DFI#9 Exams and Endings

 DFI#9 Exams and Endings

The above should be played at full volume for the duration of this blog post! 

It sums up up the last 9 weeks of DFI involvement, but especially the last few hours of Google Educator Level 1 exam time! 

I have stressed about the exam for a number of weeks. Flashbacks to 3 hour School Certificate exams in a dingy school hall in the 1970s. 

Supportive colleagues repeatedly said 'you'll be fine'. The most supportive colleague said 'what's the worst that can happen?'. It's a great question!

I never got to the end of the exam - a dodgy connection saw me thrown out of the exam after scenario 6 of 11. There was much to-ing and fro-ing with the google chat-bot, then with a real google person, and (after 40 minutes) a rather impersonal message saying they had tried everything they could and I would need to re-take the test at another time. I don't even know if my completed questions and scenarios have been saved. 

The feeling of devastation was intense, but short lived. What's the worst that could happen? 

Well, I didn't finish the test. 

That's it. Everything else from the last 9 weeks is still there. It hasn't disappeared into the ether. I can still use my new skills, tips and tricks everyday to streamline my workflow.  I can still remember how to create YouTube channels and playlists. I still have a deeper understanding of the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa than I did at the beginning of the term. I still have my blog and my learning site. I still have the shared experience of learning alongside of teachers from my school and colleagues from across the cluster.

I might get my brave on in the upcoming holidays and have another go at it ...... or I might not. 

What's the worst that can happen?

DFI#8 Empowerment and Computational Thinking

Heading into this 8th DFI session I have to admit that my mind was pre-occupied with next week's exam rather than on the days agenda. That changed as Dorothy started unpacking the Empowered kaupapa. 

 Dorothy explained that initially the word 'agency' was used and then outlined the reasons for the change to the use of 'empowerment'. Apart from a 6-year stint as principal of a Decile 10 rural school on the outskirts of Christchurch, I have always worked in the 'low numbers' - both here and also in the equivalent in inner-London in the 1980s. I totally understand what the word agency means to many people in these communities. I remember a parent sharing with me that she was having to work with 15 external agencies in her efforts to keep her family afloat and that at times there were 2 or 3 cars from different agencies in her driveway at the same time. She said it was like having a full - time job keeping up with all of her agency appointments. I am not sure that colleagues who work in more privileged communities understand what it can be like for our people. 

When we opened the new school we started talking with parents about recording information in children's 'learner profiles'. After a whanau hui one night a parent took me to one side and asked me if I could please not create a profile for her child. All her older children had profiles of a different nature - police profiles, court profiles, youth offender profiles, and the like. For us at school, it was just a word, and one commonly used in schools at that. For her - it meant something completely different. It was a good thing for me to understand.

I hadn't ever thought about the cost of disposing of rubbish - but it totally makes sense, when you drive around our school neighbourhood and see the broken furniture and electronic equipment piled up on the grass verge with a 'free' sign alongside. Sometimes our children pick these things up and bring them to school. I know I feel incensed when I see the shop trucks in the street - encouraging people to take home now and pay later. And don't get me started on the pay-day loan companies that have started lending to beneficiaries post-lockdown.

My school is the only low-decile school in our cluster. I know that what Dorothy described in regards to children starting school in South Auckland is equally as true in regards to children starting school in the east Christchurch.  I regularly get to compare our data to that of the other schools in our cluster via the Woolf Fisher reports. I also get to see the progress made over the past 3 years. We have been so advantaged by our involvement in the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme. 

New Learning

This week's new learning was around computational thinking. We had time to explore different programmes that offer learning in basic coding. I was quite surprised to find that I really enjoyed this explore time. I have little experience in anything to do with coding but am lucky enough to be surrounded at school by talented teachers who do, and who provide the Rāwhiti children with highly engaging opportunities to experiment with the likes of Bee-Bots and  Spheros. 

If you have a moment, take time to watch this movie made by some little learners at my school and see if you can determine which elements of the Digital Technologies Curriculum are in play. Trust me - it's worth watching.

What a hard act to follow! Nowhere near the same standard, here is my own first attempt at coding.

DFI #7 At Home In A Digital World

 DFI#7 At Home In A Digital World

We were challenged by using different devices this week. While I feel quite at home on an iPad, I have never even opened a Chromebook - even though there are literally hundreds of them in my school. Rāwhiti students are so adept at using Chromebooks but I certainly had some learning to do. Finding the shortcuts on the Chromebook was a challenge and good learning for me, but I found the whole device to be ‘clunky’.

