Encouraging Whanau Comments

As part of my Spark Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher inquiry for 2016, I'm looking to increase the blog comments my learners are receiving as a way of motivating the to write.  The use of blogs provides an authentic audience for my learners, but I feel that the most powerful motivator will be the learners own whanau regularly looking (and commenting) on their blogs.  Earlier in the year I sent home bookmarks with links to the learners blogs, but wanted to take this a step further by providing some instructions on how to comment as well as some suggestions for comments.

Late last week, all learners in my class took home a laminated sheet providing this assistance as well as a notice for parents/whanau about a blog commenting competition we have having in Room 15 this term.  This laminated sheet includes:

• a photo of the learner
• the address of the learner's blog
• a QR Code linking to the learner's blog
• a piece of art the learner created (and were most proud of - learners selected this themselves)
• instructions of how to comment on a blog
• some suggested ideas of what to include in a comment
• a link to a "how to comment" video
• a QR code linking to the "how to comment" video

While this sheet was in English, it is my intention to look at having this sheet translated into Te Reo and other Pasifika languages.  The sheet was created on Keynote, and I plan to share a template file (in Keynote and Google Slides) for other teachers who may wish to use this sheet.

It is my hope that more parents/whanau will be visiting and commenting on their child's blog over the coming days/weeks.  To further assist, I've used an inbuilt tool provided by Blogger (thanks +Dorothy Burt) giving them a clickable link to the "how to comment" video I have created.  

This feature is available under "Settings - Posts, comments and sharing" and displays on the learners blog like this (after the viewer has clicked on the "Comment" link:

I'm looking forward to seeing if there is a noticeable increase in whanau commenting as well as seeing how my learners respond to receiving (hopefully) more comments on their blogs.  For viewers of my blog that would like to leave a comment on some of my learners blogs, they are available here (and will count towards the challenge).

 

Improving understanding through 'creating'

Today, with the support or our team leader +Helen King our team of teachers became the "learner"!  As is often the case, through "doing", a greater appreciation of a task is understood.

Our task for today was to use Hyperstudio to create an animation - this is the task we are asking our learners to tackle this term.  While I have been using Hyperstudio since the beginning of the year, it was great to put my learning into action and take on board some tips and tricks to both assist with animating as well as shortcuts and different ways to attempt the task.

I'm the first to admit I'm not particularly talented when it comes to drawing - give me a computer or iPad and I feel confident in what I'm doing, but ask me to draw something and I definitely am nervous.  That said, in my classroom I am forever telling my learners "there is no such thing as can't" and that we need to "always try our best".  So with this mantra clearly ringing in my head, I begin tackling my Olympic Marathon runner (Hyperstudio animations this term for our team are of an Olympic athlete).

It is with some 'nervous apprehension' that I share my completed animation - there are definitely things that in hindsight I needed to draw differently or tweak to make more perfect, but time was against me.  IMPORTANTLY, I do take away many hints, tricks and tips that will enable me to support my learners - they will have the benefit of learning from some of the mistakes I made and I feel more confident in supporting them to create animations which have athletes with body parts that move (change) as they 'compete' on the Olympic stage.

Some of the ideas/tips that came from our session this afternoon I was aware of, but took away some great additional ideas:

• Use a scrap card to create equipment and your athlete - a scrap card is a blank stack(s), separate from your background where you can design these objects and the copy them into your background card
• Lasso parts of the athlete (eg legs, arms) and move them to a new position on the athlete to show movement 
• As you add to your Hyperstudio stack to create the animation, copy/paste the previous stack and leave the object(s) in place until you've put your new object in place - this allows you to line it up and see where the object was on the previous slide
• Make small movements from one stack to the next - the smaller the movement the more realistic it looks as you put the stacks together into a movie
• Don't use white on your objects - they will copy in and look "see through" 
• Try 'moving yourself' and think about where your arms/legs are in order to make your athlete look more realistic 
• Create your objects larger than needed - easier to draw them larger and then downsize them if needed - they tend to look more detailed this way too

Encouraging blog comments

As part of my ongoing Spark MIT inquiry in Term 3 I'm looking to encourage parents, friends and whanau of my learners to comment on their blogs as a way of motivating my learners to write (and post on their blogs).  I mentioned this to whanau during our parent interviews at the end of last term and many were enthusiastic about commenting on their tamariki's blogs - in fact, many started already following our conversation.

