What my kids think about using digital tools

As term two draws to a close, it has been a great opportunity to gather feedback from my students. Along with my surveys about my teaching, I also wanted to find out my classes perspective on using digital tools.  This has been a massive change compared to how they had learnt in their previous classrooms.  I use digital tools on a daily basis, and not just Google Apps for Education (such as Docs, Drawing, Slides).  While I love teaching using digital tools, I wanted to know what my kids actually thought about it.

Digital tools vs. traditional Think-Pair-Share

I have spoken previously about the affordances of digital tools, compared to the traditional and verbal Think-Pair-Share approach. I have always believed that they increase engagement and participation, as they help students to feel comfortable and willing to share their ideas.  I also believe the quality of responses is higher. My own opinion on digital tools vs traditional T-P-S proved to be the same as my learners.  I posed the question: Do you prefer sharing ideas verbally, or with digital tools? Out of the 16 students who took part in the survey, 15 said they preferred digital tools, while one student said he liked both.

Here is what they had to say about why they prefer digital tools:

Because it is better

Because it's easy to use and it's really fun

because it  is faster and because half of the class don't even share there ideas verbally.

Because we can share our ideas and  I like the word clouds.

Because I can see everyone answer.

because I don't like writing on paper

because it easy and a little bit fast.

Sometimes I like doing it on both.

Because it helps us with our learning 

I like Nearpod because it helps us answer questions on what we learn and you get to write as many words as you can.

because it's good for us to learn 

I like nearpod because it shows your Ideas on the screen.

I like using it because we share our ideas with the whole class.

I like mentimeter because It has lots of things and its fun.

Because you can write more sentences.

Creating DLOs

As Glen Innes School is a part of the Manaiakalani cluster, our pedagogy is Learn, Create, Share.  I wanted to focus on the 'create' aspect, and discover how my students really felt about it. After students have learnt something, they use any app they like to create a 'Digital Learning Object' (DLO).

Essentially, a DLO is something that is created by the student to show their understanding.  A way that it is explained to students is that it can be used to teach somebody else.  Therefore, a DLO needs to be clear and easy to understand.

Again, I used a likert scale to find out whether they liked creating DLOs for reading, writing and maths. I wasn't surprised with the responses I received:

Overall, students enjoy creating DLOs to show their learning

It is pretty clear that my learners love to create DLOs about maths.  My class was relatively new to the concept of creating a DLO, so I initially focussed on creating DLOs in maths.  Now that they are experienced with creating DLOs for maths, my class absolutely loves it.  They are always engaged, and their DLOs are becoming more detailed and articulate.

While the response towards creating DLOs for writing and reading is still mostly positive, there are students who either don't like it, or feel impartial.  In an effort to boost their enthusiasm, I am working on introducing new tools for learners to use. I wonder whether their lack of exposure to creating DLOs in reading and writing has contributed to some of the students not enjoying it.  I am hoping that over time the students will enjoy creating DLOs in reading and writing as much as they do in maths. 

Students perspective on using digital tools

I used likert scales to determine how students felt about the commonly used digital tools in our classroom. Here are the results:

Class favourites

The most common favourite digital app was Kahoot, followed by Google Apps (Docs, Drawings and Slides) and Canva.  Some students chose more than one favourite, which is why there is more than 16 responses. To help make sure these really are my students favourites, next time I would list all the digital tools we have used to help learners pick a favourite. There is a possibility that the students choose these apps because they were spoken about and used in the last two weeks. 

Here is what they had to say about their favourite apps and why...

Read theory because when you are done read you can answer the questions 

google doc,google drawing,and more

Collaborative Problem solving

Cause it's fun playing on kahot! and plus learning from you  mistake.

kahoot because it cool

Kahoot, quizizz and canva

Quizzes because you don't have to wait for the teacher to press Next like on Kahoot. 

Canva because you can create your own posters 

I like kahoot because it's fun and it is also helpful

I like using them for work because they're easy to use.

I like DLO because it helps us what we did for maths.

Kahoot because we want to win so it motivates us to read the question carefully and be fast to answer it. Nearpod because I think it helps me understand that it doesn't matter if I get a question wrong, because I'm not the only one who got it wrong. Canva because I get to be creative and make inforgraphics.

youtube and because you can play music and a movie

I like mentimeter because its fun 

Kahoot because you can play games and learning games.

