3 hour exam ... are you for real?

Today is the day where we complete our 9 week Digital Fluency Intensive. Intense it has been, challenging, stretching, even easy at times but most importantly lots of fun. I have loved getting to know other teachers, networking, sharing ideas, hearing the struggles and hearing the celebrations. It has truly been the best PD I've ever had. 

But first, the exam. We knew coming into the Intensive that we would finish with a Google Educator Exam. It is a 3 hour exam, practising the skills learnt on the course. 

Many people were feeling really nervous, and even though I had decided not to stress about it as the time approached to begin I started to get nervous energy coursing through my body. It is amazing how we feel as adults before something like this. How do our students feel before they sit down for a PAT Test or E-Asttle? But it is good to be in the Learning Pit and it is good to have these feelings. Getting in the arena is the big battle! And here I am, in the arena. 

I, of course, panicked as soon as I saw the first question. In fairness, it was on Google Classroom and we don't use that. Thankfully we could use the 'Review Later' button and I moved on and felt calmer as I hit questions I was confident in. 

The exam is split into two parts; multi-choice and practical scenarios. The practical scenarios were much easier as they were doing activities and once you got into the swing of things it felt just like what we normally do every day. I finished with just an hour to spare and only three questions to review. The hardest part was pushing the submit button. But submit I did and then the nervous wait ...

Whew ... 

So, the end is here. I have learnt so much and strengthened my own knowledge of what I can do. I have been reminded of the WHY of why we are doing this. Having the input around the pedagogy has been the standout me. Dorothy's wisdom has allowed me to engage again with the WHY again and given me the words to be able to explain this learning to others. I really don't understand why people feel so resistant to it. Learn Create Share is so powerful and it truly changes the students learn as well as the way I teach. I see the benefits of this, not just because the data tell us it works but because I can see the engagement in my own students. 

Sometimes it can feel like adults don't understand this process but it isn't about them, it is about the students. The evidence is in the classroom though. I received an email from a colleague who worked in our school a few years ago and they left because they couldn't see how it would work in a digital environment. They said this:

"By the way. What a stunning programme you are running in Rimu. I have had a glimpse of what you have been talking about all along but did not have the vision to understand."

It was so gratifying but humbling to receive this email. We run a good programme. Our students are happy and engaged. They are learning. The use of digital is enhancing and engaging them in ways a worksheet never could. Learning is interesting and exciting and they want to be at school. 

TURBOCHARGE! 

That is what this DFI has helped me to do; personally, in my teaching, in my role as School Leader, in my next steps as a teacher and as a Learn Create Share advocate. It is exciting and I can't wait to see what the next steps look like. 

Empowering our learning ... with maps, sheets and forms.

Empower!

Empowered                  

Used to use an agency but now use empowered. Empowered means to empower our learners… shock horror.

80% of the community in Manaiakalani live with an income of $19,000 per annum. And they make it work, but they are the working poor. We are not just talking about whanau on benefits these families are working and trying to juggle childcare, bills and life. However, it is quite disempowering.

5+ a day back and forth conversations make a difference to the oral language and blogging also strengthens this (5+ a blogasation).

If you want to EMPOWER our children then you can’t cherry-pick which you do. All of the following need to be part of the journey:

It has been really great having Dorothy Burt with us in person. She has a wealth of knowledge and she was able to download some of it to us. It was especially helpful in having the tips and tricks for our exam next week. Some people are feeling pretty worried about it but I am going into it with a positive attitude (assuming I can get on because I did have some technical difficulties with signing up today).

The rest of the day was exploring My Maps, Forms and Sheets. On the surface, these don't sound too thrilling but in actual fact we had a number of 'WOW' moments. There are a number of ways to use all of them, in life and in the classroom (which is also life but you know what I mean). 

For My Maps, I've started creating a My Map of our trip to Wellington for our Year 7/8 Camp. This I'll be able to share with whanau so they can see what we are doing (and how much walking they will be doing).

We did create this one with data from a Google Form.

In Forms, we created something for people to fill in. It was pretty fun. I had a go creating something for students to give feedback. This is the table that all the DFI team shared their Forms, you could always have a play if you wanted. The Block NZ is an important social question at present. 

