Term 4 Manaiakalani toolkits

Effective workflows for secondary school teachers 

Yesterday I ran a toolkit on developing effective workflows for secondary school teachers.  I wanted to share some ideas about streamlining your online resources to enhance visible teaching and learning.  

For me, it's essential to establish a good foundation with your file management system.  Naming files systematically helps you to retrieve and search files in your Google Drive.  This can be especially helpful if you are looking for files from previous years. In addition, an agreed-upon file naming convention can help everyone locate necessary documents for shared resources within departments or schools.  

When it comes to creating visibility through a class site, ensuring folder permissions are set to 'anyone with the link can view' will automatically mean files within that folder can inherit those permissions.   It's also possible to have files in multiple places, which allows you to have learning resources in your department folder and in a folder associated with your class site.  

During the toolkit, a highlight for me was hearing from secondary school teachers in other schools and learning what works for them. For example, Jayne Abernethy,  a Science teacher at Hornby High School, shares her site and how Toby's bookmarking tool helps her compile relevant online resources for her Year 13 students.  She then embeds those links back into her site.  

Juliet Buenaventura, a maths teacher also from Hornby High School, shared her site set-up.  I really like how Juliet has organised her site with the Learn, Create and Share headings. This is a great way to organise her learning resources with each year-level task associated with drop-down menus.  Here's a link to her site.  

I really enjoy it when teachers share their practice. There is so much to learn and be inspired from each other.  

If you'd like to see the recording from this toolkit or review previously held toolkits, you can search the Manaiakalani archive by clicking here.  

Term 2 week 1 - Covid19 Lockdown

What a fantastic week it's been, this online teaching really suits me and judging by the feedback from the teachers I'm working with it's suiting a lot of them as well.   The teachers at a high school I'm working at are so encouraged by the high number of students who have been turning up to their online classes during this first week of term two.    I do wonder though how it's working for students, their experience could be very different and we need to take that into account in the coming weeks.

To support our teachers with some of the new skills they'll need for online teaching my colleagues and I from the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe Clusters have been running some short online toolkits.  Today I ran one on Hapara Teacher Dashboard.  Hapara was originally developed by the Manaiakalani hackers' group to give teachers visibility to students' learning and forms an essential tool for teachers delivering Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.