Notes:

• When students mentioned DLOs I counted this as GAFE because they mostly use Google Drawings and Slides to show their learning.
• I have copied and pasted the responses exactly how they were written - hence the typos and grammar issues.

Least favourites

Here are my students responses to their least favourite digital tools:

ANSWERGARDEN because it doesn't let us write lots 

Nothing

nothing I like all the digital apps that we use.

Nothing

Socrative because it dose not have funny meme's like quizizz.

Kahoot because you have to wait for the teacher to press Next.

Answer garden because you can only use 40 letters or 20

Mentimeter because I don't like how it is created. 

none because I like them all.

I don't have one.

none

play store because you can download games 

Answer garden all you got to do is write the answer for the question and the words get bigger  

Answergarden because you can only write like 40-60 letters

While the majority of students said they don't have a least favourite digital tool, the next most common response was AnswerGarden.  I think this is interesting because their reasons is one of the reasons why I personally like AnswerGarden.  Because of the word limit, AnswerGarden forces respondents to be succinct.  This can be a challenge for students.

Summing it up

It is great to see that the response to digital tools is mostly positive.  Digital tools help to increase student engagement, as they are more willing to share ideas and collaborate on tasks. My survey has also shown that the class prefers using digital tools over traditional verbal methods of sharing and collaboration.  I will continue to expose my learners to new and exciting digital tools, as I think this will help them to become more comfortable with using them.

Life Lessons with Short Films & Nearpod

Last term I did an awesome lesson which used two of my favourite apps - Youtube and Nearpod.  As the term was coming to an end, I felt that my students needed to be reminded of the importance of acceptance, kindness, non-judgement and tolerance.  I was talking to one of my workmates, not sure of what to do on a Friday. She said that she often used YouTube as a starting point for writing.  She uses CGI short film animations.  This got me thinking about how I could use film to help teach some concepts that I felt my learners were forgetting.  Then I remembered The Present.

The Clip

The Present is a very powerful clip that my kids loved! We watched it twice before beginning our Nearpod. I chose to let it run through without stopping or asking questions because I wanted them to take in the film as a whole.

Retelling

My first activity on Nearpod was using 'Collaborate' where students had to retell the most important bits of the film.  I was impressed by the level of engagement.  As always, I use their ideas as a starting point for further discussion/elaboration.

Inferring

The next activity was an 'Open Ended Question'. This was an inference question, which asked students to think about why the mum wanted to give his son a present. The next activity was a 'Collaborate' asking Why did the boy get so angry when he noticed what was wrong with the dog? The students were able to come up with some insightful ideas for both questions.

Evaluating

Next, students shared their opinions on the boys reaction to dog, and whether it was right or wrong.

Author's Purpose

Lastly, students shared their ideas about what the message was that the author/creator was trying to tell their audience.

Creating a DLO

After all the discussion that was drawn from the Nearpod activity, my learners created DLOs to share their learning.  I let them create anything they wanted. They created Comics, Google Drawings, wrote poems, recounts and wrote explanation pieces.

Summing it up

Overall I was pretty pleased with how this lesson went.  My learners were really engaged and it created a great opportunity to discuss being grateful, kind and non-judgemental. They loved the film and Nearpod helped them to feel eager to share their ideas with the class.  Creating a DLO was a great way for me to see what they took away from the lesson. It was cool to see the broad range of DLOs created. 

Creating Our Own Quizzes!

My learners love of Nearpod

I have been using Nearpod as a way of engaging my learners and building on their knowledge of stormwater pollution. They absolutely love it.  Whenever we use Nearpod the students are so much more engaged and eager to participate in the learning.  We have done a lot of learning so far about stormwater pollution and our local river - Omaru River.  I wanted to come up with an exciting way for my learners to show me what they have learnt so far.   

Since they love taking part in quiz-type presentations like Nearpod, I decided that they could create their own quizzes to show me what they have learnt.

My learners loved this idea and immediately began creating their own tasks.  Since Nearpod is actually created for educators, I gave students two platforms to choose from:Kahoot! and Socrative.  All students ended up choosing Kahoot! because it is very user friendly.

Creating Quizzes

It was interesting to see the types of questions and answers my learners were creating.  I think creating a quiz added an extra element of difficulty. Not only did they have to come up with a question and an answer, but also other plausible but incorrect answers too. My learners seemed to enjoy the challenge though!  When some students became stuck I modelled a couple of example questions on the board.  This helped to make a connection between what they had learnt and how they could use it in a question/answer form for the quiz.