Share your name and link your form below! Have a go at completing each other’s forms
Dorothy
Mel Raisin	Would you rather
Kelsey	Do You Wanna Taco 'bout It?
Alethea D	The Call of the Wilderness
Kathy L	Weekends
Rebecca	How do you take your coffee?
Melissa	All about me sandpit student form
Paula	Finding out about you
Helen	PBL choice for my hub student form
Angela	The Block NZ
Harry Romana	DFI Practice Form
Jess	Animals
Angela	Pets
Kellen	Softball form (students)
Nicole	Colours
Sharon	Thumbs up or Thumbs down?
Bernard Adams	Inquiry Term 4:  Student form
Kimberley	Genius Hour
Sharon T	Personal reading
Lucy	Breakfast eating habits
Tracey	Which Gymnastics leotard do you prefer for our Belfast Gym Team?

Finally, we spent some time pulling data out of our student blogs. I'm not entirely convinced I've harnessed the power of the data yet. I pulled all the date from our Year 7&8 students blogs. Below you can see the data that I have to work with. I have managed to use Sparkline to create the little graphs so you can see the tracking of their blog posting. I have also worked out the averages across the years, they are at the bottom of each column. 

I made this graph to show the totals for each student. It is quite visual and shows the tracking for each individual student.

Do you have any suggestions for what I could do with the data? Ideally, I want it to motivate the students. I know that Angela was looking at individual blogs for data, which is also a powerful motivator. You could check out her blog .

It is sad to think that next week is our last week. I have loved this learning and networking. What a shame it will all be over next week. 

Drones, hand held cameras, live YouTube and Me!

Today started with Kent from Point England introducing us to some pretty cool tech. Drones, handheld cameras and VidiUPro, all to be able to Live Stream. You can check out the presentation here: Presentation

Point England use Live Streaming to be able to include family members who are working, unable to attend or live overseas in the events and school life. They stream sports, performances, class items and other school events. Whanau simply join the link and watch what is happening live. St Francis of Assisi senior class has also used it to share learning one day. They didn't have the same equipment, they used teacher MacBooks to stream.

We had our own experience of failure today with Dorothy's link to us suffering from the dropouts and then having an alarm. Ironically it was about Connection ... but next week will be Connecting in person with Dorothy, as she is coming down to Christchurch.

Some notes from her chat with us:

• Being connected digitally is a way of empowering the learners and we can do it because the learning is shared and visible. It extends from the individual, potentially to the world.
• This is an inclusive model and again, taps into the human instinct to SHARE and to be connected with other human beings.
• Diversity is celebrated - what ties us together is the language of Learn Create Share
• Digital turbo-charges but face to face is also just as important. Digital allows us to do more or include those that can’t be there.

“If you are all paddling in the same direction, you have greater power, you are more efficient. There is an impact on the nature of teaching and learning because if the teacher and student each know what it is you’re meant to be focusing on you are more likely to reach your goals.” - Dorothy Burt

You will often find the words connected and share tied together in Manaiakalani resources and events- it is impossible to have one without the other. Because connection is a two way, two-person action. You have to give to get. If you want others to share with you, then you need to be a sharing kinda person.

Powerful learning, creating and sharing comes into it's own supporting a Connected network when teaching and learning is visible. Connectedness is powerful when teaching and learning is visible, learners (and teachers) have been empowered (have agency), and ubiquity is supported.

The rest of the time was spent exploring YouTube, Google Drawings & Google Slides. We saw some pretty great examples of Pick a Path and Animations made on Google Slides. Examples of planning in the Juniors and the Seniors done on slides. Comments can be kept private so that only those that have editing rights can see them. This can be powerful so you don't need to keep separate planning and teacher notes. 

I had a good play on Google Drawing and created myself. I've seen a number of my students do this and I have wondered if I could do it too. I don't think it is that amazing but I'm proud of myself. 

I think it can be challenging for our students to learn how to use a tool like Google Drawing. Even learning to manipulate the tools to create the shapes is hard. But it is important to learn, because 'we don't Learn Google Share, we Learn Create Share'. I think we as teachers need to model this more than we currently do, or at least I do. 

