Geeks, Gurus and Gadgets

During this year of learning for me, through the Mind Lab course, I have changed a number of elements of my professional practice. I will explore and reflect on one change that encompasses 4 of the key concepts as outlined by Hack Education. What? One of the aspects of my professional practice that I have changed is the move towards real world and authentic contexts for learning, where my students make connections with other learners both in the classroom and on a global scale. Through this learning, their digital toolkit is increasing as they find meaningful purposes for using these tools and applications. So what? Stage 1: Problem Identification I observed many of my learners, on entry into my classroom, mainly focused on the end point of learning tasks. They wanted to complete the task as quickly as they could and many wanted to hold onto their knowledge without sharing their expertise. In terms of inquiry topics, they liked to regurgitate informati...

What is my understanding of cultural responsiveness? Culturally responsive pedagogy is defined by Gay (2001, p.106) as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences and perspectives as conduits for effective teaching”. I believe the five elements Gay (2001) identifies of “knowledge about cultural diversity, the culturally integrated content in the curriculum, the development of the learning community, the ability to communicate with culturally diverse students and culturally responsive delivery of instruction” all underpin a classroom programme that values the learner and the individual. To me, successful classrooms are built on relationships, on knowing the child, their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes and their whanau and family background. Making these connections during the first term of school enable teachers to have a successful and quality learning environment with their students. I also agree with Milne (2007) when she says that cultu...

What? The trend that is most relevant to me in my teaching practice is the impact of digital learning on students, teachers and the classroom environment itself. To start this reflection, I remembered back to the beginning of my teaching career, and in my classroom, I had an old PC that no one really knew what to do with, it was unreliable and took ages to start up. Basically, it just sat in the corner, taking up space. Fast forward to about ten years ago, when the Ministry of Education was implementing ICT professional development across regions.   I was keen to be part of this initiative as I had already began blogging with my students as a way of recording their learning and sharing it with their whanau.   This began my journey into using digital learning in my classroom practice, sharing this learning with my colleagues and eventually into leading this area within our school. If you walked into my classroom today, you would see all my students fully engaged in a r...