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.