Digital Fluency Intensive - Session Seven: Devices

Ubiquitous

I was not really familiar with this word before engaging with Manaiakalani pedagogy; it means to be present, and found everywhere. It relates to how we connect to our learners, and our communities. It became particularly pertinent to our success when we went into lock down in 2021 and our hybrid learning models during 2022; we should be able to offer our students learning experiences whenever, and wherever and they are, even if we aren’t in the classroom. Removing the barriers of time and place.

We also work to embrace the rewindable learning model which can allow students to control the pace at which they work through their learning; giving students the opportunity to pause, rewind, fast forward through their learning is a valuable tool, and works to give students more ownership of their own learning.

Ubiquitous learning opportunities are increasingly valuable for our students; they do not have the same exposure to language, and literacy as other students, so the more opportunities we give them, through things like the Summer Learning Journey, we see great improvements, and maintenance of the learning they have done.

Cybersmart

Empowering our learners as connected and confident decisions makers in the online space. We talk about Smart, not Safe. The internet should not be seen as a scary place, so by focusing on the positive we empower students to make good decisions when they’re online.

“The new digital citizenship takes students beyond the protective, to the proactive” (Team ISTE, 2017)

By helping students to understand how to learn, create and share in the digital world, in a smart way, we empower them to navigate, share, learn, and create, within it, with confidence. In a digital age it is really important that they understand the permanent nature of the internet, for example, understanding that the things they do online have longevity etc.

Manaiakalani One:One

Through the lens of Partnership, Participation & Protection (Waitangi framework).

Today we focus on…

 Partnership element;

- Ako is a whanau or community experience

- Engagement in the decision making process eg. Kawa of Care

- Engagement through device ownership

- Every learner can participate

- Every teacher can be supported to become Digitally Fluent when all devices are the same

- Equity; all students feel part of the collective by using the same devices

Protection element;

This should all happen behind the scenes

Partnership with Hapara to design Teacher Dashboard to make all digital learning visible

Partnership with N4L and Linewize for filtering the internet so that students don’t need to worry too much about the safety elements of their internet browsing.

Student Devices

Today we worked on the devices our students used, and familiarised ourselves with how to operate the devices. This is incredibly important because a lot of our students may not be fluent with them, and if we don’t know how to use them expertly we are hindering our students ability to explore, and navigate their devices on their own, post-teaching. If we are fluent with these devices we give our students the best opportunities to Learn, Create and Share to their full capability.

We explored both Chromebooks and iPads; I’ve become very familiar with chromebooks as they have been a part of my teaching journey since the beginning, however the iPad activity I found very useful; the se of the Explain Everything app has a wide range of possibilities; it's a great way of recording the interactive processes used in maths for example. This has encouraged me to think of new ways I could use this, particularly when working with maths groups, as we can work on the whiteboard, but also record our process in order to create rewindable learning experiences for our students;

Present problem -> Open EE -> Record whiteboard -> Problem solve w/ students -> Share video with students & post on class site/in slides.

This also applies to Screencastify/Quicktime screen recordings. These are incredibly useful tools for talking our students through instructional sequences and to provide rewindable learning for our students which is guided.

Screencastify has an awesome feature, which is that it allows you to insert questions into the video. These are interactive, and can help me to understand better, which areas of the instructions may have been difficult for them, or ones which they already have a good grasp on. These forms of formative feedback will be invaluable, as they do not require a lot of effort from students, they will engage with them because they are interactive, and the data is collected for me to refer back to, in order to better guide my practice.

Here is a small example of how this works;