Jane Clifford Professional Blog

Can you see it or not? Is learning visible to the learner, the whanau....everyone? Thinking is that children have had their success limited  due to lack of visibility of learning. Children have succeeded if they can read the teacher's mind - worked out the learning as not fully visible for everyone.  Children need opportunity to use their cultural capital in their learning. Manaiakalani believe all learning presented should be visible. That includes planning and process for assessment. No Surprises!!! Children need to know this. Even details around cross country planning. Does this need to be private.   HAVE CONVERSATION ABOUT WHAT GENUINELY NEEDS TO BE PRIVATE. Using sites - learning Accessible, Available, and in Advance. Puts an interactive whiteboard in the hands of every child. Insert videos. Plus Hapara is visibility for teachers. Links on slide show. Visible learning teacher to teacher TAI links to MIT Teachers Multi Modal Visibal Learning Multi Modal The ...

This week we have been leaning about Google Sheets, and forms. Using Google forms as a front end we can collect data from a questionnaire and present it in wonderful and interesting ways. Google Forms ideas: Pick a path, Make quiz, surveys, spelling tests -if you set up the sheets to mark with conditional formatting. Google Sheets ideas: Graphing any data collected. For maths- statistics or for data that might motivate or encourage students. So many functions for formatting and taking out data you need.  I most love the function to turn sheets into graphs. Here I have put data from number of blog post for a student, and entered into sheets. Then using the 'Explore' tool to create a graph. My hope is this will reinforce statistics skills and encourage the student to examine data relating to her in an authentic manner. In this case it may encourage students to blog more often and check her comments. Google Maps ideas:  Plot birthplaces, holidays, show community spaces. Cros...

This week's focus has been   Create &  media.  Dorothy Burt showed us this excerpt from a Heart of the Matter film. A great reminder create is not just digital.             Here is a document that was a collaboration for Manaiakalani of what create can look like.                Exploring Create in the Manaiakalani Programme One thing I created today.. Using Google Slides for 'Pick a path' I would be very keen for my students to use this to create their own pick a path stories as well as quizzes to show what they have learned and to share their learning with others. This is moving to 'redefinition' of learning tasks in the SAMMR model. Here is the beginnings of my Upstander -bystander quiz/ pick a path slideshow. It is a work in progress, so may change. And as I have learned, as it is embedded, it will update as I add slides. This is a good way for students to be ablke to publish their work on their ...

It was great to be back at St Francis of Assisi for the second day of DFI.   Dorothy's talk today was on Effective Practice.   Recognise what is Effective Practice in your school. There will be programs within our local school context that are well aligned with High Leverage Practices. For example, PB4L, DMIC, Learning through play. Amplify Effective Practice. Using affordances of digital technology to enhance the high leverage practices. For example: Collaborating on shared documents; finding more authentic texts digitally; ease of using multi-modal reading material. Turbocharge effective Practice. Using the affordances of technologies to transform the way we learn, and to offer new experiences and opportunities. using technology we can remove barriers for children to learn and find new ways of learning. Find new solutions to problems. Reflection for my practice. Today I discovered a lot of digital tools that will make me as a teacher, more efficient in my administr...

When I say I work at a 'Manaiakalani' School, I am often asked what that means.  I have to admit I did not have a very good answer.  Link to the Manaiakalani story . Manaiakalani Where did the name come from? The local Ka ū matua was asked to gift a name to the Trust. When the purpose of the Trust was explained to him, after some time he returned with a Hawaiian word Manaiakalani.  Manaiakalani is the name of a star line, translated "The Hook from Heaven" and the name of the demi-god Māui Tikiti a Taranga’s fishhook, which he used to pull up a giant fish at the bottom of the ocean – a metaphor for the discovery of new islands at the bottom of the earth. It’s also a perfect metaphor for our journey of discovery using digital learning tools as a hook and a guide to deliver the knowledge our children need to be successful citizens of the 21st century. The Hawaiians used the Manaiakalani Star line to navigate to NZ and back from Hawaii. This idea of supporting our student...