Hapara Champion Educator

 Earlier this term, I decided to take part in the upcoming Hapara Champion Educator course in mid-August. Little did I know, at that time, that the six week course would begin the day after Auckland, New Zealand as placed back into Level 3 Covid-19 Lockdown. Once the course opened up, I began making my way through the first part of the course and decided very quickly that I wanted to use the time that I was given during lockdown to complete this course. I emailed my course facilitator and asked if I could please have the entire course workspace opened up for me to complete in my own time. 

Once the course was opened up, I began to make my way through the various levels and I was able to complete the majority of the lessons in a day or so. It was a great reminder of the amazing tools that we have at our fingertips everyday working with Hapara Teacher Dashboard. 

It was also wonderful to have the time while working from home, to investigate some of the elements that I haven't used as much while in school (many of which are updates that Hapara has added over the years).  It was amazing to know that while you were submitted the learning tasks, the facilitating team was working right alongside you providing you with feedback.

One of the things we had to do for the course was create a Hapara Workspace. I was excited to spend some time working with this space mostly because our cluster (where the Hapara Dashboard concept was birthed) has chosen to present our student work using Google Sites. Therefore, I decided that I wasn't going to create new content for my workspace task. I took some elements that my team of teachers created earlier this year as we studied Whare Tapa Whā before, during, and after the first NZ Lockdown. 

  If you would like to explore this further, please click here. 

A BIG THANKS goes to the teachers of Team 5 for the material I was able to easily use to create my workspace. It made me realise that in order to effectively plan out a workspace, it is very important to have your material all created and ready to go.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed exploring Hapara Dashboard more in depth and recommend the Champion Educators Course to anyone who is considering learning more about how to use this amazing classroom tool. I would also like to thank my course facilitator Scott Lewis for all of his support and amazing feedback during the course. I look forward to receiving my final comments and certificate in the next few weeks.

Blogger Badges

 I am so blessed to work in a Manaiakalani school, where we often hold cluster-wide Toolkits (Professional Development opportunities) that allow us to learn about various tools and resources that others have found beneficial when teaching with our Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Since our cluster has started supporting "outreach" clusters over the years, we now have Online Toolkits available throughout the school year. 

Since we are all teaching from home right now (Auckland is at Level 3), our team leader suggested that we all sign up for a different Toolkit this week to share the learnings with our team. The Toolkit I signed up for is Creating Digital Badges for Blogger. I have wanted to do this for some time now, and this toolkit was the push I needed to start creating badges for my students.

I recently noticed that I have a student in my home class who has exceeded 200 blog posts this year alone (nearly 100 more than the majority of her peers). As a way to continue to push her further, and get other students to rise to the challenge for the remainder of the school year, I created a 250 Blog Posts badge.

The process was very simple once I got going, and I am happy to share what I have learnt if you are interested! Just comment below and I will happily get in contact with you.

Bitmoji Virtual Bookshelf

 Today, as part of the Maniakalani Create Clusterwide Staff Meeting, I attended a session run by two teachers from Glenbrae School about Virtual Bookshelves. We had great fun learning how to create our own interactive virtual bookshelves and we even learned out to embed our own bitmoji. Check out what we were able to do in less than 30 minutes!

Expand the slide deck to see in a larger view to get the full effect. :-)

PD: Student Design for Learning

 Student Design for Learning

Dr. Naomi Rosedale (WFRC)

Today, teachers from across Manaiakalani met at Tamaki High School for our annual Create Staff Meeting. Before breaking out into our two create learning sessions, we heard from Dr. Naomi Rosedale (Wolf Fisher Research Centre) about Student Design for Learning. She gave us a bit of a teaser introduction for the MAPIC framework involving more student agency when creating Digital Learning Objects (DLO).

Students are creating overwhelming amounts of slideshows and most were originally teacher designs. Our challenge is to come up with ways for students to create using more modes of communication. Slideshows often show 2 modes: written and visual. Screencastify is often used for procedural demonstrations especially in maths. There is great opportunities for students doing podcasts, voice recording, etc.

We need to implement more Student Design for Learning DLOs to enhance the learning for other students. For example, creating more of a flow chart slide instead of a paragraph and a picture. The concepts can be bolded by the student to show their understanding. 

Our WFRC research based definition of student DLOs "a process wherein students learn as they design for others, and as a reusable digital entity (or object)....". Our aim is for high leverage thinking practices (video/voice recordings) to be used to compare. We will be unpacking the MAPIC framework in the future for our student design for learning.  