Quiz time

After looking through the quizzes, I am pretty pleased with how they turned out.  They show that my learners have actually learnt a lot about stormwater pollution and our river.  The next part of the activity is to have a go at eachothers quizzes.  Stay tuned to see how the learners respond to having a go at eachothers quizzes!

Summer School '17: Digital Enhancement

The MDTA is half-way through our last course before we begin our dissertations.  Our week-long course is jam-packed, as we learn about theories of learning, learning design, affordances and pedagogies relating to digital technologies.

Readings, Readings and More Readings

Since there is so much to fit into such a short course, we had 9 readings we had to complete before Summer School.  These readings were all very lengthy and wordy, with a lot of challenging concepts.  To help us understand our readings, we were set with the task of creating an engaging activity based on a reading. 

My reading was Affordance, Opportunity and the Pedagogical Implications of ICT  by Peter John and Rosamund Sutherland.  I found this reading incredibly hard to comprehend, and found myself having to read it over and over again.  I decided to create a quiz to help test the MDTA's knowledge of the ideas discussed in the article.

Creating an Activity

 I chose to use the platform Socrative, rather than Kahoot! Personally, I prefer Socrative for a number of ways. Here are some reasons:

1. While Kahoot's leaderboard feature can be great for some learners, it can also put struggling learners off.  With Socrative, teachers can choose to keep the student's names hidden.

2. The questions and answers are displayed on the students devices, as well as your main screen (through AppleTV, projector, SMART board, etc). With Kahoot, the answer options are displayed on the main screen, and the students can only see the multichoice icons/colours. 

3. Socrative allows you to create mutli-choice, short answer and true and false questions.  This is great if you want to have a variety of types of questions.  Kahoot, on the other hand, only allows multichoice questions.

Creating my quiz helped me to consolidate my understanding of my reading, as well as the other MDTA BTs.  Taking part in each others activities helped us all to gain a deeper understanding of the readings. This will help us a lot for our first assignment, which is based on the readings.

Creating my Digital CV

For our last (ever!) digital immersion day we created an online CV.  It was a great opportunity to use our digital skills to showcase our learning journey, teaching pedagogies and digital capabilities.  

I had a look at my 'digital CV' I created last year when I applied for jobs and I couldn't help but cringe a little! I had just been introduced to Google sites and I created my first ever site as my Digital CV. I used the drop down menu function and choose a template.  It was a pretty good effort for a first timer, but it shows just how much I have learnt.  

My 2015 digital CV

My 2016 digital CV

For my 2016 digital CV I wanted everything to be on the same page.  I wanted it to look as simplistic as possible, so used HTML to create tables for each of aspects I wanted to include in my CV.  I  wanted to use more images and less text.  I used Google Draw to turn my images into links.

With the help of Dorothy, I created an album of photos to provide a snapshot of my teaching.  I did this by creating a Google Presentations and inserting photos onto each slide.  Also, on each slide I included left and right arrows, which were hyperlinked to the previous or next slide.  You need to publish it to the web and make sure the auto advance settings are on. Once you have created your Presentation, you add it as a Gadget on your Google site.  The Gadget you use is 'Slideshow Maker'.  Then you follow the steps to add in the slideshow and specify the height and width.

Make your site pretty

I use a few websites to help make my website look good.  I like to choose fonts that look interesting and compliment each other.  I will always use different fonts for titles and normal text.  It can be hard choosing from such a large range of fonts, so I always use 100daysoffonts to help me.  Note that this probably shouldn't be shared with students as some of the text used is not appropriate for kids.

I also like to choose colour schemes and use a few different sites to help me. Color-hex and coolors are my go to.  My favourite is coolors because a) you can adjust the shades b) you can save your colour palette by exporting it and c) you can upload an image and use the colour picker to find the hex-codes for the colours you want!

Reflecting on my First Year as a Beginning Teacher in the MDTA

It is crazy to think that I have almost completed my first year as a beginning teacher in the MDTA.  I have learnt heaps and grown a lot.  Here is my doco where I talk about my beliefs, the MDTA programme and how I use Manaiakalani's 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy. Thanks to Dorothy Burt, Anne Sinclair, Fiona Grant, the MDTA BTs and the team at Glen Innes Primary who have helped me on my journey!  I am looking forward putting my learning into practice into my own class next year.

