DFI Week 3

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 make sure that we reach as many students as possible using different ways to share e.g using a YouTube clip about a topic that will enable those students who perhaps do not have the prior knowledge that you would expect before reading a text. This supports them in their learning.

Another theme of today was collaboration and being able to share resources with other educators. We were introduced to a database where we can access and share resources from other teachers:

Multi-text database

Together with colleagues we created a Google Site. Ours was one that we can use to share some of the learning that we have found very useful during the course:

NBC's DFI

I am excited to transfer this new learning into my classroom. The imminent arrival of a number of I-Pads in our classroom will mean that the students will be able to access the multi modal and rewindable aspect of digital technology with much more ease.