DFI3 - Manaiakalani - Digital Fluency Intensive Course - Week 3: Media

I have really enjoyed today's DFI experience. I ignored my gmail and did NOT look on Hapara Highlights to see if my classes were on task and behaving themselves! This made for a much more relaxed learning experience. I am also feeling healthier than last week, which definitely helps.

Learn

Today's learning focus for Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was on the CREATE aspect of the Learn-Create-Share model. The original slogan was "It's all about the hook!" i.e. engagement - bringing joy to our learners and ourselves as teachers by creating. The belief is that creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators.

 "Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

We looked at a clip from the documentary The HeART of the Matter (2016). This film by Luit and Jan Bieringa is a really good reminder of an effort by a group of bureaucrats and arts specialists who set about introducing a "thoroughly bicultural and arts-centred education system" to schools 60 years ago. NZ has definitely had its innovative educators in the past, which is a good thing to remember when we are feeling strangled by the demands of senior secondary assessment and despairing at the momentum of change towards a more creative learning environment.

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn;

and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking;

learning naturally results.” 

John Dewey

Dorothy referenced something Stuart Middleton had written on his blog: "When it comes to learning, if the hands are involved, the head really gets going." In other words, learn by DOING. This is a good reminder that we want our young people to be "creators of content, not merely consumers."

Dorothy: "If we want our students to learn, we need to get them creating, and preferable wrap Sight, Sound and Motion into it."

Reflecting on today's learning from my point of view as an English teacher, I know that creativity is at the heart of my subject: our English curriculum has two strands: one is receptive and critical - Listening, Reading and Viewing - if you like, this is the 'Learn' or 'consume' mode where we act as informed readers and interpreters of texts; the second is productive and creative - Speaking, Writing and Presenting,  the 'Create' mode where we are skilled creators of texts. One is ineffective without the other and the better we become at one, the better we become at the other. The more skillfully I read, the better I write; equally, the more skillfully I write, the better I read. So as an English teacher, the Manaiakalani model of Learn-Create-Share makes perfect sense to me. Texts, whether visual, aural or written, are produced with an audience in mind, after all.

Skill Learning: Media

Today's skill learning focus was on Media. We looked at Youtube, various options for making and editing films and podcasts, Google Drawings and Google Slides. I have done a reasonable amount of creating and editing film and audio files using iMovie and Audible, so I was happy with those parts. Google Drawings is a tool I am not so familiar with, so this was one of my key skill learning moments of the day, along with some new tricks in Google Slides. I have shared my tips and learning below.

Create

Google Drawing

We made a self-introduction image using a template provided. This is my image below.

We then embedded the image on the right sidebar of our blogs as a gadget.

With this task, I really liked the way the instructions were set out in bubbles in the drawing itself, which made it easy to follow and understand without having to refer to a separate tab.

Later we had an opportunity to have another play in Drawing and I made a digital button I could use on one of my class websites:

Google Slides

For our main creative time in the afternoon, we were able to choose between a range of groups looking deeper into Google Slides. I chose a group looking at drag and drop resources.

Here is the slideshow I created, which uses drag and drop to help students learn terms and definitions for literary criticism (although you can't see the drag and drop features in this mode as they are surrounding the slides):

Share

Hapara Dashboard

Attention fellow teachers: did you know that you can move the students around in the Dashboard view? I always thought the only options were alphabetical by first or last name, but you can actually click and drag students' tabs to the top if you want to keep an eye on what a little group is up to! Another trick I already use with Highlights is to reduce my screen size so that I can view the whole class at the same time.

Youtube Channels and Playlists

Although I already have a Youtube channel, I found that I could make some changes to my settings and that I hadn't verified my account. Two important settings for educators are to set the upload default for videos to unlisted, and to turn off comments. Also really helpful is to set the audience for your Youtube channel to "Made for Kids" as this will prevent adult advertising content from being shown.

Playlists are something I already use to group together videos to support a particular unit. For example, when teaching The Hate U Give I began to put together a playlist of videos related to Black Lives Matter (and I see that a whole lot of useful videos I found did not get saved to the playlist!). Here is the link to my Youtube channel.

Another useful thing to pass on from this session was that Jeremy shared with us a playlist of videos to help us prepare for the Google Certified Educator Level 1 exam. If you are new to using Youtube in your teaching this would be a great place to start.

Filming with your phone

Using media that include Sight, Sound and Motion helps engage our students and engage a wider audience. A great tip I picked up today is that when using your phone to video something, whether in a classroom situation or at home, you can create a handy DIY tripod from a paper cup or bulldog clips! This is one I will be passing on to my students as well.

Google Slides

A last little trick for Google Slides, blogs and sites, is to add a bit of interest by using a gif to give the sense of motion and keep the viewer's attention.