Manaiakalani Film Festival

Today was the 9th annual Manaiakalani Film Festival.  Instead of our usual digital immersion days, the MDTA spent the day at Hoyts helping out and enjoying the awesome films our learners have created. 

It was a pretty awesome feeling to see my  film on the big screen!  I am so proud of my learners and the effort they put into the making of our film.  All the actors did an excellent job and helped come up with some awesome shots. I was also lucky to have an awesome director (Lauren) who took charge of the filming.  

Here is my first Manaiakalani Film Festival film, enjoy!

Let us know what you think! Feel free to leave a comment on our class blog.  You can also check out the films from all schools in the cluster by clicking here.

Is your default the way you learn OR the way your learners learn?

Today we joined up with other Manaiakalani teachers for our Digital Immersion session.  The focus for this term is all about visible learning and its benefits for our students. Learners in our communities come to school below the expected standard for New Zealand students.  In order to get our learners up to standard by year 8, they need to make a 1.5 year accelerated shift. Visible learning enables such an accelerated shift.  

Each learner is different

We started the day with the question: how do your learners learn?  We chose three students and wrote down the ways in which they preferred to learn.  The answers were then collated and turned into a word cloud.  The results were interesting:

As you can see from the Tagul, there is a wide range of learning preferences.  Our learners learn differently.  This is important to remember when creating learning experiences. As teachers we need to make sure we are considering the learning preferences of all our learners, not just one in particular.   Following this, we watched a thought provoking clip of Chrissie Butler discussing UDL - Universal Design for Learning. Two key ideas resonated with me:

• What engages one learners doesn't necessarily engage another learner
• Is your default the way you learn or the way your learners learn?

So how can we ensure our students learning preferences are catered to in our lessons? Can we cater to  20+ students learning needs in one lesson? 

...Enter multi-modal learning!

Multi-modal learning is an approach which uses a range of modes to develop students understanding of a topic or an idea.  It is related to Gardener's theory of 'Multiple Intelligences'. The site uses a range of audio, visual and textual (paragraphs, bullet points and sentences) resources.  Students can synthesise their learning across multiple types of media to gain a better understanding.

As the MDTA already learnt about this earlier in the year (here and here), we were set with the challenge of extending our learners further.  We were set the task of encouraging our learners to select their own texts to help make sense of what they are learning.  

As my classroom has already had experience with using a range of multi-modal sites, I decided to challenge my students with a trickier topic and include self-selected texts.  Our inquiry topic for the term is weather, so I created my site to help my students learn about lightning and thunder.  I chose a range of texts (paragraphs, bullet points and sentences), videos and images (including GIFS).  As the science behind lightning is quite tricky, the texts range in reading difficulty.   I want my learners to engage with more challenging texts, so it is my hope that they will first use whichever mode they prefer to learn in, and then use the more challenging texts to deepen their understanding.

Click on the image to have a look at the site that I have created using HTML.  We have begun using this site today and will continue to use it throughout the week.

Learning to Code

Today we had a chance to learn how to code using code.org's Hour of Code lessons.  In these lessons you learn 'computer science' by understanding how to code to create games.  You can learn more about code.org and their aspirations here.


In Hour of Code, you can choose from a range of lessons based on popular games or movies (such as Flappy Bird, Starwars, MineCraft and Frozen).  This is great for learners as they can choose a game or movie that they are interested in.  There are two options for the lessons, blockly (for beginners) and Javascript (for advanced coders).  I chose MineCraft which uses blockly for my first attempt at Hour of Code. 

The lesson

Once you have choose your lesson and type of code, you watch a short YouTube clip that explains the coding suite and its functions.  You work through ten tasks before creating your own code.

My code

My verdict

I enjoyed completing the tasks and creating my own code.  The instructional videos helped make sense of coding.  I enjoyed the aspects of problem solving and trial and error which arose when trying to complete the tasks.  To start with I run my code after one or two blocks, however as I improved I began to create more code before checking to see if it worked.  This made me think carefully about what I was asking the game to do.

One thing that bothered me is that you always have to run your code from the start.  This gets a little frustrating when you have a lengthy code and only want to check the last few blocks. 

Aside from that, I think students would benefit from learning how to code. At this point I am not sure when/how I would fit coding into my timetable.  I may start this as an early finishers task or allocate 30 minutes of inquiry time to coding.

Filming for Manaiakalani Film Festival

Today we got to spend the whole day in our schools filming for our Manaiakalani Film Festival movie.

