Returning to school with Chris Walker

A couple of days ago we started to prepare to return to school after 3 months of lockdown. I immediately felt my thoughts swishing through my brain. What are we going to do with the students for 3 weeks? Should we be doing formal work at some point? What will the students need? What did they miss? How can we make school inviting to them? Then I attended the Ti Rito Toi webinar with Chris Walker. 

What a great webinar to attend. The focus was on sharing the Ti Rito Toi resources. But the motivation that I received from the speakers, made me feel relaxed and excited about going back.

Carol Mutch highlighted how we should make our school/class inviting and inclusive. 

Lynda Stuart pointed out that students should feel safe, secure and loved. Take the time to sit alongside the students. Don't pepper them with questions. Just sit next to them, join in the activities. Have a casual chat. Students need will naturally have conversations with you and with their peers. And the best way to encourage those conversations is through art, drama and caring stories. Students should have the opportunity to laugh and sing. Some ideas are balloons, puppets, music etc.

He Tangata, He Tangata, He Tanagate = It's all about the people (As highlighted in a previous blog of mine)

Peter O'Conner emphasized it's about catching up with relationships. Getting back to patterns and the rhythms of life. The book Te Meke Tuatara (A little kindness goes a long way) is a great way to help with this. 

He posed the question: Do the things you do really matter? And in doing that, do they know it matters? 

To me, the only thing that matters is the well-being of our students. 

And last, Marie Gallichan, a teacher of a year 2-3 class gave some practical examples of fun activities. This includes lots of art activities, a name activity where students add emoji's around their name to show how they felt (this is a great conversation starter...tell me about this emoji, why did you feel like this?), having a bear in the class that students can talk to every time a new student starts attending school. Then the students that came from day 1 (the experts) explains to the bear (including the new students) how things work now. Also options of comic strips, animation and scratch. 

I love the Ti Rito Toi resources. They make it so easy for the teacher. Shalen and I planned on starting with one of the units in the second week. I am looking forward to that. 

Blended Learning with Read&Write for Google Chrome

Copy of the recording

Last night I attended the Blended Learning with Read&Write webinar. A great tool to help all our students. Not just students with learning needs but also gifted students. The tool seems easy enough for our students to use and has multitude possibilities. 

Read&Write Features include: 

Text to Speech

Simplify

Practice Reading Aloud

Vocabulary Builder

Voice Note

OrbitNote PDF Reader

Editing Tools

What stood out for me:

 Read&Write will assist students with reading different types of text and with Simplify you can reduce text to make it shorter or less daunting for the students. Also, students will be able to gain access to all learning without the help of a teacher. This made me think of T-Shape Literacy and how one of the barriers was that not all students can access written text. This would be a great tool to use in conjunction with that, especially as students will be able to listen to information on a PDF format read to them. 

Another cool feature was the highlighting and creating a word bank. I've always wanted to create a personal dictionary for my students, but to keep a handwritten dictionary is not sustainable in a busy class, it's something that slips through the cracks. WIth this tool, it would be so easy to have one and students can build their vocabulary bank. 

And the last feature that caught my eye was the editing tool that helps students with proofreading and editing before submitting. This will ensure that when we have our learning conversations with our students, we will spend more time on the deeper features of their text instead of focussing on surface features such as punctuation and capitalization. 

I'm hoping that we can provide this tool all our students so that students have more authority over their work in a blended learning environment. Moving towards independence and success.

Manaiakalani Toolkit- Google Earth with Steve Smith

 Yesterday I had the priviledge of attending a Google Earth Toolkit by Steve Smith. His enthusiasm defnitely made me excited about using Google Earth. 

Even though we learned about Google Earth during my DFI training, it was one of the tools that I have not yet used to it's full potential in my class. As we went through the many possibilities of using Google Earth, I reaslised how special this could be for our learners from all over the world. So today I used it during our Google Meet with our students. I introduced how to use Voyager. We went on a little tour to all the different places where Diwali is celebrated. (Celebrating Diwali). It was so good to see the different temples, we did a 360 degree turn and could see what it looked around the temple. We learned through noticing that they take their shoes off when they enter their temple, just like our Maori students when they enter a Marae. It's such a good tool to start conversations, compare things, look at people in different countries etc. The possibilities are invinite. 

Further,  I showed my students how to find our school  Google Earth. How to move the person so that you can go into streetview and how to move up or down the street. Some students immediately searched up their homes. 

This is what one of my students did: 

She counted the steps from her home to the school, found her home country, found her favourite holiday destination, identified the place where she wants to live one day, and identified where her favourite animal lives. In just this little casual activity, I gained so much information about her. How great will this activity be at the start of the year when we learn to know our students. Google Earth will defnitely move to the top of my go to applications list. 

Screencastify by Vicki Archer

A great toolkit with Vicki. She highlighted the basic tools while recording. I've seen all the buttons but never took the time to investigate what they can do. It's like a whole new world opened up for me today. What stood out on the basic tools were that you can adjust your countdown timer, annotate your screen, turn your webcam on and of while recording, highlight parts of your screen while you are recording, change your cursor to a flashlight highlighting what you are talking about, and add and remove stickers.

There are also a few cool new features. The one I am most excited about is that you can edit your video. You can blur out students faces, add text, cut or crop out unwanted bits and change where the sounds start or stop. A bit like iMovie.You can add questions in specific spots during the recording which pops up for the students in a box and they choose the correct answer.  How good would that be for during a reading lesson? 

A good tip is for when you want to record tutorials for students, you can create them on screencastify. Each step will be a new screencastify recording, but students will know exactly what to do. 

I am excited to use Screencastify more in my class and for creating tutorials for staff and students. I can recommend this toolkit.