I want to harness the enthusiasm of my learners and have them want to write more and post more on their blogs.  The intention is to make writing more authentic and purposeful by encouraging feedback for what learners are posting.  In order for this to succeed I need to give learners a "visual" that they can refer to and see how many comments they have compared to others in the class.  Already they know about the "recent comments" feature on their blogs and I repeatedly have learners come up to me in class and read me (or in some cases ask me to read) their most recent comments - they get really excited every time a new one appears.

I've created a Google Sheet which automatically links to chart which will show the comments learners receive.  There is a little manual inputting required by me each day to log in how many comments are received - a simple entry into the Google sheet which will auto-update the graph.  The process is streamlined as I receive emails when anyone comments on learners' blogs - so its simply a matter of updating the Google Sheet whenever I receive an email (or once a day depending on how many come through).

In order for my learners to monitor their progress, the graph is linked on our Class Site which they can access on their iPads at any time, or from home on phones/computers.

In order to support whanau with commenting on their child's blogs, I'm hoping to have the guides to commenting that I've been creating completed and sent home during week 1.  This not only gives whanau the blog address (and a quick link) but some ideas on what to include in their comments.

Finally, as the term progresses I'm looking to scaffold blog commenting with my class, so they are able to provide feedback on each others posts - another opportunity for them to 'write' as well as another teaching opportunity on creating positive footprints on the internet.

The blogs of the Room 15 learners are available to view here.

Reflecting using Thinking Hats

As Term 2 draws to a close, one of the activities I have planned for this week is an individual reflection on the learning for the term.  Our school wide theme for the term, "As I See It" had an art focus, with Team 3 deciding to focus on geometry and buildings.   We have therefore covered many things this term, including our major art piece which we have today seen displayed in the school Art Gallery.

As with any activities, finding the balance between too much scaffolding and not enough scaffolding, can often be a delicate balancing act.   While I have provided some ideas of the things that learners can include in their reflection, I've decided to not restrict it to "just the art work"!  This allows some scope for learners that enjoyed the trip or learning about the Sky Tower to reflect on these activities.

This is the first time I've used the thinking hats with this class - I wanted to have them thinking of more than just "I liked .... because ....".  I'm hoping they will be more reflective in the responses they give through the questions I've provided.  We will discuss this as a whole class, but I've also provided some questions to help guide their responses and will provide further scaffolding and support to my less able writers.

I'm really looking forward to hearing the thoughts of my learners, as this can help inform my teaching into Term 3 and beyond.

Inquiry 2016: Update

As part of our Pt England School ongoing inquiry, this afternoon we shared an update of where we are currently at.  This inquiry compliments my Manaiakalani Spark MIT inquiry for this year also.  I really enjoy the inquiry process as it makes me think about why I'm doing certain things but also provides an opportunity to compare and see how far learners have progressed.

Another way to add Sound Bites to Explain Everything projects

One of the things I really love about sharing my ideas via this blog is others sharing back and suggesting ideas and different ways of doing things.  One such suggestion came from Innes Kennard who suggested I give QuickVoice a try for adding sound bites.  While I do like Garage Band, after trying QuickVoice, I found it much quicker to add the sound bites than using Garage Band.  The simplicity of QuickVoice allows me to record my soundbites and insert them into Explain Everything quickly.

This short screencast shows how I use QuickVoice, including a trick for recording if you have a longer instruction and you'd like to include exactly what you have written on your Explain Everything project word for word.

Animating our Writing

As part of my ongoing inquiry into accelerating learning with writing, this week I've tried something a little different with my learners.  As I planned my writing lessons for the week I had two main aims:

• How could I spark the interest of my learners - particularly the boys - who are capable of producing some great sentences but who often complain at the mere mention of writing
• How could we create writing blog posts that my learners are so enthusiastic about that they want to rush home and share with their whanau (thereby hopefully inspiring additional comments)

Throughout the term, our team wide focus has been on art and in particular buildings.  I have had learners create some great writing about the Sky Tower, Sydney Opera House and the Eiffel Tower, but I sensed from my learners that interest in writing about famous buildings was starting to wane.