In room 8, we are creating a movie based on our learning about the Olympic values.  The three olympic values are respect, friendship and excellence. We chose to create our film on excellence.

Leading up to our filming day the class collaboratively planned our movie. This was important as I wanted my learners to have ownership of the film.  We watched some inspirational movies to help us get started.  Then we worked on a Google Doc to record what we liked and disliked from the examples.  Then we brainstormed ways we could show excellence in our film.

Then came the filming.  Thank goodness the sun decided to come out! It was great to see a lot of my learners stepping up and taking charge of the day.  I had a great director/producer who helped guide the actors.  I am very proud of my learners and what they have achieved so far.  They came up with some great ways to show excellence and were very creative with their shots.

We still have a bit more filming to do but I am pleased with what we were able to accomplish in one day.  Stay tuned to find out more

My Takeaways from Manaiakalani's Annual Hui

On Friday the MDTA were very lucky to attend Manaiakalani's 5th annual Hui - a place where teachers and learners across Manaiakalani celebrate and share their accomplishments.  

This has ended up being a rather lengthy post, as I gained many new insights from the teachers, researchers and learners at the hui.

In the morning

First up we heard our Manaiakalani student ambassadors share their learning.  It was really interesting to hear from students how they learnt in their school.  What I like about Manaiakalani is that every school is different.  Although we are all following Manaiakalani's 'Learn, Create, Share' pedagogy, each school is able to put their own spin on it to reflect the community they are in.  There were plenty of ideas that I will borrow and repurpose in my classroom, like the use of a 'Goal Wall' to make goals visible to learners.  

Following this, the Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher's shared their inquiries with the insights they gained along the way. I came away feeling inspired to give my own teaching programme a shake up to ensure my lessons are engaging, motivating and using digital technologies as much as possible.  Whilst I do believe I use technology a lot in the classroom, these teachers had come up with ideas that I had not thought of before.  Check out my infographic to see my main takeaways from the MIT.

Next up

After morning tea we heard from Rachel Williams about her holiday intervention programmes 'Summer Learning Journey' and 'Winter Learning Journey'.  Rachel's aim is to help lesson the 'summer drop off', where learners achievement declines between T4 and T1 after the school holidays. Her results show that students who participated in the 'Summer Learning Journey' had less of a drop compared to students who did not participate in the intervention.  Rachel's data was very compelling and I am excited to encourage my learners to participate in 'Summer Learning Journey 2.0'.

Next Woolf Fisher researchers, Rebecca Jesson, Stuart McNaughton and Aaron Wilson shared their insights gathered from observing teachers, and challenged us to consider what we are doing to accelerate our learners achievement.

Lastly

Dorothy, Russell and Pat Snedden spoke about where we are now and where to next for Manaiakalani.  Although we are doing a great job accelerating our student's achievement, we need to continue to reflect, refine and improve our teaching. We have a series of outreach clusters which are looking at us and using what we are doing to accelerate their learners achievement too.  Therefore, we need to be at the forefront of change and be constantly seeking ways to help our learners achieve.  Pat Snedden's talk was the most inspiring of the day.  He is so passionate about lifting our learners out of subsistence to capital builders.  I think Pat Snedden gave me the kick I needed to ensure that I am constantly doing my best and seeking ways to improve my teaching, because it is what my learners deserve.

I also used Twitter when I heard something which resonated with me.  Here is a collation of my tweets from the Hui.

The Importance of Audio: GarageBand 101

Learning the Basics

Today for Digital Immersion we were lucky enough to have Point England teacher and GarageBand guru Rob Wiseman join us to take us through GarageBand.  We went through all the basics of GarageBand like cutting and editing audio recordings, GarageBand shortcuts and creating our own music.  I wrote some notes of the tidbits I found useful, which you can find here.

Creating in GarageBand

Our challenge was to create some music to use with a video we had captured during the week.  I chose to use a video I took of the Zirka Circus performers that came to GIS on Monday.  The quality of the video is a little poor and the music is a little odd, but I felt it matched with the performers actions and their costumes.  I might refine it a little more by using iMovie to cut and match the song to the movements of the performers, but for now this will do!

My takeaways from my experience with Garageband

Infographics: a fun way to display data

Unfortunately I was absent during last Friday's Digital Immersion day, recovering from a procedure on my jaw. After looking at Dorothy's presentation and blog post,  and the blog posts from the rest of the MDTA team, I knew I missed out on an awesome learning opportunity!