M: Multimodal mapping of ideas

A: Amplification key concepts

P: Personilization

I: Interactions

C: Coherence Structured organised and unified uderstanding

This made me think of the create tasks that I set up for my students. I think there is a sense of urgency sometimes to finish things off quickly with our students and many prefer slides over anything else. I have been encouraging my classes to use more Google Drawings lately in their create, but I am interested in making more interactive slideshow with embedded voice descriptions now that Google has added Audio/Voice Recording to the Slides platform. 

Agility with Sound: Betsy Sewell

We had the opportunity to once again spend some time listening to Betsy Sewell at a session advertised through our RTLB office. After spending time at a session we had at our school earlier this year, (blog post here) I knew I immediately wanted to attend this session as well to refresh some of the things that were shares, and I took along a few more members of my school team. Wow! Was I amazed! Betsy is such a wealth of knowledge, and I found myself typing away the whole time a completely different set of amazing information. I was also excited to hear that Betsy's assessment tools were free to use on the agility with sound website and I look forward to giving it a go with some of my students soon.

Agility with Sound

Betsy Sewell

Reading has traditionally been taught using a constructionist model, using multiple cues to figure out the word. Unfortunately, this is no longer working for a lot of our kids. There is nothing instinctive about learning to read. In order to accommodate reading, the brain has to adapt. 

When looking at Chinese characters they are units of meaning. Many struggling students also think this way. For example, they look at the shape of a word to help determine its meaning.  However, the way English works, our students often struggle due to the changes in pronunciation over the centuries, the number of language origins that make up the language, the sheer size of the language (four times larger than French) and an alphabetical language which represents the way a word sounds.  If you start writing rules for the language, you end up writing endless exceptions to the rules. 

Good readers learn in 4 stages:

1. Pre-alphabetic: the look of words

2. Partial alphabetic: uses some letters mostly consonants (reading 6-6.5 when 10)

sh**t

cr*sh**

ag**n

A c*t

pr*****s

Students reading at this level do not read the endings or the letters in the middle of the word (thinking visually)

3. Full alphabetic: process of all letters

4. Consolidated: recognise and process chunks

Competent and struggling readers behave differently. Competent readers overwhelming process words as speech, using S&L areas of the brain. Struggling readers overwhelmingly process words as shapes, with limited activity in the S&L areas of the brain. Good readers and writers process words differently.  This applies to all struggling kids, whether they are or are not dyslexic, and many of these students are well behind by the time they reach years 5/6.

A sight word is a word that is instantly recognised as a spelling pattern. It is stored in language areas of the brain. Spelling pattern, pronunciation and meaning are linked: one instantly relates to the others. Mapping. Children who read like this can decode and encode unconsciously. 

How a student spells and writes is a function of how s/he reads.

Competent, fluent readers:

1. Give their full attention to comprehension
2. Notice the structure and spelling patterns of words as they encounter them
3. Hear the rhythm and flow of a good sentence
4. Notice how punctuation instructs the reader
5. Notice how writers structure text
6. Are constantly encountering and absorbing new vocabulary

In order to work with students who are struggling, we need to teach them how to think how good readers think. For many of these students, they need to learn how to think differently than they have previously.

There are 7 different decoding skills that these students need to think about differently.  Most students are able to get to the point that they can achieve skills 1-5. Skills 6 and 7 are a bit more difficult to achieve.

1. Identify, and think in the compound sounds (how do the sounds feel)
2. Distinguish between the sounds
3. Recognise how those sounds are represented in print
4. Recognise the repeating chunks and patterns of language
5. Hold those chunks in memory
6. Substitute phonemes within chunks or whole chunks within words
7. Blend those sounds or chunks of sound rapidly and unconsciously

When looking at letter sounds, exaggerate them so kids can hear the difference and then slowly bring them back to the sound of normal speech.  This is great for recognising letters and blends that are confused as the same thing (ie, p/b and ch/sh).

Struggling students need explicit, structured and cumulative instruction in how words work. Students also needs to work from simple to complex, common to uncommon beginning with what the child already knows. The overall aim is to build the thinking skills of competent readers. 

