Melanie Hill Mindlab Blog

Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness. Reflective blog week 31 My understanding of indigenous knowledge is that it is the local knowledge that is unique to a culture or society. In a school where we have a variety of different cultures. It is important that we do not use only our own cultural identity to guide our teaching but that we acknowledge that in our classrooms there are a variety of different cultures.   They will all be bringing with them their own indigenous knowledge. If we first acknowledge this, it will become the starting point for us as teachers to be able to achieve culturally responsive pedagogy. Gay defined this as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences and perspectives as conduits for effective teaching” (gay 2001, p.106) The two areas that I will focus on are the core values of the school I teach at and learning activities that I incorporate in my own classroom. Below I have included the core values of our school. They are Respect...

WEEK 30 THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL TRENDS ON EDUCATION A current trend that is impacting on education is the impact of digital learning in education. We have students hitting our classes who are digital natives. They have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives and the reality is that it will only become a bigger part of our society as time goes by. As educators we are challenged with the job of using the technology to best serve our students to help educate them and make them ready for either further education when they leave school or for future jobs and the workforce. We are challenged to keep up with the technology ourselves and assess how best to use it to allow for the best outcomes for our students. There is an increased trend for the use of technology but we can question how effectively are we doing this? Every teachers skill set are different and the access to digital technologies in schools is different. Beyond school you do not need to go far to see ...

HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA BEING USED IN MY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DESCRIPTIVE I am presently involved in social media in a limited way. I am on face book.   I belong to a few groups on there that are part of my professional networks. They include: Mindlab November 2017 Tauranga groups. Food and Nutrition teachers New Zealand. I also follow a few pages that are relevant to my teaching practise such as NZQA so I hear about important announcements. I find these all to be useful sources of information. I find out about things that I might not otherwise. I am not very interactive in most of these groups except the Mindlab group. COMPARATIVE What might I like to do differently? It would be good to get more involved in the Food and Nutrition teachers New Zealand group. I have only recently been made aware of this group and joined it. I have observed that it only has a few people that contribute to it even though there are 169 members. Most of the posts are just ...

WEEK 28 – INFLUENCE OF LAW AND ETHICS IN PRACTICE WHAT Cheating using an electronic device as an aid. I had a year 10 student who missed an assessment (in class test) as she was absent from school. The grade for this test would be recorded on Kamar as a final mark for the topic but not for any formal NZQA assessments. I set her up at a desk outside the classroom which is common practise in this scenario. I explained to her that it was a closed book assessment and she had the hour to complete it. I left her to it and continued to teach my class. When I checked on her during the lesson I discovered that she was using her phone to check up some answers.   I was faced with an ethical dilemma of how to deal with this situation. SO WHAT Hall (2001) framework. Which stakeholders should be given priority? Why? The stakeholders I needed to consider were: ·          The student I caught cheating. ·      ...

ACTIVITY 3 : CONTRIBUTION OF TEACHER INQUIRY TOPICS TO MY COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE The two inquiry topics I will consider are: ·          Followership ·          Implementing Technology innovation in the classroom. DESCRIPTIIVE Wenger defines a community of practice as “a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion on about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott&Synder,2002,p4) If we are to grow as teachers we need to be part of a community of practice. For me I am part of a department within my school which forms my strongest COP. I also work with other teachers in schools in the Bay of plenty who teach the same subject. This forms my second COP. How these fit the three elements of COP: ·          Joint enterprise – We all wor...

I will use the Gibbs reflective cycle to reflect on subtheme 1: The role of current and emerging technologies in supporting future orientated learning and teaching. DESCRIPTION The context I will reflect on is my own experience over the past 6 months where at our school we have starting a transformation to using the G suite for education platform as a base for ICT within our school. This was introduced towards the end of 2017 and began with making Chromebooks compulsory for the 2018 intake of year 9 students. FEELINGS Initially this came as a shock to me as we had not really been part of any talk around this concept as a staff and while we lacked direction in this space the decision made to go down this path was made by a small group within the school. Once I had my head around the ideas I could see that it was a great opportunity to learn new skills, change my teaching practise and try a different approach. I felt quite excited about the opportunities it presented and th...