Digital Fluency Intensive Day 4

The day began differently with us all sharing our digital Pepeha that we made last week.  It was interesting to see the connections we had and the variety of slideshows that this creative group had made.  We had to each chrome cast our Pepeha and then disconnect so as usual in every task there is learning for us as well.

This week to connect with the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy we looked at the "share" side of "Learn, Create, Share".  To share, is an important part of creating relationships.  Sharing is as old as time but what has changed is the mode or method of sharing.

Since 2005 the biggest change in digital sharing has been the speed and amplification of the sharing.  With Youtube, Twitter and Bebo, sharing has become something our students have all grown up with.  They readily "share their lives" with a huge audience around the world.  It is not only the young who use this method of sharing.  Polititians and the rich and famous have taken advantage of the fact that they no longer need to rely on the media to get their message across.

The connect and share way of interconnections are ingrained in their way of life so working  "with learners to establish authentic audiences for their learning outcomes" could be another hook for their learning and lead to raised achievement outcomes.

It is not an "either, or" way of looking at things but an amplification.  You can still publish children's work by putting it on the wall, include their work in a Year Book or in a newsletter but children don't usually have a choice and the "audience" is constrained by time, place and people.  You need to be at the venue, you need to listen and you have no choice who you listen to.

By choosing to share digitally it brings in an audience beyond the local school or community to a world wide audience.  Grandma who lives in the Cook Islands can link directly into her grandchildren's lives watching a live performance of the Kapa Haka group, look at the grandchild's blog to see what they have been doing and watch a movie the child has made about a class trip.  The sharing and connections have a two way purpose and benefit - Grandma is an authentic audience of the child's learning and the child soon learns she has an appreciative audience for her learning by looking at the comments that are left on her blog.

Children need to learn that just like in times of old when sharing was not digital, sharing can cause trouble if the rules on how to share are not followed.  They need to learn how to use a secure space  that is legal which is why our children all have a blog that is owned by the Board of Trustees.  The audience is generally not unkind and leaves positive, thoughtful and helpful comments.  As a school we try to enforce "family values" and hope that the children take these values with them into being a positive Cybersmart citizen who has a conscience.

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As Teachers we like to get things finished.  To be able to blog and show the world a finished piece of work is an important life skill.  If you are someone who never finishes work, people won't want to read unfinished work and employers won't want to know you.  In pre digital days work was done in books or on worksheets which were often not pasted in books or it was lost before it was completed.  This learning was in books that children only had access to at school.  Now learning can be accessible any time and any place.  It could even be at a later time when a thoughtful comment could trigger further learning.

Learning any time has become an important factor in helping to eliminate the "summer drop".  Over the summer holidays many children lose the gains they had made over the weeks prior to the end of the term.  The Summer Learning Journey programme has children blogging through out the holidays.  Woolf Fisher research has shown that these children who participate in blogging twice a week will maintain their learning and those that blog three times a week will actually increase their learning.  This shows what a powerful learning tool sharing is.  The writing of posts, sharing and receiving positive and thoughtful peer assessments links directly to how you can connect and supercharge learning.

Even for my Year 1 learners they love to share their learning.  At present we have a class blog where many aspects of my class and their learning are posted so family and whanau can share the moments of success too.  Photos are taken of children's writing, learning and certificate winners, movies are made of activities and school wide activities are blogged about.  The children love visiting the blog to see who is on it and reliving things we have celebrated.  It is very special when someone leaves a comment.  I hope to be able to get some children blogging on their individual blogs towards the end of the year to increase this "sharing" and for the children to have more choice in what is shared.

We also looked at Goggle Sites and how to make our sites engaging and multi modal.  A teacher who excites and captivates her learners by exciting "window dressing" will encourage her learners to be excited about and participate in their learning.  Our children are at school because it is compulsory - they have no choice so we need to be creative to hook them in to learning.  Each term the Pt England teachers have an immersion assembly to hook students in to a new terms inquiry topic.  We dress up, make movies or act out scenes much to the children's delight.

Digital devices are a hook for learning but after a while the novelty wears off so we need to create engagement that lasts the distance.  If children are left to their own, they tend to gravitate to off task behaviour.  They need to be on task on the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

Children also learn in many different ways.  So teachers should provide opportunities for all learners to connect with the learning through many ways.  It can be acting out a play, watching different versions of a play, to recreate an aspect which is important to them through video, graphics or sound files.  This leads to a higher chance of most learners becoming engaged.  If it is just book learning then only those who respond in that manner will benefit from the learning.

