Empowering our learning ... with maps, sheets and forms.

Empower!

Empowered                  

Used to use an agency but now use empowered. Empowered means to empower our learners… shock horror.

80% of the community in Manaiakalani live with an income of $19,000 per annum. And they make it work, but they are the working poor. We are not just talking about whanau on benefits these families are working and trying to juggle childcare, bills and life. However, it is quite disempowering.

5+ a day back and forth conversations make a difference to the oral language and blogging also strengthens this (5+ a blogasation).

If you want to EMPOWER our children then you can’t cherry-pick which you do. All of the following need to be part of the journey:

It has been really great having Dorothy Burt with us in person. She has a wealth of knowledge and she was able to download some of it to us. It was especially helpful in having the tips and tricks for our exam next week. Some people are feeling pretty worried about it but I am going into it with a positive attitude (assuming I can get on because I did have some technical difficulties with signing up today).

The rest of the day was exploring My Maps, Forms and Sheets. On the surface, these don't sound too thrilling but in actual fact we had a number of 'WOW' moments. There are a number of ways to use all of them, in life and in the classroom (which is also life but you know what I mean). 

For My Maps, I've started creating a My Map of our trip to Wellington for our Year 7/8 Camp. This I'll be able to share with whanau so they can see what we are doing (and how much walking they will be doing).

We did create this one with data from a Google Form.

In Forms, we created something for people to fill in. It was pretty fun. I had a go creating something for students to give feedback. This is the table that all the DFI team shared their Forms, you could always have a play if you wanted. The Block NZ is an important social question at present. 

Share your name and link your form below! Have a go at completing each other’s forms
Dorothy
Mel Raisin	Would you rather
Kelsey	Do You Wanna Taco 'bout It?
Alethea D	The Call of the Wilderness
Kathy L	Weekends
Rebecca	How do you take your coffee?
Melissa	All about me sandpit student form
Paula	Finding out about you
Helen	PBL choice for my hub student form
Angela	The Block NZ
Harry Romana	DFI Practice Form
Jess	Animals
Angela	Pets
Kellen	Softball form (students)
Nicole	Colours
Sharon	Thumbs up or Thumbs down?
Bernard Adams	Inquiry Term 4:  Student form
Kimberley	Genius Hour
Sharon T	Personal reading
Lucy	Breakfast eating habits
Tracey	Which Gymnastics leotard do you prefer for our Belfast Gym Team?

Finally, we spent some time pulling data out of our student blogs. I'm not entirely convinced I've harnessed the power of the data yet. I pulled all the date from our Year 7&8 students blogs. Below you can see the data that I have to work with. I have managed to use Sparkline to create the little graphs so you can see the tracking of their blog posting. I have also worked out the averages across the years, they are at the bottom of each column. 

I made this graph to show the totals for each student. It is quite visual and shows the tracking for each individual student.

Do you have any suggestions for what I could do with the data? Ideally, I want it to motivate the students. I know that Angela was looking at individual blogs for data, which is also a powerful motivator. You could check out her blog .

It is sad to think that next week is our last week. I have loved this learning and networking. What a shame it will all be over next week. 

Three is a magic number for making sites about dung

Despite feeling a bit under the weather I was looking forward to another Tuesday of learning, and I haven't been let down.

We met Danni Stone, our Year 7/8 Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu partner from Point England. She was here to teach us all about Google Sites. It was lovely to meet her and to make the face to face connection. She is very knowledgable and helpful, also willing to share her journey of how things have evolved over the 5 plus years she has been on this Learn Create Share journey.

Dorothy introduced us to today's theme of create. Create is such a powerful tool to use. I took many notes as she spoke but here are a couple of standouts:

• Creativity is a doing word … the whole parts of our body, not just a screen.
• The digital world can give us a world that turbocharges our creativity … but it isn’t the be-all and end-all … it is one part of the wedge. (see graphic to see the different parts of the wedge)
• Digital can capture the creativity.
• We don’t want our learners to be consumers, we want them to be creators. 
• Students that take more responsibility for selecting topics to learn about and this lead to accelerated learning. 
• Create: empowering through choice, information/knowledge, developing skills, building capacity & scaffolding.

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

All this information has made me ask the question: 

Does our YMS belief mean that we only think it is about the digital? Do we ignore the other wedges of creativity from the classes that are using digital devices more than the juniors?

Sadly, we don't get much time to verbally process this information. Sometimes I wonder if it would help me work through what we are already doing in our class/school before we move on. I know my brain can be like a sieve and things come and go as fast as Katy Perry changes her hairstyle.

(or Mel Raisin 😊😊)

The rest of the day was spent with Danni taking us through Google Sites. I have some experience using sites but it was great having some sandpit time. The tips on this slide are fantastic, especially the size for headers and buttons.

In anticipation of the opportunity to do some creating, I had brought along a new Sharp Reading resource on Insects. We have been able to create our own site which we will be able to use for half our class for reading next week. It was great to be working on it with my fab work wife. Angela hasn't had a lot of time on creating sites and I think she found it helpful.

It was also interesting learning about Dung Beetles. We aren't quite happy with it but the bones are there. A bit of tweaking and we will be away.

Our Site

What do you think about it? What would you suggest?