Digital Fluency is about being able to use any device - it is really important that we understand the learning experience our learners are having so I am glad that I was able to experience this. However, I was very pleased to get back onto my Macbook to write my blog post.

I also really enjoyed experimenting today with Screen Castify and I could see where I could purposefully use this tool at school. I am currently working on a resource for parents to help them understand our new system of reporting student achievement and progress using Linc-Ed Hero. 

However, the biggest challenge today was actually taking part in the DFI. Not terribly far into the session I was unceremoniously kicked out of our Google Meet, with my screen displaying a rather intimidating message from Linewise saying that I had been banned from using Meet! Being remedial in my abilities the thought of missing the mornings content caused quite some stress. 

And so, the problem solving began. 

A quick check with my DFI colleagues revealed that two of us were in and two of us were out. To determine whether it was linked to school or home, I changed from my school email to my personal Gmail account and discovered that I could get back into Meet - although nobody would know who was trying to access the meetings. With the help of someone on-site back at school, we were able to determine that 'someone' had been playing around in the school settings because they wanted to deny children access to something as a consequence of doing the wrong thing with their device. Because my account is linked to that particular Learning Studio, when they changed the setting I was directly affected. 

Problem solved and access restored.

However, the whole incident cuts right to the heart of today's DFI theme of being Cybersmart. If the goal is to have young people who can harness technology in smart and clever ways and to engage in online behaviour and thinking that elevates positive actions, then I can not see a place for blanket banning of online access. As Dorothy pointed out, teachers don't take maths books off children because they don't do their maths properly. 

My observation is that teachers tend to remove or deny access to things that they think children will like - such as PE and outdoor games, and digital devices. This is a practice that can't be condoned.

There are a myriad of excellent Cybersmart resources available to us on the Manaiakalani site to help us "prepare and empower our learners to manage in an online world". Let's not take kids - or principals - offline to try and make a point.

DFI #6 Getting Connected

 DFI #6 Getting Connected

Connectedness is the state of being joined or linked. 

When I was a child in the 60's I lived in the country and our small rural area was linked in way that would horrify children today. We had a party line! I wonder if you know what I mean? Everyone on our road shared the same phone connection, with each household having a slightly different ring notification - so you knew whether or not you needed to pick up the phone when it rang. Ours was two longs and a short. We ignored everything else. If you wanted to make a call, you had to check that no one else was already talking on the line, and you did this by simply picking up the phone and listening to see if anyone was talking. Sometimes, you heard things that you shouldn't. We were connected, and while it may not have been visible it was certainly audible!

Connectedness is also the feeling of belonging to or having an affinity with a particular person or group. 

When the country was plunged into COVID-Alert Level 4 at relatively short notice we were so grateful as a staff that we belonged to the Te Ara Tuhura Manaiakalni Outreach Programme and were linked to so many people around New Zealand who could support us in delivering distance learning. While we had quite a few children who did not have access to a suitable device at home, from a teaching perspective we had everything that we needed to 'keep calm and carry on'. 

How different it was from the last time that Christchurch school children were forced to stay away from school for their own personal safety following the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. On reflection, our lack of connection to the internet was not really our primary concern back then - it was the lack of connection to power, water, and sewerage systems that caused the most angst! 

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Dorothy described a time in the early days of Manaiakalani when the schools involved were disconnected, even though they were geographically close. Exactly the same could be said in regards to the early days of our own cluster. 

It has been our involvement in the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme that has really forged the connection between our schools. Connected leaners share - and so do connected schools and connected school leaders. 

I enjoyed having the opportunity to work on a Google site with my colleague Lauren who, like me, does not have her own class and therefore does not have the need for a class site. We have taken on the task of creating a site for our upcoming school A and P show. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, Christchurch is unable to have the annual A&P Show so Rāwhiti School is going to have its own show instead, which links nicely to this year's school learning theme of Growing. All of the information about the day - categories to enter, competitions, and events - will be on our site, along with Google entry forms. It took a bit of thinking to work out to include multi-modal aspects, but we are working on including movie clips to inspire creative ideas and instructional 'how-to' videos for whanau working at home on their entries.

We had a lot of decisions to make today, and also had to determine who would do what - so that we weren't both working on the same thing, or deleting each other's efforts! However, we are making progress.

DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

DFI #5 Collaborate - Visible Teaching and Learning

The concept of Visibility is simple - you can either see something or you can't. When we talk about Visible Learning Manaiakalani schools use Google Sites and Blogger as the vehicles for making teaching and learning visible, and in doing so have made parents genuine partners in the teaching and learning process.

Dorothy spoke about children having been unsuccessful at school in the past because much of the learning journey was hidden from them. 

That is was what school was like for me - trying as hard as I could but not actually knowing what was expected of me until I got my marked work back. Sometimes I would get an 8/10 and a comment 'good work' and other times I would get a 6/10 and the same 'good work' comment! As a cheeky 4th former I once submitted a book review assignment that I had written for an assignment in the 3rd form and had earned a C+. I was bemused to find that a year later and with no additions or improvements, it was worth a B+.

There was never any feedback as to how I could improve what I was doing.  No one ever talked to us about how to be successful at school - there was no such thing as WALTS or success criteria - we just knew that we were expected to be successful. 

For too long success in education has gone to the learner who had the ability to read the teacher's mind, - those who were able to 'learn' the teacher. 

I was interested to hear the discussion about See Saw, as it has become a bit of a sticking point in my school. Junior teachers love See Saw and the ease of its use for the younger children. Lots of schools seem to have continued to use it at the junior level, with blogs being used from Year 4 up - and I have not really been able to offer a reason as to why blogging is preferred. Today, I understood.. See Saw is not a visible teaching and learning experience because you need passwords for everything and only the people with the passwords can access the content. 

This article Be Careful With SeeSaw is an excellent read. It argues that because SeeSaw is so easy for teachers and children to use there is a danger that it will lead to a steady stream of low-quality images or videos that are captured with little or no thought or purpose and that provide parents with little or no substantial information about the nature of the learning that the students are engaged in, and also engages children in screen time that has little or no value. 

No doubt the same argument could be applied to blogging.

We need to be mindful that the aim is to make the learning visible. Unless we are purposeful, posting to any platform could become a  pretty pointless scrapbooking activity that gives parents a steady stream of images from within the classroom that they may start to depend on but not necessarily learn anything from.

This Week's New Learning

One of the ways that we can make learning visible is the use of Google Sites. Google Sites replace the blackboard, the worksheets, and even the things in the classroom that are there to help children learn are no use to the children when they are doing their learning at home.

While I take great pride in what I see the teachers at my school achieving with their Learning Sites before now I have never done anything in Sites myself - so today was a great example of me trying to catch up with them quickly. This is where being a perfectionist can really get in your way as a learner! I really like to know not just how things work and why, but also what is actually possible. I like things to look great - and the sooner the better. What this can actually do is slow me down to the point of inactivity!  

I did have a play in SItes to work out what goes where without getting too bogged down in 'is this the best picture I can find' and 'is that the right shade of blue'. Today was a slightly different DFI experience for me as I was learning alongside 3 of the teachers from my school - so it was good to have a 'reality check' every so often. 

As usual, far too much time is then spent getting my head around how to my new learning in a meaningful way. If I am going to spend time creating a site what will the purpose of it be? I have decided that making a site for the Board of Trustees is something that would be of benefit as they are not really managing the BOT Google Drive and all of the folders it contains. I haven't started yet - but the plan is to have something ready to share with the BOT at our next meeting on September 24th. I love a deadline!

 

Dealing with Data

I am really enjoying delving deeper into the various components of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, Learn Create Share. Hearing directly from Dorothy is filling in any gaps in my understanding and also reinforcing why I was so keen to have Rāhwiti School involved when the opportunity arose.

 

My big take away from this week was about sharing with an authentic audience and what that looks like for learners.

 

When I was at school, and in my early years of teaching, sharing was of the Morning Talk/  Show and Tell variety. This evolved to sharing with another person in the class, sharing with the teacher, the principal, and sometimes even sharing with parents and others in the community via the school newsletter. Some children may have had the opportunity to stand in front of the whole school assembly and share their work. 

However, what is missing from these scenarios is the authentic audience component. A school assembly is not an authentic audience because they have to listen to you – they have no choice.

 

Our involvement with Manaiakalani means that we make use of the Blogger platform to host individual student blogs for the public sharing of work. This means there is an opportunity for our students work to be read globally. Rather than completing work for the sole benefit of the teacher, our learners can share with others who share the same interests, or others who are invested in their learning i.e. friends and family.

