Supporting Connections, Learning and Whanaungatanga

Our Manaiakalani Cybersmart Learning includes supporting our young people to critically examine information online and we are enthusiastic to be piloting a media literacy programme Newshounds this term.

The programme includes a series of podcasts created and presented by Amanda Bower and Bryce Corbett. After five sessions we were excited, this week, to join Amanda online in a scheduled Google Meet. Learners shared feedback and also had the opportunity to ask questions, hearing directly from Amanda about her experiences creating the weekday news podcast, Squiz Kids Today. 

In this context it was important for Amanda to see the learners and hear what was being said in the room. All learners joined the Meet on their chromebooks and Amanda could see and hear learners as they spoke.

Being Cybersmart has empowered our young people to connect online, confidently making the transition to online learning over the past two years (see The Josh Smoothie a Technology lesson during lockdown 2020). 

This week's opportunity was also about thinking beyond video conferencing as a tool only for learning in lockdown. Using Google Meet to connect with Amanda, was an opportunity for our learners to experience how we can harness the technology to tap into the knowledge and experience of an expert. This exemplifies The Manaiakalani Programme's Learn | Ako pedagogy. Harnessing  the affordances of technologies to offer new experiences and opportunities not accessible prior to digital technology.

We often see our schools utilising local experts, parents, professionals and community members to help further learning in the classroom. How are we continuing to harness the connectivity digital technologies enable to connect with this expertise and knowledge at a distance? 

Visible and Connected

Harnessing online spaces to share and collaborate just makes sense to me especially when devices are 1:1. From 2006-2008 I facilitated in a group of schools in central Auckland and realised quickly that email updates were not going to cut it if we going to harness the digital to share and collaborate. 

As a cluster of schools we met regularly then for Cluster Shares, face-to-face opportunities designed for teachers to share their Teaching as Inquiry progress and to support digital fluency. We also quickly acknowledged the need for an online collaborative space that was visible and accessible publicly and would enable us to curate content that supported real time collaboration and rewindable learning for teachers... we even made the Ed Gazette! 

This same thinking applied when I joined the Manaiakalani Cluster in 2012 with  learners from Y5-13 shifting to 1:1 devices. Today sites are recognised as one of the KEY components of visibility. Teaching is visible and access to learning is visible ... any time, place, pace and from anyone.

Manaiakalani Google Sites for Visible Teaching and Learning

Sites support ubiquitous learning. Engaging and scaffolding how our young people Learn, Create, Share in a digital learning environment and enabling increased choice for learning outside the traditional 9-3 timetable of school.

The role of the teacher and effective practice remains a key component of teaching and learning in the digital environment. PLUS it warrants considering how as teachers we are harnessing the site in realtime i.e. How are you harnessing content on the site during your face-to-face interactions with learners, to elevate engagement, teaching conversations and scaffold the learning in new ways?

“We acknowledge also the purposeful approach to visibility of teaching, in ways likely to identify and promote effective practices.  Therefore, we recommend that this process continue, including the most recent observation data to consider the role of the teacher [highly effective teaching], the nature of the assigned tasks [SAMR], the nature of the sites accessed [rich multi modal opportunities] and the degree of student choice and collaboration.....” [options/choices (multimodal) for creation and presentation]

Rebecca Jessen (Woolf Fisher Research, Auckland University) 2014