Fiona mentioned the importance of starting with a new folder before commencing to build a new site.  Sites.Goggle.Com was the starting point for us to create a new site.  Pages were added for different subjects and these could be disclosed or hidden if necessary.

 

We collaboratively created a site, learnt how to embed items, add slides and duplicated them.  Using information from TKI about the science of growing things, Khismira and I took the opportunity to make a resource about growing food to use with our healthy food Inquiry topic for next term.  We incorporated familiar resources in reading such as PM readers that the children already use and on a sub page we put stories that the children can listen to about growing things.  In maths we created some problems that the children could solve and found prompts that the children could use to write about.  It was a valuable time of learning as well as creating a useful resource we maybe able to use next term.

"Making Sense and Persisting Workshop" By Deborah Schifter

We were invited to attend a "Making Sense and Persisting Workshop" by Deborah Schifter.  This mathematics workshop using video studies of Grade two and Grade four students demonstrated students making sense of mathematical problems with which they persisted to find solutions and discussed their reasoning and how they engaged with mathematics.

Deborah is a principal research scientist at the Education Development Centre in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Her main interest at present is investigating algebraic thinking at the elementary level.  With other researchers (Virginia Bastable and Susan Jo Russell), she has been studying students ability to reason and notice how they can use their knowledge to solve a mathematical problem and to explain their thinking to others.  She has studied  "a student's ability to notice, articulate, prove, and apply generalisations about the behaviour of the operations."  A sequence of lessons for students in Grade 2 to Grade 5 has been developed and published in their book titled "But Why Does It Work? Mathematical Argument in the Elementary Grades".  (Heinemann 2017).

The book focuses not only on the mathematical content of the lessons, but also on what effective teachers need to know pedagogically to make these lessons worthwhile.  It is not enough to only know and use the content or curriculum.  There is a whole classroom culture that needs to be embraced for successful outcomes.

There are 8 common core standards.  These are
"1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning."

Students need to find "an entry point" where they can begin to work on a problem and to think how or what they can use to come up with a solution.  In junior classes they may use concrete materials or draw pictures to represent their thinking while older more mathematically proficient student might count on.  Asking questions that help them get started and continuing to ask "Does this make sense?" will make the student consider simpler ways to solve the problem.

Once a solution has been reached other options can then be looked at, answers check and analysed using models, pictures, mathematical equations and descriptions.  Younger children might use concrete objects and move these objects while they describe the actions they preformed to come up with a solution.

"Mathematically proficient students can listen to or read the arguments of others, decide whether they make sense, ask useful questions to clarify or improve the arguments, and build on those arguments.  They can communicate their arguments, compare them to others, and reconsider their own arguments in response to the critiques of others."

While viewing the videos and listening to the discussion I was thinking about the DMiC lessons we had been attempting and how we are learning the "teacher talk" to encourage the children in their thinking.  The children in the videos were of course much older than Year One but the level of teacher talk to get the children to reason and think without actually saying "you need to do...." was enlightening.  The open questions such as "Could we say that?"  gets children to critically look at their thinking.  "What are people thinking..." and " "How did other problems help you..." helped the children justify and explain their arguments.

We are just beginning our journey but when you see children working collaboratively to solve problems and to be able to say "I not not convinced."  and "That's the part I'm not sure." to a group of peers and with further discussion be finally able to say "Oh now I see it cause..." makes a pretty convincing argument that this style of mathematics makes children far more engaged in the process of making sense of mathematics and working through to find a solution.  We have a way to go yet but are taking our first tentative steps.

Thanks to Jodie Hunter for organising this event and Koru School for hosting it.

Digital Fluency Intensive Day 3

In connecting with the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy this week we looked at the "Create" part of "Learn, Create, Share".  

The create side of learning is all about "the hook".  Engagement is so important as there are many children who cannot find any connection between school, learning and themselves.  In the local area prior to Manaiakalani and digital learning the children either left the area for secondary schooling or couldn't find a connection and left soon after compulsory education was completed without any qualifications that would lead to further education.  Now Manaiakalani schools focus on priority learners - the Maori, Pacifica and children with special needs.  The local secondary school is finding children are engaging and achieving which is a great success story.

So how has this been achieved?  Children naturally like to explore and create things and it is the harnessing of these creative skills whether it be culture, sport or art that "help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators."  (Apple 2018)  In the employment market today employers are looking for employees who have these skills.

We are creative beings and if we do not use the creative side of our beings, we are not using our best learning tools.   Engaging the whole body will naturally engage the mind and learning will occur.  John Dewey's quote about giving a child something to do that is worthwhile not just a task to pass time, and if "the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, learning naturally results" rings true.  