- quote, Mark Maddren.

So my aim this week is to try and show my students more examples of me being in the learning pit. 

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?

Does motivation make a difference to students engagement in reading?

During the holidays I met with Kelsey to hear about some learning she had experienced a few weeks back. She shared her and Mark's notes with me, as well as explaining an overview of what they had covered. The discussion was around how we engage students in reading.

In writing we take time to hook the students in with something, we try and get them excited and interested in what they are going to write about. But we don't do it with reading. Usually, we give them a book or journal and tell them what to read. There is no choice left with them. But we expect that they will be excited and engaged with reading because it's reading.

The speaker Dr Rebecca Jessen said "Motivation does not predict reading achievement however engagement does. The hook gets engagement and leads to increased motivation and reading achievement. Relevance especially culturally is critical for engagement."

Kelsey shared about what Wigram Kereru community are going to be doing to engage their readers and it made me think about what we need to do. While we have given a little bit of choice around one or two things (the novel study group got to choose their book, they have a choice in the way they present activities) we don't really give them any choice about all of it.

Because of the timing, I didn't feel that we would be able to change everything for the term, plus our class runs a bit more traditionally than Kereru, however, I do want to see if creating excitement and interest before beginning makes a big difference in their achievement.

I decided to start with two areas that I could, without changing everything.

Shared Story: While we have decided to follow the Chapter Chat choice and read the book Holes to the class I wondered if I could help create excitement around this book by the way we introduce it to the class and the way in which they first engage with the follow-up work.

Novel Study Group: There are two books for the students to choose from, one we chose and one the students chose. I wondered if there was some way I could hook the students in, get them to choose the first book they read and get them excited about the reading for the term.

With these wondering questions in mind, I decided to try a few things.

Shared Story:

• I created the Slide to help engage interest and prior knowledge in the story.

• I decided to create excitement around the story by putting the book into a box and creating 'clues' that needed to be opened on the first day. 

The students were very intrigued by the box and curious to know what was in it. Lots of discussion and noise was created as we opened and talked about what the clues could mean. Watch the video below. 

The clues gave way to some discussion around what it all could mean. My class blog entry shared some of the ideas that they came up with.

It was great to hear everyone being creative, despite a few students knowing things about the book. I was open to having a student say they thought it would be a book called Holes but because it was amongst other suggestions we didn't dwell on that. It was helpful having Angela saying she thought it was going to be a puppy, the children got into this idea.

We read the first couple of chapters because they wanted it and so far they seem to be enjoying it. Tracking of the work they complete and the responses during discussions should give us some indication of how engaged they are with the book. I would hope to see an increase in the depth of answers and creativity in the creative DLO's. 

Novel Study: 

In light of the idea that we need to give ownership and choice to the students, I created this slide for students to choose to know about the books and knowing what work they would need to do. 

I also thought through how I could enhance the activities that the students need to do so that they don't just answer a bunch of comprehension and vocab questions. I want them to deepen their understanding of the book and to extend their creativity in the way they answer so that it shows their depth of understanding. 

Kelsey also shared that Dorothy Burt felt that teachers do far too much of the work and that we aren't allowing students to do some of this checking. After a term of struggling to keep on top of the marking, I would have to agree so I wanted to include this in the work. 

So my follow-up activities include peer checking, peer work and creativity with choice. There are still comprehension questions and vocab questions but I have encouraged pair conversation and will aim to use some of the critical literacy lessons with this group to develop more of these skills. I am thinking about testing them again at the end of the term to see if this makes a difference to their results, though we will test early Term 4 so I may wait till then. 

What about the rest of the class?

This is an area that currently I have left as is. I do need to develop this but currently, time and a question around how to do this well, while still developing the reading skills using Sharp Reading is stopping me from moving forward at this stage. I would like to explore how Wigram manage their programme further as I feel that will help me with some of my thinking. 

What questions do you think I should be asking? What ideas do you have around Critical Literacy and engaging readers? I would appreciate peoples thoughts on what I have written. 

How many tabs can a teacher have open at one time?

