My inquiry this year is about motivation and engagement. I have outlined in this blog post how I feel that this is going so far this year and how i feel it is time to have a new direction for this. I have also thought about questions to move me forward.
My main thoughts are, can I utilise social media as a tool for engagement and motivation?
This brought with it a lot of soul searching as to whether I should. I have bemoaned the constant use of mobile phones by students along with everyone else and their dwindling attention spans due to short, sharp inputs of information from their little hand held buddies. But then I started thinking, is this going to change? No. It isn't. So can I use it?
After getting feedback from one of my most unmotivated students that he learned stuff from TikTok, I decided to have a look. Like the rest of the internet, it is a combination of interesting stuff, fun stuff and total piffle. I started an account and had a go at making some Lego movies myself. It was fun. I wasn't great at using the app so decided before going further I would engage the help of the experts. Over the last 2 weeks, I have been getting some pretty intensive training from my lovely Year 13 girls, who are finding it amusing to be training me and are exited when I show them my new videos.
After talking my plan over the DP in charge of curriculum and Fiona from Manaiakalani, I decided to load the videos up to three places, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. This was not arduous, as when you make a video on TikTok, it is downloaded to your phone. This just means uploading it to the other two spaces and copying and pasting the written stuff.
The reason i have decided to include my Year 9 Food Tech class in this experiment is that they are driving me TOTALLY CRAZY!!! I put a load of effort into the site pages for each recipe, with videos to watch, links to check out etc. Example here. I email this to them directly and they don't check their emails. When it comes to cooking day, I ask if they have looked at the resources I have sent them. No, comes the reply. I have been printing out the recipes so they have them available to follow on the day. I have to remind them they are there. Since making a few examples on TikTok, I have been getting some promising feedback from them.
There is still the hitch that I have to email the link to the video directly to them so they know that it is there, but small steps.
Here is where I am up to with this experiment as of writing this blog post.
I will get some feedback from my Year 13 and Year 9 students and then start making some for my Year 11 class. I am hoping I can send links to the Year 10 students to use them as advertising for the course for next year as DVC isn't offered to Year 10 this year.
