Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Five

Visible Learning

Creating visible learning is a critical part of the Manaiakalani pedagogy; creating transparency between us as teachers, the students, whanau, and the community in order to develop strong partnerships between the school, and learners.

Teaching is a more collaborative process than ever before, and we should be making an effort to include as many relevant parties as we can in the process; by including people we can share the responsibility for learning - a problem shared is a problem halved, so to speak.

"It is our job to get inside the learner's mind. Not the learner's job to get inside ours”

Creating learning opportunities that are effective across our learners lives means we make learning accessible, available, and in advance. Nothing happens by surprise, students are aware of learning intentions, outcomes, and of the tasks they will be working on.

Feeds strongly into the feedback/feedforward elements through the use of comments & sharing on Google, and blogging our work (both students and teachers)

Multimodal Learning

- Priority Goals 

- Engagement

- Personalised Learning

- Accelerated achievement 

- Empowerment

Creating engagement is critical to learning, and so the more personalised, and relevant information is a powerful tool; it is also critical for student’s information literacy, understanding how many different types of texts, and styles of presenting information. By empowering our students with information literacy through a variety of text types, and multimodal learning we give them confidence not only to tackle the work they do in class, but also to become life-long learners who are confident navigating the contemporary world of information.

Our class sites are the first port-of-call for creating an engaging place for our student’s learning; in order to do this we need to be creating multi-modal designs for them to engage with.

We design these sites with the following in mind; 

- Engagement

- Accessibility

- Empowerment and agency (making choices about their learning)

- Cognitive complex 

- Personalisation, and differentiation

- Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Multimodal Designs used for behavioural engagement & Multi-textural design for cognitive engagement

For me to focus on;

Finding ways to separate tasks into smaller chunks

Offer greater variety of texts, not just variation of activity options

Multi-textual Learning

Along the lines of T-Shaped literacy, multi-textual learning is built around the idea that we don’t teach to text; we teach to theme or a structured set of ideas. By using a variety of texts from multiple perspectives/contexts we give students a wider array of information from which to draw conclusions;

Main text (w/ identified theme)- the focal point of the teaching, and the one which we use as the fundamental gatekey to the learning.

Complementary texts - texts which are similar in idea, theme and/or reading level to support information.

Scaffolded text - a text which is chosen for the purpose of supporting students who are finding reading the main/complementary texts difficult. 

Challenging text - texts which will challenge pre-existing ideas, ideas within the text, or perhaps cognitively challenging by being more in-depth, or a more difficult reading level (which can also require some support and scaffolding for students to read)

Learner selected text- gives students ownership over their learning, and also allows them to exercise their own research skills, and choose texts which are interesting and relevant to their own interests.

“Identifying what is an appropriately challenging text is a very complex undertaking as it is not just determined by quantifiable features such as lexiles, but by multifarious factors including students’ prior knowledge and interest in the topics at hand, their motivation to read, the extent to which the task is purposeful (and they see it as purposeful). We believe that one affordance of text sets, as opposed to single texts, is that the range of texts used increases the likelihood that all students will find at least one text that is challenging and all students will find at least one text that is accessible. Text sets might therefore be seen to spread the risk that one text would be too easy or too hard. Achieving the balance between high and deep, wide and narrow is likewise a very fine balancing act, and what is the appropriate balance is always contingent on the students’ strengths and needs and the purpose and context.” (Wilson and Jesson, 2019)

Google Sites

I've been very familiar with Google Sites over the last 4 years working at PES, but understanding the process of creating one which is multimodal and multi-textual has been an awesome challenge - here is one I created today as an example of what can be accomplished using Google Sites; following the Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share the site is simple; three learning areas, with a variety of texts, tasks and activities for the students to complete, and to share their learning with their classmates, and the wider community