Today for our Maniakalani Workshop with Mark Maddren we focussed on how we can use our everyday lessons and units and extend how we engage the children with a "Turbocharge" use of technology.

Myself along with Becky and Brittany from my team decided to Turbocharge our Swimming programme. Our beginning Plan can be seen here.

There are so many new and engaging programmes you can use to enhance the learning of children. We can use the Ipads to take photos and videos of the children doing their work and use many new online tools.
The tools we thought would be great to use to enhance our children's learning at swimming were "You Tube" to look up swimming techniques, "Google Tour Builder" to show the children the beach we are going to on a school trip prior to going, to try organise a "Skype" call with Sophie Pascoe or to set up a google doc or google drawing that the children can use in reading or writing to ask other children in the school questions about their swimming or to draw different swimming pictures together. We thought these would be incredibly engaging for the children.
Another great tool we thought we could do was to take videos of the children at the pool at swimming and then showing them what they look like doing that particular skill as many of the children we are trying to teach to starfish in the pool and not lifting their feet off the ground properly.
As children are always trying to compete with each other we saw this as a good opportunity for the children to learn from pictures and videos of themselves and to compete against themselves.

Using more technology in the classroom and to Learn, Create, Share is something that I know I need to really focus on this year. I have already set up a class 'Seasaw' account and have been posting student learning on there. I have had many parents already engage with their child's learning through this and I am trying to encourage more to get on board.

2018 Teacher as Inquiry-

For my 2018 Teacher as Inquiry I worked alongside my teaching partner Becky Beattie as we were focusing on developing collaborative methods of planning, teaching and assessment within a variety of learning opportunities, with particular focus on Reading and Play based learning taken from the CAOS model.
This fit in with the Junior Syndicates Strategic goals for 2018.
 We hoped to develop and incorporate play based learning strategies and collaboration into the Reading programme to increase student engagement and social development stages.

A lot of the children in our classes lacked many key social skills. At the start of the year we selected a group of students who found engaging with play and playing alongside others more challenging and did some CAOS assessment on them. We implemented play based learning into our Reading programme and made a teacher available for social and emotional coaching to help support this.

As this was a syndicate wide goal we had some great support within the team for reflection and sharing ideas and we also had Maree Grant, an RTLB,  as our support person who gave some PD on this. We had some great discussions in her sessions with us which are recorded here.

We did a lot of reflection (See link) on how our programme was running and continued to adapt it throughout the year.  We were also able to visit some schools to observe their play based learning in action which was great to be able to see where we were on our journey.

Afyer our observations we felt we were on the right track and were able to take away a lot of new and exciting ideas that we wanted to try.

We noticed as the year went on that the children were able to sustain play of favoured and non favoured tasks for longer periods of time and they were able to solve more social problems as they went as they had more skills to deal with situations.

At the end of the year we had to share our learning with the staff which is always a nerve wracking feeling. We received a lot of positive feedback from other staff and senior management about our programmes and the positive dispositions of our children.

Our next steps are to continue to develop our play based learning into all of our programmes, including Numeracy. To continue to discuss and develop the Key Competencies from the NZC.