 Creativity focuses on deep learning and original ideas.  An artist can sit in his own studio painting or creating by himself, unconnected with the world.  But how do we know how fantastic his art is?  Add in technology and this instantly turbo charges his artist ability because he is connected with a world wide audience or following who appreciate his wonderful artistic ability.  This is the same with our children who have an iPad or a digital device of their own to use.  They get the chance to be a creator - making their own slide shows, movies, raps or music to help with the "tough learning" and it helps them learn in a more meaningful way. 

Classes with the biggest shifts in their learning have been shown to be classes that have time to create, collaborate and have choices that empower the students when they have the opportunity to create.  It is the learning that is achieved through the process of creativity rather than any concern for the finished product that is important.

These ideas help focus on my own planning and teaching.  How can I make my teaching embrace more creativity?  We have discussed at length within our team that we need to put the fun and exploration back into learning.  This term the science based Inquiry topic and challenges have resulted in a huge engagement, with most children able to tell you many facts they have discovered about Simple Machines.  Now we need to remember to add the digital learning to turbo charge it even further.

Next Kent took the "visability" and "rewindability" to the next level by showing us how to create a live channel and live stream events.  Using a drone to take footage of an event allows a wider audience to take part.  Spectators can see the total cross country race from one vantage point on a screen even though the course winds out on to the reserve out of sight.  They feel more connected with the event.  Kent used a drone to show Pt England school making the Olympic rings last year.  This footage is on my class blog and the children like revisiting this event.  Footage can also be used for team training to review what could be improved or it could be used to make spectacular footage in a film for the Manaiakalani film festival!

Fiona reminded us of the protocols for digital learning and meeting our duty of care to parents, whanau and the Board of Trustees with blogs and accounts administered by the school.  Learners should be using G Drive for their blogs.  It is best to have comments going through a blog which is monitored through the Teacher Dash Board - being in the right place at the right time.

We also learnt how to build and add clips to a playlist to build a resource to support our teaching.  It is best to have it in your name so that if you move schools all is not lost as the channel stays with you.  Sharing with anyone with the link means teams can share resources.

The Goggle Slides component showed that slides can be used to enable learners easy access to their learning.  We use these on our team and class sites make a slide deck for each curriculum area adding a new slide each week.  This enables learners to revisit their learning if they haven't complete work or if they wish to practise a skill again.

Using a slide deck in my class site.

It is easy to share and embed a link to learning content, a text or tasks on the site.  Slides can also be used for the learners to create and not just be consumers.  We looked at some slides which had been used for quizzes,  introduction slides, to explain how to do a task and add facts.

It was enjoyable to have a go at making things move in a slide show and to learn some more skills that could be used in displays.  Command D to duplicate is useful.  To make an object move you need to set up your slide.  Select a background from creative commons or from Explore, then duplicate your slide, click on the object and move it slowly to make the movement as smooth as possible.  Repeat the "duplicate and click on the object" process as many times as is needed.  I can see learning this skill will be popular even with the year ones.

Digital portraits using the polyshape tool were fascinating but the fact that you needed to start back at the beginning if you didn't join it up completely the first time would make some children decide it wasn't for them.  It required patience and a steady hand and for those who had these two ingredients I can see they would be fascinated by creating a lifelike image of themselves, their friends or even to just add another dimension to their art work on a slide show.

We finished the day making our personal pepeha on a slide deck.  As this required thought and discussion to make it culturally appropriate it is still a work in progress and to say it correctly will require much practise.

A lot of learning was packed into another very intensive day.

Digital Fluency Intensive Day 2

It was another intensive day of learning on day two of the Digital Intensive Fluency Course.

In connecting with the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy this week we looked at the "Learn" part of "Learn, Create, Share".  Fiona explained that there is not just one way of "Manaiakalani learning".  It looks different for each school because of the special character of each school.  Some schools serve a specific age group, for example primary level or college, while others are special education or special character schools.  Not only are the schools different but they also serve different communities so one learning style will not fit all the Manaiakalani schools.

But the common connection is the digital nature of the learning and the access we have to a digital learning environment.  It is not just the 9 to 3 learning in one place but learning is "any where, any time, any place".

To implement such a programme it is not enough just to have expensive digital equipment.  It requires major changes in teaching practises.  Existing quality programmes need to be re evaluated.  What is effective needs to "amplified" and "turbocharged" to promote student learning.

Teacher actions will promote student learning.  Students learning is so much more visible in the digit world on their sites.  Teachers are able to provide sufficient opportunities to learn not just once but students can revisit and be reminded of the learning or the tasks.  Feedback is quickly provided and a teacher can look at what the students are sharing, listen to recordings the students have made or see how long they spend on a document and if it is more than the required time see if they need help.  The students are able to access their learning immediately so there is an efficient use of learning time.

