Empowering: Learners, Teachers... and Me!

Connecting with Manaiakalani

We had the fabulous privilege to have Dorothy Burt leading us today. I always find that her perspective serves as a bit of a recharge.

Empowered

Learners and Teachers

Each of the 11 Manaiakalani communities has there own "why".

It began with the word "agency"... but that doesn't work within some of our communities, as the agencies that whanau are used to equate to various government Agencies... which equate to also turning their life upside down. Whanau interpretation is more important than ours.

It's important to not slip into a deficit model when talking about our communities. Despite the housing shortages and financial difficulties. Despite the outside influences that are impacting and adding stress.

5+ a day

Creating a dialogue with our kids, to develop their oral language, by bouncing the conversation backwards and forwards 5+ times. (Just like we want to create a thread with our blogging). This is a great strategy to combat the low oral language that our akonga arrive at our door with. By having deliberate conversations with the children we are effecting change in a positive way for them.

Google Forms

We went through a Chalk n talk to create a Google Form. It was great to be forced into amping up the use of it, rather than sticking to the tried and true. We created pathways etc, which was good to actually get stuck in and done.

Google My Maps

I'd never seen or used this before. pins can be dropped on actual maps, then pathways can by mapped, with distances measured etc.

Could use it at the beginning of the year to get kids to locate where they're from. Houses or countries.

Google Sheets

Protecting cells

Super Sheets! Using the Explore tool to work for you, creating graphs etc.

Tips & Tricks

• You can freeze more than one row by selecting the row first and then freeze up to row.... You can also "grab" the grey line and drag it to where to freeze to.
• Resize columns by highlighting the range. Then go to the top... double click on the blue line that appears. It'll allocate width due to length of word.

Getting Creative with Google Sheets

• Split name Add-on... when you have both names in one cell, you can split them into two columns (first and last names)
• Crop sheet Add on - to delete all the extra blank cells in a sheet, so that focus is drawn to what you're dealing with.
• Filtering for effective workflow and saving to utilise them
• Conditional formatting
• SPARKLINE adds a visual line to
• Macro Recorder... formatting a sheet and recording that, so that you can apply the same formatting to another sheet.

Students carry out a statistical inquiry about their blog.

Open a spreadsheet and gather some data.

What opportunities/provocations are there for 2020?

• Who would benefit from doing the DFI next year? 
• Whoever is new to the Takitini Team!
• Whakatau Leader, to ensure that the pedagogy is embedded within the Whakatau team.
• To quote Brene Brown... I need to step into the arena! 
• I'm interested in applying for Google Class on Air for next year.
• I want to consolidate some of the systems that hav'nt been working and have them more efficient to hit the ground running. 
• Amp up creativity.