DFI Day 3 - Media Agenda

Today I participated in another worthwhile session of Manaiankalani's Digital Fluency Intensive.

Following on from last week's session on learn/Ako, today Dorothy spoke about the create/Hanga pedagogy of Maniakalani. One of the key messages that resonated with me again today was that we want our children to be 'creators of content, not merely consumers'. As Dorothy was speaking I thought back to my own experiences of primary school and the majority of my memories, unsurprisingly, are related to creating something or going somewhere. Two such creations I remember were building a brontosaurus out of chicken wire and paper māchē, and the joy of discovering I could use PVA to stick sand on a model I made of an island. Unfortunately, I can't remember any of the learning that went with these creative tasks other than the craft skills! Dorothy spoke of 'create' being a hook for learning and as teachers, we need to embed these create activities within authentic learning tasks so that the memories our children create are saturated in learning opportunities and/or that cement the learning that has already occurred. How lucky are the children at my old school, Kaniere Primary,  that they are apart of Manaiakalani outreach! It is also a reminder once again that being in the 'create' zone sometimes means 'doing less, better.' The best creations and authentic learning sometimes comes when students are given the time to create and not rushed on to the next piece of learning.

The next session looked at creating a Youtube channel and setting up playlists. The benefit of saving videos to a playlist is that this can be embedded within your class site for children to access without going directly on to Youtube. Several years ago I made a slideshow with videos of well-known pictures books being read aloud. It would be helpful to use a google playlist for this instead. I would also like to create an appropriate music playlist too for children to listen to while working.

Today's deep dive was by guest presenter Kent Somerville, Associate principal of Pt. England Primary School. He discussed different ways of live streaming via Youtube and Google Hangout meets. As a school, we tried our first live streaming of assembly during the lockdown. This got me thinking, would it be worthwhile streaming all of our assemblies or at the least filming them for our whanau to watch at a suitable time. We also have other events such as Manu Kōrero and Pacifica performances that would be wonderful to share to a wider audience. Now all I need to do is convince those that hold the purse strings to let me purchase a decent video camera!

The final session of the day was an opportunity to explore one of seven create tasks. Dorothy's session was focused on designing personal slide templates which brings joy to my creative soul! I was already familiar with the site https://www.slidescarnival.com/ but didn't know you could edit the masters. As I have found out not all the slides will allow changes. Below I have included the master slide and then the one I have edited using our school colours.