Struggling kids must have 80-100 hours of practice thinking of the sounds of words, blending strategies, and practice...lots of it. They also need reading material they can read and want to read, that meets their learning needs, and explicit vocabulary, comprehension and writing instruction. These students do not require anything else in order to be successful in reading.  When working with them it is best to use text without illustrations, and possibly have the students add the illustrations themselves to show what they understand that page is about. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Session 2

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

It was a great morning spending some time reviewing the Learn/Ako focus of our Manaiakalani pedagogy. It was a great chance to refresh some of the information that was shared with us during our term 1 staff meeting.

A few take homes for me were:
FOCUS: effective teaching and learning using both digital and analog world (side by side railway tracks)
-Effective Practice is teaching that RATs:
Recognise Amplify Turbocharge
-Learn is not prescribed by Manaiakalani...it differs from school to school and has nothing to do with digital education
-Great teaching + Digital Affordances=Accelerated Learning


What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

One tab would be an amazing extension to help organise my life professionally. I often leave Professional meetings (COL, DFI, etc) with many tabs open that I want to use to formulate an informative or reflective blog post at a later date.  I think I would use this more often than the Toby extension.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

It nice to review using Google Hangout. It is something that I have used in the past with my class to have some sharing time with another school in South Auckland.  However, over the years, I have not
thought to use it. I would love to come up with a learning opportunity for my students to Hangout at some point in the future.

We also had some time to have our own Hangout discussing student work from around the country. Check out my post of this session here.

During our session, we spent some time having a Hangout with others discussing student work.  Here is a video for our session:


What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Although I have been using Google Keep for quite some time, I had not thought to use notes collaboratively with adults in my personal life to help with planning household routines or group events. I plan to add Keep to my husband's phone so we can have a collaborative shopping list or prep list for future trips.  I am also in love with the location tracking tool in Keep. Being able to have your phone ping you a reminder when you get close to the location is amazing!

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 1

For the next nine weeks, I have the opportunity to be part of the Cohort #2 of the 2019 Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive. I am very excited to begin this journey, and I am looking forward to discovering some new tools to be used with my students and in my planning.

This week, we spent time focusing on Google Drive and Google docs. It was a great opportunity to refresh my thinking around these two elements of Google suite. 

A few take aways that I have are:

1. When copy and pasting, it is important to press Ctrl+Shift+V and not simply use Ctrl+V.
2. When on a doc (or in a folder) that you want to add into your own drive do not make a copy. Press Shift+Z
3. Use the "Assign" tool when adding comments for students to create questions about a text for other students (those they have assigned) to answer. I am really excited to use this with my students. 
4. When working with a group (ie parents, school club, or group of teachers) create a Google Group to use as a platform for sharing and discussing information.
5. I am very diligent when organising my own Google Drive but do I offer opportunities for my students to clean up their Drives on a regular basis?
6. We also explored a few new Chrome Extensions that I am excited to try in my classroom. Watch this space to see which I decide to use and how it goes with my students. 

Manaiakalani Create PD

This term for our Manaiakalani staff PD, the whole cluster was invited to Tamaki College for the afternoon to spend some time engaging in a fun create task or two.  I signed up to make Vietnamese spring rolls.

We were split into groups of 4 and put into kitchens around the room to work. Each kitchen was responsible for prepping the ingredients needed to make various types of spring rolls. We were in the shrimp kitchen. My job was to cook the vermicelli noodles, dice the lettuce and then I split the prepped veges into two different serving dishes.

After learning how to prep the rice shell, we were given time to explore the various ingredients and make our own spring rolls to sample.  We had a lot of fun and I look forward to making these again in the future.

CoL PD: Rebecca Jessen

Dr. Rebecca Jessen

Planning and Predicting: THEORY is everything

Studying cognition is like studying dolphins but only being able to see them when they pop out of the water.  How do I adjust what I do for when the dolphins pop out?

Image Source

We should have a strong theory for what language abundance should look like for student acceleration to take place.  Providing opportunities for students to have meaningful conversations using rich vocabulary. Remembering to recycle vocabulary throughout the school day. 

Now is the time to take what we found 'worked' last term and make it happen more often this term. We need to start taking our results (looking at the kids 'it' worked for) and think about what worked for them and how it worked differently.  Also, reflecting on what I did differently.  Bearing in mind, how different students engaged, and how I engaged with different students.

Revisiting our Theory...what causes the shift? How was I able to obtain shift in the students so far this term? Theory is not quite everything. The only way to know if it works for a certain student is to try it out. 

