Is it a bird, is it a plane ... no, it's a site!

Sup ... yo ... hey ... opps ... I mean Kia ora, hello, welcome to this week's blog. We have the privilege to have Clarelle, from Point England with us. Clarelle has been teaching at Point England for four years. She also had an awesome TIGER top!

Dorothy took us through visible learning. This is such an important part of the vision of Manaiakalani. The power of learning being visible and available to everyone; students, whanau, community and the world means that the students are provided with an authentic audience for their work. It also means whanau can be connected to the classroom which goes beyond simply walking into the classroom and finding a book. 

Visible Teaching removes the surprise element, time upfront and the learning rewindable for afterwards but also in advance. - Accessible - online, shared visibly to anyone with the link, removing password barriers. Available - everything the learner needs is present - no scrambling to share material, activities etc at the last minute. Advance - BEFORE it is needed, before the deadlines.

We know how excited students get when they find comments on their blogs from a parent or another family member or even a random person. This also counts for what they are working on. Knowing that Mum, Dad, Whanau care enough to look and talk or comment means that their work is valued. And that is what children want ... to be valued and for their work to be valued.

Also ... sharing online and with the world is powerful and leads to all sorts of wonderful things happening. Check out this video to see how being online found a special audience.

The rest of the session was spent exploring sites. We spent some time analysing sites; what was great about the way they look and about the way they function. Then we had a turn sharing our own sites for analysis.

It is amazing how quickly you realise that it isn't the way you thought it was and all the things you need to do to make it more user-friendly and visible. I know I thought I had made sure all the things were available for others but it turns out they weren't. Sad face!

Thankfully, the timetable allowed us time to have a good tidy up and a cleanup. I spent far to much time sorting the header for the home page. Note to self: simple is best! and if it starts to take longer than 20 minutes its time to do something else.

The finished product isn't terrible, it looks better than it did. (Should have taken a photo of the original but I didn't).

Angela did a lot of sorting the folders out so that they were available online. This means all the work for this year is now freely available. I did a lot of 'zhuzhing' of buttons and things, working on the flow of pages and making media available from the site too. The biggest changes were to the blogger page. I wonder if any of the students will notice?

It has felt really good to be able to get things sorted. Often I notice that things need fixing but I run out of time or forget about them. What a gift this course is for the teachers who are attending.

Explain Everything 0 - Screencastify 1

Today we have been exploring Hapara - Teacher Dashboard, Cybersmart Curriculum, iPads & Chromebooks, Explain Everything and Screencastify.

Hapara - Teacher Dashboard
Whilst I know quite a bit about how to use it, due to using it for a few years, there were a few things that I discovered.

• You can access the shared folders from Hapara, which is helpful if you can't find the document or the student has called it something weird, or you have student who makes multiple copies of the same document.
• We explored the 'Share Links' button which allows you to either lock students into particular sites or allows them to explore the internet but not particular sites. There are real advantages for both of these tools in the classroom, particularly if you were wanting to direct them to say a reading activity using a newspaper site but not wanting them to explore further than a particular page.

Cybersmart Curriculum

Reviewing the Cybersmart Curriculum reminded me that I need to spend some time on the YMS
Curriculum to highlight some of these things. Looking at our curriculum has made me realise that the Learn Create Share pedagogy is highlighted but needs to be unpacked more. I'll see if I can find some time for this ... 

We also need to work out how to balance the curriculum in a classroom where the children potentially spend 4 years. It is important to keep it fresh for them.

iPads/Chromebooks

Kindly Te Pihinga lent us some iPads to have a play on. We spent a bit of time looking at this slide. That was great to go over the basics. In terms of my role as School Leader, I feel a bit disconnected with what the iPad classes are doing and how they are implementing the use of these devices. My guess would be that they aren't being used to there fullest potential but I could be wrong. Looking at all the information in the slide gives me an idea of how we move forward, however, it comes back to that time thing again. I'll add it to the list ...

We didn't play with Chromebooks but the Digi Dig was a good process to go through. Important learning: anything that is a short cut on a Chromebook that uses control, on a Mac is simply command. Boom town!

Explain Everything/Screencastify

Our explores today were around these two apps. I have some experience with both but in limited ways. I had spent last night creating two explain everythings for a math lesson but was having trouble working out how to get it into my lesson slide. A quick conversation with the experts (Kelsey and Mark) and a couple of tips on screencastify and I've been able to redo what I was trying to do last night using screencastify.

We also discovered a published work of 50 ideas for using screencasitfy in education. This has some great things in it and inspired Angela to try something new for her math lesson. I have magpied her idea and am also going to use it. It is really great to be able to share ideas and spark off each other.

My aim for this coming week is to see how the students find using screencastify to enhance their understanding of a strategy. Is anyone else trying screencastify for their learners?

