Media – DFI Day 3

I thought this week’s content was really interesting because it had a lot of practical ideas for how we could bring creating into our classrooms. I really enjoyed hearing the variety of ideas that students could use to create things. Some of them were ideas that I’d had myself, such as using video, but through Manaiakalani I felt there were opportunities showcased that allowed students to practice creating on a much grander scale, such as through film festivals. I’ve had groups of students enter film competitions before, but taking the students to the cinema to see their film on a big screen just seems like such a fun idea.

I was also very inspired by the likes of using Google Slides to create stop motion stories for learning languages, and creating simple “apps” such as a fortune teller. I thought it was interesting when I was tasked with creating my Google Slide version of a pepeha (or what I was able to finish thereof…) and ended up massively overcomplicating the “create” part of the task. This was a very practical lesson for me in using the correct tool for each job. I have attached the slides I ended up creating at the end of this post.

I’m still not so sure about how I will use YouTube with my class. I feel like recording actual lessons would create classroom management issues; using pre-recorded content on a playlist could also risk confusing students as the content covered throughout the year is rather vast considering the range of levels of students we’re targetting. So I’ll need to think on how I’ll best manage that; in principle I think the idea of a sort of “classroom TV” is cool, but in practice the execution might be tricky.

I think the reason why I found today’s content so stimulating overall was because “creativity” sort of has several dimensions. I first read about this in a study a few years ago and did a lot of reflecting on it today. There’s a subtle difference between teaching creatively, offering creative tasks, and teaching students to be creative in their approaches to tasks. Arguably, there might be some correlation between these ideas. I’m not so sure about Ken Robinson’s implied idea that the third comes automatically to every student; you need to know the rules of art to be able to purposefully break them after all. I feel like today’s session gave me a lot of ideas to involve learners in creative tasks, but there’s almost so much to cover here that it’s going to be difficult manage as just one-third of the learn-create-share framework.

I liked the analogy to a “lifelong kindergarten” brought up today, and wonder to what extent that is practicable in a school still reporting to National’s standards (and testing students in these subjects very frequently). Perhaps the secret is to spend more time establishing at the beginning how to create, which is a bit of a paradox as last week I had a lot of thoughts about spending time establishing how to organise. I’d be interested to see how the DFI develops over subsequent weeks and whether I’ll still be following the notion of prioritising organisation, which has a certain logic to it also.

Nonetheless I really enjoyed the session overall and am looking forward to the next one. 🙂