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.