 

Blogging is about sharing to learn. I thought the comparison between using Blogger and learning to drive was a great way of looking at things. Driving instructors use functional cars – they certainly don’t teach young people to drive in a top of the range Ferrari. Manaiakalani schools use Blogger as a vehicle to teach digital citizenship, it’s a bit like learning to drive online.

 

I am brand new to blogging – but I realised this week that if anyone actually reads my blog then they are choosing to listen to me, choosing to read, and maybe choosing to leave a comment. This has really made me think about how many student blog posts I read in a week (they come up in my Twitter feed) that I don't actually leave comments on. I am going to set myself a goal of contributing more when others are sharing to learn and setting time aside each week to comment on the student blogs from my school. 

My other learnings from the day......

• Google My Maps: This was not new to me but I really enjoyed having another play with it today and using it to plan out our upcoming (COVID-Alert levels allowing) Northland holiday in the next term break. 

 

•  Google Forms are something that I use a lot - but there is always more learning to be done e.g. uploading an image as part of the form was an option that I did not know about. Click here to fill in my form and help me out with some viewing ideas in case we end up back in Covid-Alert Level 4!
• Google Sheets: Lots of new learning here for me. I spend a lot of time looking at data that comes to me on spreadsheets created by other members of staff. I can do most of the basics but I really want to spend some time exploring the Conditional Formatting options as I can see lots of potential for using these to identify priority learners and those who have made accelerated progress. 

DFI#3 Media

Creativity has always been very important to me. On my first day of primary school, I took on the leading role in the class production of 'Are You My Mother'. (The original narrator was away sick, I could already read on arrival at school, and happily put my hand up to fill the gap.) I actually have a school report from my primary school days that says “Elizabeth has a fine sense of the dramatic”. We did not have a TV and so as a very young child, I used to put my dolls in the oven, shut the door, turn the light on, and narrate my own tv shows to entertain my siblings! I begged to learn to play the piano and then, much to parents' dismay, the violin, and any other instrument that the school had in the music room. At intermediate school, I joined my first ‘band’. We called ourselves ‘7 Day Dairy and the Milk Shakes’ and dreamed of becoming 70's rock chicks!

 

Eventually, I decided the stage was where I wanted to be and in my early days of teaching, I led a ‘double life’ of full-time teaching by day and acting at night, while weekends were filled with stand-up comedy and improvised theatre. To this day, my life outside of school has a strong focus on the performing arts and it saddens me when I hear teachers saying that they are so busy working at nights that they have no time for personal hobbies and passions.

As a classroom teacher, I was inspired by the work of Sylvia Ashton Warner. Her philosophy that volcanoes and children need vents of creativity, from her 1963 book Teacher, is still as relevant now as it was then. I can’t help but wonder if the reason that so many schools and teachers are reporting explosive student behaviours in the classroom is linked in some way to the decline of the arts in education?

 

I have believed for a long time that over time schools teach the innate creativity out of children. I frequently blamed the ‘dark years’ of National Standards for the absence of creativity in many classrooms. How could creativity flourish if children are being fed formula in order to learn how to earn the most points on a senseless standardised test?

 

At our school, one of our 4 RISE learner capabilities is Imaginative (Whakaaro Are).

“We dare to be creative. Being imaginative is not always about creating something new, but also, with a little ingenuity making old things work better. We are encouraged to reach far into the depths of our minds and come up with outlandish possibilities as well as practical ones. We undertake new and daring challenges and love trying to solve big problems. We do not always take the easy or expected option!”

 

 

I think that the Create part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is one of the key reasons that I chose to involve Rawhiti School in the outreach programme when the opportunity presented.

Reflecting on My Learning

 

For someone who loves having the opportunity to be creative, learning about being creative using a digital platform was hard work! Today I was the kid who had to stay in and morning break and lunchtime to finish the work the others had all done in class. It felt more like a learning chasm than a learning pit! While frustrating, it has given me a real insight into how so many children must feel while sitting in our classrooms and not being able to keep up. It has shown me why rewindable learning opportunities are essential, and the tools focused on today are the ways to provide those opportunities for learners (young, and old!).

Eventually, I managed to get my About Me button in the right place on my blog page and went on to create my YouTube Channel and a Playlist of music we that could use in our school bell system that plays songs to indicate the end of break times. I did have to stop myself as I could have spent hours trawling YouTube music videos.

Google Slides and Google Drawing are my home learning for the coming week.