So what does learning look like in our schools?

GREAT TEACHING + DIGITAL LEARNING = ACCELERATION

Fiona felt that if there was one magic silver bullet it would be effective teachers not devices.  So in the evaluation of the Woolf Fisher research what is common to all the schools that has resulted in shift and how can we share these pockets of success and spread it around?

When we started digital learning there was some substitution for example a device for paper and pencil but now we need to move beyond this and redefine how technology can support learning.  We need to use these amazing tools to provide solutions to problems and opportunities for new ways of learning so that our students have a voice and they can move beyond the classroom environment and join other and learn from them.

"If its worth teaching, its worth capturing."
"If its worth learning, its worth capturing."

Fiona's presentation had many important points for me to ponder on about how I can use technology to support my teaching and therefore enhance my students learning in my class as well as in our team.

Then we moved on to looking at the uses of Goggle maps and how maps can be integrated into many learning opportunities to enhance students learning.  Tips were shared as to how Google maps can be useful in our personal lives from finding your car in a carpark or to tracking your journey for your family.

I could immediately see ways I could use Goggle forms when we looked at the making and use of such forms.  It could be used to get children to learn basic facts and number knowledge using technology.  I made a simple form on which my students who are having trouble with the concept of "before" could practise this using a number line.

Using Goggle spread sheets to display and analysis information would be a great digital way of displaying the information we put onto 5 week reading graphs that are presently on paper.  This could be manipulated and used in different ways to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.  It could also be a way of displaying other information we keep on the children's progress such as alphabet letter identification or words learnt over a period of time.  I hope to be able to make some spread sheets to use this information over the next few weeks.  Fiona also mentioned if we needed help in remembering any of the tips on freezing cells, adding totals, to format dates, hiding columns and autofilling columns there is a good Goggle Help centre.

When Fiona was talking about learning being rewindable I thought about our DMiC maths lessons and how the children often needed reminding of what the story is telling us.  To get the children to actually record what they need to do on their iPads and then to be able to listen to what is required might help focus some of the learners who need to be refocused.

We also looked at how to analysis data and create a graph using data gained from a student's blog.   I looked at how many blogs were done over a series of years as well as when the blogs were done within one year and created two graphs to show this information.  The first graph shows how the number of blogs was a lot more intensive in the first two years of blogging and then tailed off.  This might be due to a variety of reasons and such a graph could be a starting point to discuss with the student how they could be helped to keep up the number of posts.

In the second graph I looked at when the blogs were posted to see if there was a pattern over a year.  Again this could be an important graphic to show a student and remind them "that their voice has value" and they needed to keep their voice alive.

All in all a very intensive day but a very valuable day of learning and thinking about how to use technology to enhance our student's learning and our own practise.

Digital Fluency Intensive 2018 Day One

Today was the beginning of the second course of Digital Fluency Intensive for 2018.

It began with  the Manaiakalani story which is a powerful reminder of why we work to provide our students with a digital learning environment in which they can "Learn, Create, Share". Dorothy's presentation on the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy showed us that so much has been achieved over a short space of time and as we look at the philosophy behind the story we can see that communities and teachers have worked together to make ideas come to fruition.

When using Goggle documents we were reminded to label, organise, date and file work properly.  This applies as much to our private planning and organisation as to getting children to do this.  Taking time at the beginning of the year to teach these skills to the whole class as part of the Kawa of Care is a good suggestion.

Learning how to use new tools in Goggle documents such as a table of contents and headings will be useful in planning and presentations.  The method of making the headings linked to a document  creates a searchable table of contents.   In the break out time we were able to work in smaller groups and revisit this going at our pace and asking any questions which arose. This gave you confidence when we put the learning to use immediately to create a poster and having help to guide you through the steps if you needed it was very useful.

During a discussion on voice text I could immediately see possibilities to use in my Year 1 class for both reading and writing activities on their iPads. Khismira and I discussed possible ways that we could use this for getting the children to publish their writing by having the story "typed" as they read it. It would also make them aware of punctuation as they need to say "full stop". They could then take a photo of their picture if they had already done one in their book or draw a picture to match their work and then save it to their Drive to be put on their blog at a later time.   In the reading EE's that we use, there is a section that the children need to write words from the text. The children who find difficulty writing often find this tiresome as it requires them to transfer words from the text but the idea of using voice text and checking if is correct might overcome this. The use of a clear voice and the idea of recording might help some children actually finish their work.