Designing Learning with the End in Mind

 This tool is designed to draw together the High Leverage Practices, the Digital Affordances and recommendations from the Milestone Reports that Woolf Fisher have produced for Manaiakalani over the past few years. It also shows the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy used my schools in the Manaiakalani Programme. 

Reading - Looking at opinions

This week we have been working in thinking groups to look at two different opinions. Since we have come back from lockdown it has been important to re-teach co-operative and collaborative skills as we get used to be ing back in the classroom.

For this learning I chose a context that all students are familiar with, the end of year school prize giving. We looked at 2 different texts, one written for students by Kiwi Kids News and the other article from the NZ herald.

We followed parts of the reciprocal teaching model and pulled out the vocabulary that we needed to explore and then we could use in making a decision for ourselves. We collected vocabulary and ideas on post it notes to pull together the ideas from each group.

We posted our ODL to our blogs once it was completed.

Google Meet

Room 5 had a Google Meet every morning during lockdown. As we were still in the process of getting 1:1 devices for my year 4 class, it was tricky to get everyone up and running. This day we managed to get 21 out of 28 students on-line together. We used the Meet to share our experiences, check in on the previous days learning and discuss the current learning tasks. Everyone got a chance to speak and we were able to share artwork (and new babies) over the Meet. There was some good contextual learning about lighting, sound, and framing that came up as we got better about meeting online.

High Leverage Practises

Love listening to Aaron Wilson about how we can best get shift in reading with our students. Starting with a provocation and making sure we provide lots of opportunities to read and discuss texts. Thinking about the activities I use in the classroom and how to get my students engaged in the text enough to talk about it in a discussion.

VR in the classroom

Robyn and I have been lucky enough to have been invited to work with Yvonne from Auckland University's bio engineering department on some Virtual Reality research.


Robyn and Yvonne have developed the content around our current study and have created amazing VR tasks for the students. We used 2 different formats - Google Cardboard and iPads to deliver the content. Yvonne and her team collected all sorts of data from the sessions including heart rates, balance and before and after content knowledge. It has been fantastic to be involved and I look forward to seeing the results!
A really excellent opportunity lies ahead for our students 'creating to learn' using.

ISTE - Feeding back

This week I ran a session at staff meeting on FAKE NEWS. I was able to repurpose the slides used in the session attended at ISTE to facilitate this, (many thanks to the presenters who allowed this)
One of the main activities we did was play a game created by Maggie Farley a veteran journalist. The game is called Factitious and staff were challenged to identify between fake and real news reports.

Give it a go for yourself here

Creativity Empowers Learning

During our Manaiakalani staff meeting this term we were reminded of all the wonderful creative things we do to engage our students with their learning, and the way our digital tools can help us.

Here are some of the gifs I made...

What is a Futurist?

A group of Manaiakalani educators met Roger Dennis for a discussion about trends for the future.
Roger was really interesting to listen to as he has done work all over the world looking at patterns and trends for the future.
While not an exact science it was fascinating to hear what could be coming in the next 10 years.
As educators Roger believes that the skills our students need most for the future are 'soft skills' - collaboration, empathy and communication.
A huge thank you to Pat for organising and hosting this event.

Link to Roger's site