Angela Hamilton Blog

Today was all about making our teaching and learning visible for our students and whānau. The importance of this is so that the students know what success for them will look like. The purpose of visible teaching is that there should be no surprises. Planning should be available, accessible and in advance. Unless information NEEDS to be kept private then everyone should be able to access it. Today was a valuable opportunity to revisit the class site that I have been working on. It is still under construction at this point as we do not have devices in the classroom that the children are able to use to access it. I have been adding things to it recently in order to familiarise myself with how we will make it happen when the time comes. My goals were to make the site more user friendly for my students by making the buttons a focus and to make sure the site was suitable for using with i-pads. I could do this thanks to using an i-pad from St Francis of Assisi to check on what I was ...

My reflection on the week that has been: I have revived my class blog which has been a bit quiet lately. Commented on blog posts of other students in our school. I have been planning with Sisomo in mind and putting more of it on slides. This week: We are teaching our students to be Cybersmart rather than cybersafe this is because "safe" can have negative connotations. What's more being cyber smart means that we know how to deal with potential issues rather than be guaranteed to avoid all issues always. This reminds me of listening to John Parsons from Simulate 2 Educate who tells educators and parents the same thing. We looked around a Hapara dashboard which I have used in a very limited way previously but it was great to see the different applications available for making available and unavailable sites for students at different times. You are able to check what sites students are currently on or have been on for the last 15 minutes. Because my students will be w...

I always enjoy joining the hangout with Dorothy first thing in the morning. Today she shared with us the importance of the Share step of Learn, Create, Share. Giving students an opportunity to share their learning and creativity with a genuine audience is such an important part of the process. I was particularly struck with the student voice around this and how their blog posts facilitate conversations and bonding with family about what they have been doing at school. from  https://sites.google.com/manaiakalani.org/dfi/connecting-with-manaiakalani/share-pedagogy Too often I ask my own children what they have done and school and get a grunt of "Nothing" in return. The beauty of a blog is that this can prompt rich conversation around what our children are creating as a result of their learning. I like the idea of both the presenter and the audience being genuine and how the global nature of blogging means that students can read blogs to see what students have been doing...

A focus to start off the day with why creativity is important to capture hearts and minds with a hook and inspire students creations. We looked back 60 years to the teaching and learning of Elwyn S Richardson. I have read this book previously but it reminded and inspired me to think more about the students ability to create while they are learning. The teacher becomes a facilitator of student led agency. While we are directing students in order to cover parts of the curriculum we will get a lot more engagement when students themselves are asking the questions and pursuing the answers. We heard about the concept of Sisomo (sight, sound and motion) and how the more we use all of these the wider our net will be cast in regards to capturing the hearts and minds of the students. They in turn should be able to learn, create and share in a multitude of different ways. The main take away message for me today was that the easiest way to engage, encourage and facilitate learning is to m...