Creating to share with infographics

The create aspect of the day was about creating to share using infographics. Infographics are a visual and fun way to present statistics.  It goes without saying that people respond better to visuals than a lengthy piece of writing.  The average human attention span is only 8 seconds, and our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.  This makes me question who wouldn't want to use infographics to show data!

Having a go

I created an infographic to display the data from my professional blog. There were so many infographic creator sites online, but I chose to use Canva.  Instead of using a template I decided to create mine from scratch as I had an idea of how I wanted to lay out my infographic.  There were lots of icons, images, charts and shapes to choose from, but the only thing that bothered me was that the charts were not editable, I had wanted to use a Pie Graph to display the countries of my visitors, however I discovered it was a set image that could not be edited.  I had heard that Piktochart allows you to edit your charts, which I will keep in mind for the future.

Why use it in the classroom?

• Fun way to display information which would normally be in the form of lengthy sentences.  
• Infographics grabs readers attention through its use of images and colour and short pieces of writing. 
• You don't have to be an artist or very creative to feel successful in your creation.
• You can choose from a wide variety of templates to get you going and get some inspiration.

Student's perspective

I actually finished creating this infographic whilst supervising a group of GIS students at a chess tournament.  When they saw what I was creating they were all really interested in what I was creating.  They liked the way it looked and had said they would like to do something like this in their learning.  One of the students said an infographic about their blog posts would be a cool thing to create and have on their blogs and classroom. Such an activity could empower, excite and motivate my learners to continue to share their learning on their blog. I am looking forward to finding more ways to use infographics in the classroom.

Purposeful Doodling: The Art of Sketchnoting

What is it?

Sketchnoting is a way of recording information using images, diagrams, connectors and text.  An amazing sketchnoter to look at is Sylvia Duckworth. There are three important components of sketchnoting: text, images and structure. When using text, it is important to consider the hierarchy of your ideas and highlight the most important aspects.  This can be done through using a different font, size or boldness. It is said that pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is definitely believed by sketchnotes.  You can use images and symbols to visualise important and complex ideas. Lastly,  to help make the structure clear you should use containers and arrows.  These help organise the flow of your sketchnote. If you want to learn more, Dorothy's post about sketchnoting is where you need to go.

Why sketchnote?

Instead of me writing about the benefits, have a look at this sketchnote!

Photo by Tanmay Vora

Having a go at creating a sketchnote

Sylvia Duckworth's presentation helped me a lot when creating my sketchnote.  This presentation could also be adapted and used to help your students begin to sketchnote.

I found it fun but also infuriating at the same time.  As someone who thinks creatively but does not have nice handwriting or drawing skills, I found it hard to transfer my ideas onto paper.  Another challenge was figuring out where to start drawing/writing, as I wanted to space out my text and images evenly.  Sketchnoting takes a lot of time, but I found that as I was doing it, my understanding of what I was sketchnoting was reinforced.  I had to think carefully about how I could summarise and synthesize what I wanted to say, which helped my understanding and memory.

This is the third of my attempts at sketchnoting my thoughts on why learners should share their learning online:

My advice... 

Do a rough pencil sketch to map out the structure of your ideas (size and style of font, words/phrases, symbols etc) and then do your sketchnote free hand.  Using pencil is too tempting to erase your work, and you could also leave smudges and holes in your paper. 

Using sketchnotes in the classroom

I can see the benefits of sketchnoting, although it would need to be taught in some detail before trying to use it in the classroom.  You could use sketchnoting in reading as a way to summarize the story, or write character profiles.  You could use it as a way to show your understanding of a concept in social studies, or a strategy in mathematics.   Another way you could use sketchnotes is for your wall displays.  You could create sketchnote information posters, class treaties, class rules and quotes... the possibilities are endless.  

MDTA 6 Month Reflection

And here it is!

 This is my reflection of my experiences as a BT in the MDTA so far. I had wanted to create a reflection which portrayed my personality and experiences honestly and accurately. I had decided to not use a script when filming, as I wanted it to appear genuine and more conversational rather than interview-like. However I had forgotten to mention a lot of things, so I had to film some more this weekend (which explains the change in camera angle and different background).  A big thanks to Juliana who helped me film.

I am thoroughly enjoying being in the MDTA and have learnt so many new things which I have been applying in my teaching.   I'm looking forward to continuing to learn how to use digital technologies to accelerate my learners and get them excited about learning.