Beyond a Blackboard

Are you guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Every year, educators from around New Zealand choose an area of inquiry. We look at what we know of our learners, and identify an approach that will support them to achieve. As we have a new group of students every year, it makes sense that our inquiry and approaches would differ, but should we be discarding our learning from the year before? Last year, I inquired into effective teaching in writing. My goal was to support my students to make the connection between reading and writing. So, I got them to critique and analyse texts, to identify vocabulary or writing techniques that they liked as readers and to use them in their own writing. I found that this approach was effective at supporting my students to use more vocabulary and the quality of their writing improved. This did support their reading progress as well, but to a lesser extent and so I chose reading to be my inquiry topic for 2019. It would have been easy to s

'Multimodal' has become a popular concept in education – almost to the point of becoming a buzzword.  It has also become synonymous with the use of digital technology. But don't let the veneer of modern use fool you: multimodal teaching has long been viewed as effective pedagogy. In fact, researchers have been praising multimodal teaching for some time. If you enjoy academic literature, check out  Sankey (2010)  as an example. If not, know that researchers have found that multimodal practice engages our students and provides them with multiple opportunities to explore a concept. In a digital classroom, a great way to capitalise on the benefits of multimodal teaching is by using a multimodal site. These could be made to support a unit of study, inquiry or even a few weeks reading programme. For example, I made this site to support my students while we were studying cells in science, and this site  to support a reading group explore science fiction. While they do