Building multimodal and collaborative google sites

DFI day 3

The focus of today's learning was about being collaborative with an emphasis relating to creativity. This was a fun filled day of learning. We began the day again in a google hangout with Dorothy Burt. Dorothy discussed the significance of 'Hanga' and the importance of the way we hook our learner's. She spoke about how as teachers we may need more than carisma to sustain the engagement of our learners.

I found it interesting when lifelong learning was discussed and the relationship of fun things that are part of preschool care being embedded in our ongoing learning. Our ultimate goal should be to emcompass a world full of playful creative people constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their learning communities.

Creativity empowers learners. Creating is fun. There are many exciting possibilities when we create. This is an insight that is for all, and shouldn't just be for our Early childhood and younger learners. This was proven to us today when we as adults were given the opportunity to create. Create has always had a place in the NZ Curriculum. We should be encouraged to include this in our planning: Have we had the chance to be creative this week? Have we given our students the chance to be creative today?

Dorothy speaks of the importance of re-introducing creativity in our schools. She believes that the death of creativity wasn’t simply through one thing...not national standards, nor a particular government. With create there are many paths. Creating with our feet on the sports field and on the dance floor....then there's creating in the brain which can lead to teachers planning amazing things. Some teachers may expect this to be retained within the brain, however we sometimes need a congruent: our hands or mouth to assist this. We should be moving away from being consumers of content into being creators. As creators our learners need choice, appropriate information and knowledge, skills, scaffolding, as well as building capacity. We need to find ways to connect with our learners through sight, sound and emotion. This is where being multimodal and collaborative assists. The learn, create, share model shouldn't be learn, google, share. We need to encourage creativity as finding new paths.

An important focus is that the device itself isn’t the sole motivation/ engaging factor. We need to create exciting activities. Our priority should be engagement and begin with hooking the students in.
Wolf Fisher encourages us to first hook students behaviourally and next cognitively.  We need to provide multimodal activities for the purpose of engaging and deepening understanding.

We need to support students with what they need to know in ways that are effective. What engages one learner doesn’t necessarily engage another. The default shouldn't be us and how we learn. We need to provide lots of options and eliminate the default. Good learning shows we experience learning through multi modes. The purpose of creating multimodal sites may be to encourage excitement for students. The site we created collaboratively today sustained excitement for us as teachers. Here is the link to this site: