Activity 15: Summarising your Postgraduate Learning Journey and Planning for the Future

Create a blog post where you reflect on your personal 32 week learning journey through the whole postgraduate programme. Identify and evaluate your most significant learning outcomes and outline your future goals by mirroring them against the Registered Teacher Criteria and e-learning. If you want, you can choose to focus just 4-6 out of the 12 criteria. End your blog post by sharing your future dreams of your professional practice.

What have I learnt & So what?

The final post! (At least the final post that will be assessed!) 

The past 32 weeks of the Digital and Collaborative Learning Postgraduate Course have flown by. Partly due to the wealth of information and new ideas that I have been exposed to, partly to do with assignment due dates, and partly to do with teacher workload!

Whilst I feel like a lot my reflection for the first part of the course was done here, I have learnt more about ethics and the use of social media in the classroom over the last few weeks.

I’ve learnt about myself as a professional that my moral judgements are a result of my upbringing and societal factors and that these influence my decisions and actions. I feel that these factors have had a huge impact in the development of my character, which in turn impacts on the type of teacher that I am and what I bring to the profession.

I've also learnt that social media is a great tool that can be utilised for teaching and learning, as well as networking. There are so many ethical dilemmas that can occur through the use of social media, so in order to implement it more into my classroom, I would need to do some research - ideally by using social media (possibly twitter?). I would need to put it out to other educators by actually asking them how they use social media and what challenges did they encounter, as well as how did they overcome those challenges. Hopefully doing so will give me more confidence and support to trial this in my classroom, and then share this back to professional community, again via social media.

And as for trends and issues... there are SO many happening in education right now!! How do you keep up?! Perhaps via social media?!...

Criteria 4: How do I/can I utilise e-learning to further my professional learning and development?

Signing up to the Postgraduate Certificate I had no idea what I was in for. I originally thought that it would be very tool orientated and after having to make videos nearly every week I started to feel like the course was well and truly over my head and I was surely sinking, yet in some strange way I wanted to get better at making videos and using all these tools! The fire had been lit!

I WANTED to become better at utilising e-learning in my classroom, especially since I was undertaking my first digital class in 2015.

Figure 1: The Aurasma app
could be integrated into the
classroom

The Mind Lab opened my eyes to a whole different way of looking at how use digital resources. For example, being shown how to use Aurasma, I took this back to school and asked my students to draw their name and incorporate cultural patterns into it. They then had to record their mihi and we attached the video to their picture. Whilst it wasn’t overly successful do to time constraints, I did trial something that could have had potential to work. This has prompted me to reflect on this lesson and consider what I would do differently next time.

e-learning has also prompted me into be more proactive in sharing good resources that I have found online with my colleagues. I’ve used other educators expertise, such as: TeachTechPlay and Kasey Bell at Shake up Learning, as well as Free Technology for Teachers to help build my own professional knowledge and skills outside of school hours. I am a lifelong learner myself, and I will continue to actively seek out resources and strategies that will help further my professional learning and development.

Figure 2:
Twitter logo

My next step in this area is to use social media more effectively by joining twitter so that I can network with other education professionals and share ideas with a global audience. Then I will begin to look at strategies for how I can implement social media within my classroom.

Criteria 5: How do I/can I use e-learning to support my colleagues to strengthen teaching and learning in my setting?

Whilst not the ICT Lead Teacher (although I am on the team, and am currently the Acting ICT Lead Teacher), I have been involved in supporting my colleagues strengthen their teaching and learning at my school. I have supported them with technical issues, as well as ethical dilemmas regarding social media.

I have promoted and encouraged my colleagues to participate in digital workshops and have given guidance on what would be most useful for them.

After trialling many of the ideas that I have been introduced to at the Mind Lab, I hope to extend my leadership skills by considering what will work best for teachers and students in my school and hold workshops or staff meetings to share this knowledge with them.

Criteria 6: How can e-learning support and extend what I am trying to achieve when planning programmes of work for groups and individuals?

The integration of digital technology has made me reflect on my teaching and planning. I have seen first hand how digital devices can support and extend student achievement, not to mention motivate them! For example, I used booktracks to help motivate my struggling readers and writers. After some dramatisation, we wrote pieces about World War 1 using google docs. My students then published their writing using booktracks with sound effects. One of my struggling writers was the first one to complete this piece of writing, and as a result of using the digital tools he informed me that he “used to hate writing, but now I like it”.

There are so many e-tools available but it’s about knowing our learners so that we can cater for the needs whether they be working as a class, in groups or individually.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve begun to trial flipping the classroom with my students watching maths videos. The feedback that I’ve had from the kids is positive and they love being able to go back and watch the video when they aren’t sure, can’t remember or if I’m out of the classroom. This is proving to be successful, and I’d like to continue it, maybe even extend it into other curriculum areas.

The Mind Lab has made me challenge traditional ways of teaching and learning, as well as making me reflect on my own personal teaching philosophy and pedagogy. It has made me critically look at digital technology as a tool to enhance teaching and learning programmes, and motivated to use the SAMR model when planning my lessons. The Mind Lab has made me consider modifying tasks and encourage collaboration within my classroom more often.

Criteria 11: How can I use e-learning tools to gather and use assessment information in ways that advance the learning of my ākonga/students?

The use of collaboration is a key way of advancing the learning of my students. This is an area that I need to continue to model and develop in my current class. Google drive has a number of possibilities as a way of giving feedback and gaining assessment. Student voice can be captured using voice recorder apps, and this can then be uploaded onto the students individual blogs where it can be commented on by peers, whanau, teachers….anyone! This feedback can be given instantly, and engages students in a conversation about their learning.

My professional goal is to operate an effective digital learning environment in my classroom. I think this postgraduate programme has certainly helped me on my way to achieving this.

Some key areas that I would really like to focus on now are:

• 

  Figure 3: Goal setting (Bernardo, 2015)

  using the SAMR model - continue to use this when planning lessons and move into the modification and redefinition phases
• using social media more effectively - for professional development (twitter) and to enhance student learning, as well as to engage our schools community
• stepping out of my comfort zone more often - by taking risks and trialling new concepts, such as blended learning and design thinking
• using my class blog to share more frequently and develop a google site for my class
• tinkering more!

and maybe... after having a break, I may even consider further tertiary study!

References:

 
Aurasma. (2015). Aurasma. Retrieved from http://www.aurasma.com/#/whats-your-aura
Bernardo, E. (2015). A Simple Guide to Goal Setting. Retrieve from http://emeroy.com/blog/my-simple-5-step-guide-to-personal-goal-setting/

 Ministry of Education. (n.d). Enabling e-learning. Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning

Twitter. (2015). Welcome to Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/