Spark MIT - May

Sitting here at Spark headquarters reflecting on my day and feeling really lucky to be here with such an amazing group of educators. 

The day started with us sharing what's on top for us and our inquiries. Listening to where everyone has got to and sharing the struggles together is such an important way to start the day. We were also fortunate enough to have Anne Sinclair with us for the day supporting our ideas and challenging our thinking. 

We discussed the importance of recognising those before us and talked about 
acknowledging the work they have done in our blog posts and research. This is the best way to make ourselves credible and our inquiries worth reading. We also talked about how no idea is fully original, it stems from something or somewhere that we have seen or experienced. 

We then had a great session talking with the Spark Buddies that could make it today. Mine is from Christchurch and I am looking forward to meeting with her in the next few weeks. It was great to see such a range of people wanting to give back to their communities and interested in the affordances of technology for learning. 

Dorothy then shared with us two life changing extensions for google chrome. Google Save - which is like pinterest for bookmarking and Google Keep - which is an amazing note taking tool! I will most definitely be sharing these with my colleagues! 



We were then challenged to think about how our inquiry was innovative as it is the Spark - Manaiakalani INNOVATIVE teacher. I was really challenged by this at first and began thinking in too many steps and creating much more work for myself. 
I then realised that the innovation of my inquiry is the online practise and tasks that I am providing for my students to learn from. As long as I am making tasks that are providing creation and challenge I am changing the way that numeracy has been previously taught. And if I can collate these in a form that other teachers can add to and use then I will be saving a lot of work for others. 
I must acknowledge that the thinking of these tasks and providing students with online work that is multimodal stems from the work Manaiakalani has done previously in Literacy with multi-modal texts. I am also taking into account the extensive work that has been done by Naomi Rosedale in digital learning objects vs. digital learning artefacts. As well as Spector and colleagues notion of DLO as “the integration of multimodal digital content items with a learning objective”.

As always it has been so incredible to be on this journey. I have a lot of work to do in creating and innovating numeracy tasks so that they can be shared with the wider community of teaching and learning!

Watch this space!