Digital Intensive 26th May 2016

Ten years ago I attended the uLearn Conference in Rotorua, there was a wonderful presentation on the use and benefits of Google docs. At the time, the school where I taught did not have a programme where students were given access to devices. Even when Chromebooks were added to each class, with a bank of cows in each room, there was no PD on how to take advantage of Google systems. At best, teachers shared the odd teaching unit where augmentation was made to pen and paper lessons.

With a system of classroom cows students did have access to the web but they did not have devices that could be used outside the classroom and they could not be taken home. Students had little opportunity to share their work beyond the use of wall displays found in most classrooms. Students were not sharing their work, and being creative was limited to Google searches, pen, paper and occasionally PowerPoint presentations.

Awareness of the publication opportunities offered to students by sharing online was only dimly understood by staff and investigations into the wall-less classroom were considered a novelty and generally ignored or even scorned. Now, even a cursory examination of programmes such as: Kid pixs, Keynote, Framebyframe, Presi, Hyperstudio etc. offer an unlimited range of programmes aimed at engendering student creativity and promoting motivation. The purpose of these programmes is to enable students to publish their work online and more importantly to receive feedback.

The challenge here for Tamaki College is to go beyond augmentation. Augmentation is a necessary step in addressing student learning needs especially when it comes to reading skills and writing fluency but there is the opportunity to accelerate student engagement by providing real tasks or real challenges where they are motivated to improve their literacy and numeracy.

This can be assisted in significant ways by using digital programmes like Rewordify to assist with the way students learn the functional grammar features of a genre. Using a digital programme, that automatically highlights the grammatical features of a genre, makes the learning of the features associated with explanation writing an enjoyable experience rather than a chore.

A programme like Newsela offers teachers the ability to rejig texts they present to their students. Teachers can determine the lexical density of a text and recreate the text at different levels so it matches the various reading levels of students in their class. This means all students can read the same text, albeit at their determined reading level. All students, whatever their reading level, can feel included and can participate in class activities and discussions because they have read the same text.

Lastly, the need to blog and the need to join online communities, whether personal or professional, is a necessary step in developing a school culture of sharing.