Uru Manuka PLG for Manaiakalani

Uru Manuka PLG Friday week 4

Every term I am fortunate to attend a PLG for Manaiakalani with other lead teachers in the Uru Manuka cluster. This Session we spent looking at Five dysfunctions of a team (which is a book about leading others and how to work together), knowing our learners and the majority of the day was spent on Multi modal reading (what it looks like, how to achieve it and the impact it has on our learners when we get it right!).

I have copied the relevant slides about Multi Modal Reading as a way to use UDL from the presentation to show you the main pointers that I came away with from the day.

I came away from the session with a bit of a buzz. This way of teaching Reading creates a large opportunity for students to learn in other curriculum areas, by using reading strategies to unpack ideas in science, social students and even the arts. In a packed curriculum this makes a huge amount of sense to me. Also, it is a cool way to teach to students interests! It is time consuming to create (for sure), but when we have a bank to share from I can see how far we can get!

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini ke.

My strength does not come from me alone but also from others. (Cooperation of many can bring best results).
It is important to note that text in this model is anything that conveys a message i.e. audio, video, visual, written form. Also that you need around 4-6 texts per subject.

Another good thing to look at when we are designing L.O.'s are the words in the foundation document for Learn, Create and Share.

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I am looking forward to our school session on this in week 6 - and can not wait to get stuck in to this for next year! 

Matific - Kelsey

Last week while I was off… I met with the Matific guru Inba to secure a free month on Matific for my math class.

The program is super easy to use, links to curriculum and from what I am seeing the students are in love with it! They are going on it at home and are motivated to get the top number of stars for each learning game they are playing.

This is what the students see when they log on:

I love the language of math missions and the layout is clear and easy to follow - students are not overwhelmed with what activity to chose or spend learning time deciding what to go on. They also collect monster cards when they have achieved a number of points - a sort of reward program within the game.

The episodes are colourful and interactive. The programing is easy and up to date digitally (knowing what I know from my UI/UX design partner). It has won a number of awards for visionary pedagogy and best practice. Also, you can send home reports to parents and assign homework and school work on awesome islands.

Here is an overview of the program:

The thing that I love most about it is that you can preview the episodes before assigning them to the students. This way you can see exactly what the students will be doing and therefore what they will learn or practise through the episode.

Here is a link so that you can have a free trial and play with the program.

https://www.matific.com/nz/en-nz/resources