Day 3: Digital Fluency Intensive

What a fun day exploring the Create side of Manaiakalani, as Gherard and Dorothy led us through this session.  Dorothy encouraged us to weave creativity in and throughout our lessons every week.  With an emphasis on using the multiple senses, she explained that Create is all about the "hook" - the hook for our young people to stay captivated and engaged in their learning.  As a result, I have been thinking of ways to give my 5-year olds more opportunities to express themselves creatively with less direction from myself. 

Here are a few quotes that resonated with me today from Dorothy's presentation...

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" 

Kohl, 2008 

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such 

a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” 

John Dewey

We also got introduced to Live-streaming and YouTube, learning how to create channels and playlists.  We were able to get our feet wet in Google Draw and Slides - learning how to draw self-portraits and match colourings from images, as well as getting familiar with animating slides.  Google Draw was especially helpful as I began to think of ways that I could have my students draw pictures related to what they are learning (e.g. different shapes, etc.)  As my students are getting familiar with the iPads, I will look into doing a session with a few of them and practising drawing in Explain Everything.  Here is my self-portrait (in the making of course) with a missing nose... still figuring out how to do that!

I made a super cool "About Me" gadget for this blog - of which I have been curious about how-to-do since I began blogging.  I plan to create an additional button for a quick link to my class blog.

I also got to create my very own digital Pepeha which I will present next week in the sharing time (coming soon).  Learning to pronounce the words correctly will be this week's challenge!