Analysing implementation data

Moving from:

-What I wanted to happen (planned)?

To:

-What actually happened (delivered)?

To: THIS TERM

-How can I make sure this happens even better every time?

Opportunities for Teacher Learning

1. Figure out the students' strengths and needs

2. Use the existing research base to plan something different that is likely to use strengths to meet the need

3. DO the different thing

4. Which engages the students in a different way of learning?

5. Which results in learning...for all? for some? WHY??? What explains anomalies?

CoL PD: Language Abdundance

Janni van Hees

Language in Abundance

Where does language occur? 

-Spoken

-Print

Keep in mind, we could have mileage in one of these areas but it is important to ask yourself is it heightening the level of complexity that the children are able to achieve. We have to be prepare to shift our pedagogical beliefs in order to make the necessary shift in our student's level of achievement.

Elaborative Style Responses

•  Tuning into and picking up the message and meaning expressed by the child
•   Offering more-structurally, word choices, contexts
•   NOT posing questions or "wringing" more out of the child
• Co-constructing and co-contributing- focused on the child and growing their language and understanding

It is important to remember to be a co-contributor by focusing and noticing. In the end, the children are in apprenticeship zone, but the teacher is the key contributor to their learning. The quality of the material and the way we role it out is very important.  However, inside our classroom there is a lot of 'knowing'.  We need to capitalise on what it known and it is our job as the teacher to raise the level of their understanding...the level of the 'known',  As a teacher, we don't have to hurry and respond, we need to be circumspect and it is ok to say "I'm thinking....". 

To and Fro Talking (Conversations): Chain Linking what you say to each other

You can't talk past each other, you need to be sure you are linking and shaping things that are connected potential paragraphs. In order for two points (made by students in a sentence form) to be chained up (to form a paragraph), they have to be related to one another. 

Next Step: Introducing the chain link method of conversation building to my literacy students in the hopes of it transferring to maths and our DMIC program as well. 

Creativity Empowers Learning

Today, we had Dorothy Burt back at our Staff Meeting for our Manaiakalani Professional Development.  It was awesome to take a deeper look into Creativity, which is an essential part of our school's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

It was decided many years ago that children of Pt. England (and Manaiakalani) will be "creators of content, not merely consumers."

It was fun to spend some time going back into the archives and take a look at what Create has looked like through the years.  There were so many good reminders of some of the things that can easily be embedded into our classroom lesson plans to provide opportunities for our students to be creative to display their learning.

When movie making, you are ultimately providing an avenue to use and build an understanding of Key Competencies.  Your rubric will provide student guidance to achieve ultimate results.

Create is NOT a head knowledge thing.  It is an action using multiple senses and the whole body. Consumers are enticed by three senses: Sight, Sound and Motion (Saatchi and Saatchi). SISIMO should be applied to anything concept worth teaching the students.

The key to Create is planning.  All students have the opportunity to create.

2017 PD: Connecting With Manaiakalani

This year I will be working as a CoL Teacher within my school, and as a part of this role I spent today at Day 1 of the Manaiakalani Cluster Orientation.  It was a great day collaborating with staff from across the cluster, including those who are knew to our cluster this year.  We spent the day hearing from Dorothy Burt about Who, What, How, and Where of Manaiakalani.

It was so amazing to be reminded about the backbone of what drives Manaiakalani to do the amazing things we are blessed to do to serve our community and the learners within it.  My favourite part of the day was the simple reminder that Manaiakalani is about the people...not the computers.  It is about making a difference in the lives of our students and their whanau by enabling them to become 'confident, connected, life-long learners'.

"Critical" Friends

As part of our ongoing school wide professional development our staff is looking at ways to provoke increased reading with our students.  We are blessed to have Dr. Rebecca Jesson share various discussion provoking ideas with our teaching staff and as a result we are taking part of a special teacher growth experience that we are calling "Critical" Friends.

We have been put into groups of three with teachers from around our school to spend time looking at various ways that our staff teach different aspects of reading to our students.  I was able to spend time with my two Critical Friends observing their interactions with one of their reading groups.

The first group (year 7/8 students) was focusing on creating a "dialogic" classroom.  They spent a chunk of time taking a deeper look at the emotion that was evoked within them as they focused on the cover picture from the reading journal.  The students were respectful, responsive and engaged in the activity.  They were able to answer questions when going around the circle to provide their responses.  The teacher had the students orally repeat words and phrases back as a group often during their discussion.  Prior to reading the text, students were asked to remember the questions that the emotions provoked within them.

