Dorothy led us in a session to explore beneath the floorboards of the Manaiakalani kaupapa: Making Teaching and Learning Visible. In the simplest terms “Can we see it or not”? Learning must be visible for students and whānau at home. But it is a two-way street because teachers need to have visibility of students’ mahi and that of other teachers. The default is “visible in the Manaiakalani kaupapa” of day-to-day teaching and learning including planning, process, assessment outcomes and reflections. A powerful analogy that really resonated with me was Dorothy’s use of the image of a fenced Council walkway to emphasise that:
Multimodal Affordances
Exploring Manaiakalani Teacher Sites
After Vicki took us through a Chalk ‘n Talk with Google Sites we had the opportunity to explore Angela Moala’s site and the multitext database. The database is a fabulous resource for curating and ‘borrowing’ text sets across clusters and year levels. I was particularly interested in Robyn Anderson’s choice of an “anchor” or main text in only audio mode with supplementary print and video texts. I like that the learning design may intentionally foreground an audio experience to potentially free up cognitive resources to focus on meaning making (and potentially note taking). It would be interesting to capture teacher’s rationale for their multimodal (and other) choices of the texts in the sets.
Create
The culmination of today’s session was using our Google Sites and knowledge of text sets to create our own site. I joined Makoare’s bubble and have started a text set resource featuring Māui me te Rā:
I to found the visibility resonating with me. Too often we don't realise or just don't know what might be barriers for our whanau to relating better to their tamariki learning journey. It is obvious to us 'once' it has been shown. We need to be proactively aware of how to remove barriers for all.
ReplyDeleteKia ora Naomi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the link to the work of Richard Mayer, this is a good point and we may add it to the content for future cohorts. I'm really enjoying having you in the DFI this term, and appreciate your research experience, I can see some opportunities for collaboration in the future!
Vicki
Yes, for sure Vicki, opportunities for collaboration would be great!
DeleteHi Naomi
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing those links to Richard Mayers and Gunter Kres. I think there are a lot of elements to consider with class site design, Mayers has some good basic principles.
I liked his idea for the Pre-Training Principle. I can see plenty of potential with this concept for creating learning resources to start the school year.
His approach challenged me to the Redundancy Principle. I thought it was better to have some supporting text or instructions to accompany any narration or graphics. I’m thinking of the number of sites where teachers have resources, but it’s unclear what learners are supposed to do with them, fine if the teacher is in the class talking you through, but that is not always the case. So I guess it’s about getting the balance right.
I’m sure we’re all guilty of having too much crammed into a lesson or slide deck. Once I'm on a roll with developing learning resources, I often don’t know when to stop. I noticed how much I had to chop out and how succinct I needed to be when creating the content for the upcoming Summer Learning Journey lessons. It really made me think about what was important, what had to be there, and what could be left out, especially in the video.
I searched Gunter Kres, and that led me to this wonderful online MOOC resource
Kress and van Leeuwen on Multimodality. I’m definitely bookmarking that one :)
I find it fascinating to think about how we respond semantically to information, what can draw students in, and what can overwhelm them.
I’m reading Joseph Henrich’s book at the moment The Weirdest People in the World WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Henrick is an anthropologist, so much of the content is about how societies develop and evolve. For example, he highlights literacy as being a defining moment in the westernised world. I never knew that mainstream literacy for the general population started around 1600 as people read the bible. It’s a fascinating read.
I’m so looking forward to being able to connect with you more often and have these kinds of discussions when you’re part of our team, Naomi :).