DFI Week 3 - Media

Today we talked about how important the 'create' opportunities in the learning environment are to students and that often this is the part that gets left behind. We need to refocus on this aspect of learning.

It's all about the HOOK and engaging our students so that they find the academic side of things exciting both behaviorally and cognitively. Young people want to create, and this is what excites and empowers them.

"Creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators."

Dorothy reminded us about a documentary called 'The heART of the matter' which I have watched before. I remember how inspired I felt, how ripped off I felt because that was not my school experience and the questions it raised as to how I could do this for my current students. I want my students to be saying things like, "... school is wonderful and I just want to be there." I know this is a good conversation to have with my team to see what opportunities we can create for our students to become better problem solvers, communicators, and collaborators.

 The Harpara hot tip helped me realise how to drag priority learners to the forefront. Also creating groups will be very useful in our studio when we are working specifically with our literacy or maths groups. This will make it easier to see what they are doing and use the guided session a little better.

I became familiar with google draw during lockdown while trying to create presentations for students that they could complete at home but it was very dependent on what device they had access to and when we got back to school I found out that you could not access this on the iPads. So it went to the back of my mind. But trying again today I think it could be a very useful tool and I am going to try and find out how to utilise it more in the studio.

I think it could be a very useful tool for a creative activity based around our science learning making Battle-vore cards as we learn about habitats and foodchains.

I think the main thing that I realised about 'media' is how much we use it in our studio and how useful it is to help with making learning more engaging for our students. What they can see in a well thought out and presented video is ten times more engaging than listening to the teacher drone on about the same things, plus they can do it in their own time and rewind it whenever they need to.

Today I learned how to add the whistles and bells to the slideshows that we use for independent learning in our studio. I can now easily add sound. video and hyperlinks to our slideshows making the learning more accessible, rewindable, and engaging.



I also learned about creating a playlist in YouTube. We use a lot of YouTube clips to hook our learners into our writing, inquiry, and maths by putting the video into our Google Slide deck but the problem was that all the ads and other, sometimes more interesting, videos popped up enticing them away from the intended viewing. I will be using the playlist feature more to see if we can stop this from happening.