Digital Immersion - Term 4

On Friday, we had our final  Manaiakalani Digital Immersion PLG of the year. I have enjoyed attending these PLG's as I've taken away something really useful every time!
The main focus of the day was how multi modal learning opportunities increase student engagement. We had a great discussion about creating multi modal and multi textual experiences for our students as this not only deepens/broadens their understanding of a topic but also allows for students of varying learning styles to connect to the material. After thinking about the learning styles of students in my class, I understood that I cannot always teach something one way and expect every student to click instantly. There are some students in my class that learn best with materials, some with visuals like videos and diagrams and there are a few that learn best when listening to an explanation by the teacher. Thus, creating multi modal/multi textual learning opportunities is a important!

Dorothy and Fiona taught us how to create a website to bring multi modal teaching into the classroom. I chose to base my website on room 13's upcoming science experiment: how to make ice cream! As this will be quite a fun experiment that will teach my class a lot about change, we will dig right in and read about it, watch videos and write about the scientific process. I will put facts, links to online stories/articles, images, recipes, videos, instructions, key words and activities on this website. I will also link the audio tracks from any School Journals/Junior Journals that feature ice cream.

I am really looking forward to putting the website to use in weeks 4 & 5. Here is a screenshot of it below! I'm looking forward to sharing the website with you once it is completed, hopefully it could be a useful tool for others!

Room 13's New Blog

Room 13 has a new blog. This is a place where you can see some of the awesome learning and fun that goes on in my class! Each week I will showcase a different student's work and let you in on some of the events that happen at Pt England School.

Check out our blog at pesscanlan.blogspot.co.nz

Term 3 Inquiry Presentation

Learn, Create, SHARE

Today at the Manaiakalani Digital Immersion day, Dorothy Burt led a discussion on the SHARE element of Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.  I got a lot out of today's PLG as I learnt how much of an affect that sharing can have on a student's self esteem and motivation in their learning. It is important for students to share their work with their peers as this gives them the opportunity to see each other's ideas and encourage one another. At Pt. England School, every single student has their own blog in which they use to share their work with a global audience. Teachers also blog to share their professional learning journey. 

What I loved the most about today was learning how empowered students feel when they get to share their work with a large audience. To this day I am still getting my head around how amazing it is that primary school aged children get to share their thoughts and creativity with thousands of people around the world. By having their work visible to parents, teachers, friends and others across the globe, they are given the opportunity to receive feedback and encouragement from so many more people than just their own teacher! 

As part of the day, we learnt how to make infographics to show a blog's statistics. I chose to use a programme called Canva to show the data from Leilani's blog - a student from room 13. As you can see in the infographic above, Leilani has viewers from as far as Germany and U.S.A! 

Hyperstudio Animation

Kia ora! It is now term 3, my second term here at Pt England School. This term, team 3 is creating animations that reflect a sport at the 2016 Rio Olympics - I'm very excited about this! Seeing as animations can be a little tricky, Helen King decided that it'd be an awesome idea to hold a Hyperstudio workshop for team 3 teachers. I'm pretty stoked about my animation, considering I had no clue how to use Hyperstudio before this week!

Room 13 are currently animating sports like gymnastics, swimming, archery, athletics and volleyball. I'm really looking forward to seeing their final products. As you can see below, I chose diving!