Level 3...Again

 About two weeks ago, the students and teachers in Auckland, New Zealand began distance learning once again as our city was put back on a Covid-19 Level 3 Lockdown. However, the feelings and anxieties felt around going back into lockdown this time around were vastly different when it came to how we were going to set up and administer Distance Learning for our students. We have done it before, and we, as individual, a teaching team and a school, learnt so much from our successes and failures the during the first lockdown.

One of the things that we were able to begin much faster this time around was having our students attend Google Meets with their high school technology teachers. The students did a fabulous job adapting to this especially since they missed their last rotation with their technology teachers, and started the new rotation learning online in their new courses. We love knowing that the high school technology teachers are working from a department page for our students to access across the grade levels. 

Student names have been covered up in compliance with our Manaiakalani Cybersmarts curriculum which teaches students that they should not share their last name publicly online. 

Developing a Dialogic Year 7/8 Classroom

After hearing from Jannie last week, I have been reminded to embed techniques to create a "Dialogic Classroom."  I worked very hard to do this last year with my NE/Yr 1 class of five year olds, and even though we experienced some growing pains in the beginning, they were very successful after just a few short weeks.  Today, I was geared up to see how my Year 7/8 students fared!

We are currently studying the World War 1, the ANZAC troops, and the technologies used during the war.  Today, my Maths/Inquiry students spent the last hour of the day digging a little deeper into this Inquiry topic together.  We began by watching a short video clip, that discussed various aspects of WW1 and trench warfare.  At various times during the clip, I paused the movie and posed a few 'thoughts' for the students to consider.

For example, at one point the narrator made a comment about the war not only being "the first industrial war but also the first scientific war."  I paused the clip, and told the students I was going to make a statement that I wanted them to think about.  "I wonder what makes some industrial..." Students were asked to take a minute to think on their own about my statement, and then they were asked to discuss their thoughts on industrial with their neighbour.  After a brief time, students were able to share what they discussed.

The thing I found most interesting was that when another student was randomly asked to repeat what was said, they were unable to do so.  This is something that I will be looking to develop further with my learners as the year progresses.

After we also did a think/pair/share with a similar thought to consider regarding what was meant by a scientific war, we continued with the video clip.  I made sure that I was looking for moments that I could intentionally "feed in order to lift the language readiness" of my learners.  I randomly stopped the clip when a opportunity presented itself to discuss the definition of a potentially unknown word with students.

After completing this process with two different 4-5 minute video clips, the students were led to their Blogs and asked to work with their partner to create a two paragraph recap entitled 'Technology @ War."  Most students will have to complete this task tomorrow, but from the work I was able to see as I circulated this afternoon, I believe that their posts will be stronger because of the dialogic experience that was provided prior to simply writing about the video.