Following on from last week's learning we continued the journey of working smarter, not harder.

Our main focus was on learning how to use Google Hangouts, plus a few extra tips and tricks.

Google Hangouts:

Today we experienced Google Hangouts, firstly 'hanging out' with Dorothy, where she spoke about LEARN and we listened and followed on a shared screen. Following this, we then 'hung out' in small groups learning how to share our screens and speak about our favourite place. You can see below some screenshots of our first conversation as a group and what it looks like. It is amazing how something simple like turning a microphone on and off and sharing a screen seems so complicated for the first time.

Later on in the day, we had a go discussion a students blog post from the Summer Learning Journey and having it recorded at the same time. I don't think it was truly successful, for a number of reasons; lack of understanding around the task, tech issues (the recording didn't do the sound initially), nerves around most of us not wanting to 'fail' or 'look stupid' ... or maybe that was just me. But it could be a great thing to try with students and for staff to use at different times. 

Workflow:

We continue to be given skills/extensions/apps/ideas to make our workflow better. We focussed on three things; emails, calendars and Keep. Many of the things in email and calendar I had already explored so it didn't feel so helpful, though I did get to change my email background to a personal photo so that was nice.

Keep, however, was a different story. This seems to have many uses - list-making, note-taking, a place to keep ideas and lists and the ultimate hack ... turning text from a picture into text! That is mindblowing and we can't wait to try it out with our Sharp Reading sheets. We have already started to make a list of comments or pictures that we want to use often. Another member of our group uses it to drop digital stickers into their students work because the children missed the stickers. You can share lists between others so that is helpful for Angela and I and our workflow. 

In terms of thinking about the pedagogy that sits behind all of this, I would like to take some time to reflect on what Dorothy talked about. 

Learn is the sticky idea that most people struggle with. We are all, always learning but Learn is the bit where we access what we already know. Dorothy spent some time breaking the idea of Learn down a bit more. 

Exploring the idea of RATE was a good reminder.

R - recognising effective practise

A - when we have recognised it then amplifying that effective practice. This does include understanding the data and then amplifying that across other classes

T -  Turbocharge is where technology clicks in and allows us to amplify our effective practice

E = Effective Practise

What do we do that does this in our class? Do I do this? Having some time to explore this would have been helpful. I also wonder if it is something that we should be exploring as a school? What does YMS see as Learn? 

Hmmmmm, more to process around some of this but the tables are being packed up and my brains stopped working.

And the answer to the screen title is .... Many, many, many tabs (though One Tab or Toby Mini will help you to control the many).

DFI ... a new journey for me.

Beginning today I started walking a 9-week-long journey exploring digital fluency. Even though I have been teaching using digital devices for over 5 years I still have a lot to learn. Angela (my work wife) is also attending, which is and will make our teaching stronger. Already we have created a google doc for Maths Week using what we have learnt.

Today's session was called: Core Business. 

It has covered the origin story of Manaiakalani, shared succinctly and passionately by Dorothy Burt. Gerhard Vermeulen and Mark Maddren took us through a very full day. Mostly we were going over some google basics and how to work smarter not harder. I found it to be helpful, a reminder of things that I've forgotten, and new things that I want to use to be smarter in my teaching and work life. 

There was some simple learning; how to make your bookmarks icons only, how to copy and paste without formating (a key for blogging), how to use the explore tool in teaching and for our own work. I'm sure I've been shown these things before but these things slide out of your mind when you don't use them regularly. 

Some new learning for me was: 

• Using tables in docs but colouring the lines white and having the boxes coloured so it changes the way they look. 
• Getting a free icon sourcing page!
• How to use commenting and explore tool together for extending learning.
• Voice typing now has a New Zealand option. This is so great for us and for students.
• How to keep my personal and work Google accounts totally separate user account change in the toolbar, not just in the account. This is really great, especially to keep searches and work-life separate. 
• Command + number allows you to jump between tabs. This can make life faster when you are moving between tabs.

It was a good learning day. I am looking forward to what the journey ahead is going to bring. I feel that it will enhance my teaching greatly, as well as making me a more efficient teacher. I look forward to what it brings.