Is it scratchy in here?

Did you know that sharing is a really important part of the Learn, Create, Share circle? I know when we first started this journey a number of years ago we didn't really understand that it was to be more than just a blog post of perfectly finished work. What we have discovered and learnt is that we don't just share to finish our learning, we actually share to learn. The brilliant thing about having a blog allows us and our students to share even further than just parents and teachers.

Something that really stood out to me was Dorothy sharing this:

As teachers, we ask our children to write for an audience and there is a compulsory audience who is forced or paid to listen or read this. An authentic audience is someone who chooses to listen/read your work.

This is so true. The students know and expect that we will read there work. In fact, they get frustrated when we don't read it, but they don't always have an expectation that anyone else should care about their work. But seeing the excitement on their faces when someone they don't know or someone they really care about, particularly an adult, writes on their blog helps us understand why it is so important to share with that wider audience. Authenticity is what these students need, in a world where nothing is really that authentic ... and they know that.

Do you agree?

Computational Thinking! 

This is something I've done two PD's in before, however, because I am not using it in my classroom I have forgotten most things. Because I am Learn Create Share leader and using digital technologies in the classroom then this is something I haven't thought much about. But today has been a good reminder that we have to teach this from next year and that you don't need to much stuff to be able to teach it. No need for fancy robots (though that would be fun).

We started by doing an unplugged exercise where we were sorted, just like a computer algorithm. In this exercise, we had to google the distance to where we were born and then 6 at a time got sorted from furthest to closest. It was pretty easy and you can see how that would be quick to do in a classroom with any sort of data.

Getting Sorted:

Kawana came to us from the Pam Fergusson Trust, who are working with teachers to get ready for the new digital technology curriculum. Kawana has a background in computer science and is passionate about helping Maori young people access this area. You can check more out at https://trailblazers.pamfergusson.org.nz/

A key part of today's learning was around exploring the concepts of computational thinking. This involved thinking about ethics and morals, understanding binary and the practical side of using different types of apps. We also spend some time looking at the new Digital Readiness site that the government has put together for teachers before the 2020 launch. 

My biggest learning was around using scratch to make something. This is definitely a learning pit area for me. I have spent a tiny bit of time exploring but it has been a couple of years. It is logical and involves problem-solving (as all math really is) and it wasn't as hard or as complicated as I remember it being. You can check out my process in the slide below. 

There is much that I've learnt that we can use in the classroom. In fact, we have put Computational Thinking into our Tuesday plan for Term 4, a great way to do some creative problem-solving in a different way. I am looking forward to this.

What do you to introduce computational thinking in your classroom? 

Three is a magic number for making sites about dung

Despite feeling a bit under the weather I was looking forward to another Tuesday of learning, and I haven't been let down.

We met Danni Stone, our Year 7/8 Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu partner from Point England. She was here to teach us all about Google Sites. It was lovely to meet her and to make the face to face connection. She is very knowledgable and helpful, also willing to share her journey of how things have evolved over the 5 plus years she has been on this Learn Create Share journey.

Dorothy introduced us to today's theme of create. Create is such a powerful tool to use. I took many notes as she spoke but here are a couple of standouts:

• Creativity is a doing word … the whole parts of our body, not just a screen.
• The digital world can give us a world that turbocharges our creativity … but it isn’t the be-all and end-all … it is one part of the wedge. (see graphic to see the different parts of the wedge)
• Digital can capture the creativity.
• We don’t want our learners to be consumers, we want them to be creators. 
• Students that take more responsibility for selecting topics to learn about and this lead to accelerated learning. 
• Create: empowering through choice, information/knowledge, developing skills, building capacity & scaffolding.

"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

All this information has made me ask the question: 

Does our YMS belief mean that we only think it is about the digital? Do we ignore the other wedges of creativity from the classes that are using digital devices more than the juniors?

Sadly, we don't get much time to verbally process this information. Sometimes I wonder if it would help me work through what we are already doing in our class/school before we move on. I know my brain can be like a sieve and things come and go as fast as Katy Perry changes her hairstyle.

(or Mel Raisin 😊😊)

The rest of the day was spent with Danni taking us through Google Sites. I have some experience using sites but it was great having some sandpit time. The tips on this slide are fantastic, especially the size for headers and buttons.

In anticipation of the opportunity to do some creating, I had brought along a new Sharp Reading resource on Insects. We have been able to create our own site which we will be able to use for half our class for reading next week. It was great to be working on it with my fab work wife. Angela hasn't had a lot of time on creating sites and I think she found it helpful.

It was also interesting learning about Dung Beetles. We aren't quite happy with it but the bones are there. A bit of tweaking and we will be away.

Our Site

What do you think about it? What would you suggest?