Attribution

The second classroom (year 2 students) learn using iPads and the Explain Everything Application, which I use with one group of my own learners. The learning group I was able to see, read orally from their reading book and their teacher did a great job stopping to have the students discuss necessary/new vocabulary.  She began by asking what word was used to "DESCRIBE" the web in the story.  I loved seeing that year 2 students were already being asked to describe things from their stories (a concept my year 5/6 students have a very difficult time with when writing).  After the students completed their reading, their EE activity was explained.  I loved that they had videos embedded that provided the students with opportunities to expand their own knowledge on similar subjects.  I thought this was great given recent discussions on my own team regarding how to help our students apply (and gain) prior knowledge to apply to their reading.

Being in the classrooms was so fun, and a great way to spend some time reflecting on my own teaching practice.  I look forward to observing (and learning from) my colleagues in the future!

PD: Dr. Jannie van Hees "Crafting Writing. Crafting Writers."

Today, we had our second session with Dr Jannie van Hees.  We spent the afternoon discussing our student writers and crafting effective paragraphs.

My notes from the session are below:

What is a paragraph?  How can we get kids more “crafted” in their paragraph writing?

Don’t forget to keep students in a “Goldilocks Zone” not too...fast, slow, hard, easy-especially with vocabulary choices.

This allows students to have powerful learning at all times.  This is highly powered by gifted words, and bringing definitions alive with a classroom discussion (not jumping to the dictionary).  

What is your ultimate goal with writing for your children? Dynamic, delicious writers, or able to pass an e-asttle format test.  Do not let go of frequent oral language and crafting “dynamic and delicious” sentences together.

It is so important that our student writers understand that editing is an ongoing job, and the writer must always be wearing the shoes of the reader.  

Do your students begin their writing with a sentence?  This is ok some of the time, but it is important that your students do not overuse this form of a writer’s hook.  It is very important to demonstrate varied ways to craft a hook.  

Make sure learners identify and write their topic, purpose(s) and audience prior to starting a piece of writing.  Purposes...move away from using “describe,” “explain,” “construct.”  Instead, use a reason:  “Your parents/aunties/uncles will be able to fully understand what happened during our assembly today.

Digital Immersion PD

PD: Dr. Jannie van Hees "Developing a Dialogic, Orally Expressive Classroom"

This term, the year 5-8 teachers are participating in Professional Development with Dr. Jannie van Hees. Below are my notes from our first session.

Conversational Teaching and Learning

How do you explicitly grow student expression in the classroom?

-Think/Pair/Share

-Repeat Back what was said

-Backing Up View Point/Answer

-Individual Conferencing

After this discussion, I am very interested in finding out more about and implementing “Talk Moves” into my daily Maths lessons.  

Students need to be pushed to use the “output” more in order recognise more complex language features.  They need to have “gifted” words provided multiple times a day in order to effectively receive a high level model of appropriate language features. The need to be continuously fed in order to lift their language readiness.

When students are acquiring language knowledge there are three major gains that happen for them.  

1. Deeper Knowledge: Structure and Grammatical Language
2. Fullness of Expression: How to deeply engage and talk with others using rich vocabulary
3. Extended Language Growth and Vocabulary  

Students need to use their brains at a higher level of complexity than they are currently.  This will only properly happen if students are able to practice.  Providing students an opportunity to participate in a Think-Aloud that has multiple steps, which potentially puts them on the spot provides an extremely important life skill.  Students need to have orally shaping conversations that will allow them to “hold on” to information.

Our day-to-day priority of conversation enhances the learning of our students, in addition to the actual curriculum covered.  Students are required to participate in a more enriching manner. Students have to contribute, be focused, have meaningful things to provide, etc.

On a daily basis, students should be provided with a chance to have conversation.  Topics could be anything that the teacher suggests or that is student prompted.  This provides a chance for formative assessment, both on the topic and a students language ability.  This allows the teacher a meaningful opportunity to provide gifted words (including definitions) to help expand the vocabulary of their class.

Point to ponder: How many questions do you ask your students on a daily basis? Questions do not provide opportunities for students to expand their thinking and language. They provide a way for students to dig deeper into their own resources instead of expanding their thinking and engaging their understanding.