Today’s session had a variety of ideas, but as with last week the most interesting part for me was Dorothy’s discussion of the Manaiakalani pedagogy, which concerned the “Learn” component of “Learn – Create – Share.” I thought there was an interesting tension between the focus of Manaiakalani in establishing a “common idea of what works” while acknowledging that school context often defines effective practice. On another level, at my school I feel there has been an acceptance that effective practice may also vary slightly from teacher to teacher, and sometimes, from student to student. This ties into my thought from last week about what technology is really replacing in the classroom, which Dorothy alluded to with her “baby and the bathwater” analogy.
For me personally, this has occasionally been a roadblock to “amplifying” effective practice. While I often find myself drawing on the ideas of other teachers, because I like to make things hard for myself and come up with my own crazy ideas for how to teach stuff, it’s sometimes harder for other teachers to just run with. I’d find it interesting to observe some schools (like those Dorothy mentioned) where teachers can articulate exactly what their schools believe about the way students in their community learn, and how these schools manage differentiation. There’s probably a good balance to be struck here somehow, and I’d be interested to know if there’s research that defines exactly where this balance lies.
There were several other interesting ideas that came out throughout the day:
- The fact that only 20% of computer users knew the CTRL+F shortcut stunned me; I feel like getting students to create posters in Docs of common keyboard shortcuts might be an interesting activity. I also liked the idea of students sharing maps and songs, and think this could be a good “getting to know you” type task.
- We had an interesting discussion about Google Calendar in our bubble, and how we might use it with students. I think a lot of this depends on whole-school buy-in which is tricky when not all students are 1:1. Currently at our school most communications are through a daily newsletter which is read to students daily, and I think it would be interesting to think about how we can transition away from this long-term to support students to use technology to organise their learning. The main thought I have, though, is that this would require something of a whole-school approach to publishing and updating events in a digital way.
- The discussion about Google Keep got me thinking about the workbooks that students generally use. I think it would be a worthwhile holiday project to create digital notebooks that my students could use, customised for each subject. The amount of time we spend getting students to rule up their books correctly etc. is sometimes a bit of a nightmare and being able to link directly from there to tools that might be useful for particular tasks, like Google Keep, might be useful for students also.
For our “create” task, I worked with Kerry from our digital bubble to record this Google Meet. We reviewed some learning done by Hannah from Marshland School during the lockdown together.