Virtual Learning Network

Rebbecca Sweeny (CORE Education) shared a piece of research today. Rebbecca has been working 3 days a week with the Woolf Fisher Research Centre (Prof Stuart McNaughton & Dr Rebecca Jesson) and the Manaiakalani cluster in Tamaki Auckland (Pt England School et al) on a project funded by Learning & Change Networks (LCN - Dr Brian Annan). 

This project was the dissemination of research findings about Manaiakalani from 2012-13. Rebbecca worked with WFRC and Manaiakalani to understand those findings and then create an interesting resource to explain this further.

Rebbecca created a Google Site and then went about filming teachers and classrooms, working with kids who created screencasts, talked to her on camera and made graphic novels.

The findings are outlined through a film of slides with voice over and transcript on the main home page of the new site. The site is embedded within the Manaiakalani site itself and went live today.

Rebbecca shares,

WFRC wrote about the affordances that the digital environment provides to teachers - enabling them to give more synchronised feedback to kids and spend more time asking deeper questions etc. I found that when these teachers (who achieve acceleration) describe it, they tend to talk about how they make that happen - through planning for differentiation - so you can see that the digital environment helps teachers to plan and teach in more differentiated ways. 

Here is the site for you to have a surf around - my site is embedded under "Research Explained" in the top menu under "Our Story": 

http://www.manaiakalani.org/our-story/research-evaluation