Rachael's Professional Learning

Connected Learners Share Today was really useful. I set our site up at the beginning of the year, and as with last week, the refresh was great and I have been talking with my team about how we could use it better within the class to motivate and engage our learners. Another colleague has also given time to talk about using Explain Everything and with a bit of luck in getting some more devices, we could be onto something! Looking at the sites through different lenses  - visual engagement and ease of use, made it easy to see what needed to be done on our learning site - from a simple descriptor so that visitors know the age of the students and location of the school, to putting the actual date on learning rather than our school system of Term 3, Week 7 - this means nothing to anyone apart from teachers! Making the home page relevant to the learners by including images of them was an easy fix as was being able to change the shape of the buttons. The process of creating a drawing, then...

 I really enjoyed today learning about the pedagogy behind the learning sites - is the learning visible or not? A really simple question and one that I have used to look at our existing learning site. The answer - not all learning is visible and this is probably due to a number of factors - none of which are irreversible!  Great to hear about the behavioural engagement with the site and also the cognitive engagement - will the children be attracted to the site and want to engage with it?  Will the content keep them there and challenge them, support them and enhance their learning?  I had previously used the multimodal text approach with year 3 and 4's - now being back with New Entrant and Year 1 children it was so useful to talk through with Latham about how to transfer that to very early reading. Of course so much easier when someone who has used it gives you examples that have worked in the classroom! So below is my addition to the multimodal spreadsheet using a bo...

Well - Google Sheets - not my favourite thing in the world to be honest! I find them very confusing. Working through the tasks today, and applying formulas for working out the average and the totals was okay - I could follow that. When the conditional formatting started I just found I was lost. When I was trying to apply a function to more than one row and I was dragging the blue corner down - all the numbers were changing so that they were all the same - time to stop, take a break and come back to it another time! I can create charts and put them on a separate sheet, also choose from the range of charts available.  For the work I do in the leadership team looking at data my skills I have are okay - it is something I would like to become more proficient at but at the moment it's nowhere near the top of my to-do list :) Analysing the blog posts from the archive was interesting - looking at the data it's easy to see the trends and add a narrative as to why these things happen. Da...

Another extremely full-on day - probably the trickiest one so far for me. I found the Maps presentation quite confusing, in that the map was zooming in and out randomly and not working the way the presenter was explaining it. I will take some time and have a look through the slides at a later date.  Looking at how we can use maps was interesting and I can see when we look at where in the world our blog comments are coming from we could import this data into the maps and show the children. There are I'm sure many other uses too - but that's the one I'm thinking on at the moment.  We created a map with information imported from the Google form we filled out this morning. There was a lot more to the information gathered than I realised and can see huge potential for our learners.  I enjoyed learning more about Google forms and the options around the types of answers you can choose and also the information easily gathered. So many uses particularly around getting information...

It was inspiring to listen to the Create part of the connecting with Manaiakalani pedagogy section - it is after all why a lot of us became teachers. Listening to how easy it is to fit in with all styles of teaching and for all settings reinforces the inclusivity of Learn Create Share. I love to use Google Drawing for things like Site buttons and creating images to insert into other documents. It was good to go over how to change the orientation of images, also to drag the page to the size required - this was new for me, I have always just put numbers into the page set up and hoped for the best!  .   Creating the drawing to share on the blog was good, however, I'm not quite sure about the adding of gadgets and how to get them where I want on the blog - I wanted to remove my profile pic and just have the About me drawing but for some reason, I couldn't work it out...a work in progress. 

Another day full of new learning for me! I use slides a lot for planning and previously have used them with older children on iPads for learning.  Today has reinspired me to use them with our Year 1 and New Entrant children. Taking part in the levelling up about slides, and also the Create Slides workshop in the afternoon was great. It was good to hear how other people use slides and also some tips and tricks like the Command D to duplicate rather than having to go to the drop-down menu. Also to group objects and use an image for a background on the slide that cannot be moved by the children whilst they are completing their activities.  I created some slides to use with my maths workshop children next week which I have included a screenshot of here - a total copy of the apple tree in the video - but we all have to start somewhere! Subtraction slides The only moveable items on the slide are the apples. I did not put any equations on the slides because we will use them multiple ...