So this week I introduced writing about a castle - but not just any castle.  The castles that we wrote about were created in the imaginations of my learners.  Not so different to other writing we have done earlier this year, where I gifted a topic and we brainstormed ideas.  This time however, the castles were different because we used them to create animations which my whole class enthusiastically embraced.

I gifted the class a selection of backgrounds that they could access via our class site.  Our animations were created using Explain Everything with the first slide (or two) used to draw the different objects for their animation - the one criteria was they had to include a castle (keeping to our 'buildings' theme).  Many learners opted to copy my idea of a spider which was animated, although we did have some that branched out with people, butterflies and birds.  

Learners then used their second slide to insert and set the background they had selected.  They copied in the different elements (castle, spider, etc) and then duplicated that slide several times.  Over the next 10 - 12 slides, they moved their character slightly more on each slide, creating an animation effect, before exporting the project as a video.  This video was then inserted into iMovie where we sped it up slightly and added some background music.  Lastly, learners uploaded their movie to their Google Drive and I inserted them into their blogs (I needed to use the embed code from their Google Drives to publish them on their blogs).  To make this process faster, learners had already created their blog posts, with their writing and saved it as a draft.

Once upon a time there was a little blue castle. It lived in an ice forest with trees around it and there was a spider crawling around the castle. The spider was very scary and all the people got scared of the spider so they ran away from the spider. the spider was left alone inside the forest and he went in the castle so he can have a break.           - Precious

While the lesson (over a number of days) was by no means perfect, I aim to repeat it next week using a "wooden shack" as the featured building as I was particularly pleased with the enthusiasm demonstrated by even reluctant writers.  Much of the focus last week was on teaching the animation process I wanted the learners to follow (and how to use iMovie) - but now that many learners in the class are secure with this, I will be able to focus on small groups of writers while others create their animations independently.  I'm excited to see what creative writing is produced and what characters and ideas they decide to showcase through both their animations and writing.

Blog posts for all learners in my class with their animations posted are available here.

Using Garage Band to record a soundbite for my Explain Everything projects

I find inserting audio instructions into my Explain Everything projects really helpful as a way to scaffold my learners that may not be able to read (or remember) my instructions.   I use Garage Band to create the soundbite rather than record the instructions directly onto the slide so that my instructions don't detract from the recording the learner will do on the slide when they push the red record button.  The soundbite is also shown visually on the screen so the learner knows to click on it and hear what I say if they struggle to read the instructions.

I've been helping other Manaiakalani Schools recently and am often asked "how do you do that" so have made a short screen recording which I can link to as needed.

Sharing my MDTA experiences

Earlier this term I was asked by the University of Auckland (Faculty of Education & Social Work) if I would speak about my experiences in the Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy at a dinner they titled "Leading Learning, Changing Lives."  I was extremely honoured to be asked, particularly because I really value the introduction to my teaching career that MDTA and can't speak highly enough of the opportunities I've had as a result.

The dinner occurred late last week, and was an extremely enjoyable evening.  As well as speaking myself I really enjoyed hearing about other initiatives and innovative projects that the Faculty of Education & Social Work is involved in.

As is always the case when speaking, there is always more to say than time permits - three minutes goes very fast and I found myself cutting pieces from my speech in order to meet the brief.   I'm choosing to share my speech on my blog as both a record of the amazing evening I was invited to be part of, but also so it has the opportunity to be read by a wider audience as I'm proud to have been one of the ten beginning teachers accepted into the MDTA program.

For the last three years I’ve been teaching at Pt England School, a decile one school in Glen Innes, Auckland with a population of mainly maori and pasifika students. Pt England School is one of 13 schools in the Manaiakalani Cluster which came about in 2007 as these schools sought to find ways to engage learners and the whole community in their learning, in a hope to better the educational outcomes for our tamariki. For those of you in the audience who may not be familiar with some of the issues in our NZ education system, we have a very long under-achieving tail. How our children perform is heavily dependent on their socio-economic status. 

Fortunately, there are success stories, and I’m here to share the success of the Manaiakalani Schools in partnership with the University of Auckland. The schools in the Manaiakalani Cluster have moved to become digital learning environments, with all learners from Year 4 up having a Chromebook which they use to drive their own learning, and share this with the world. 

In 2013 I was accepted as one of ten beginning teachers to join the inaugural Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy. This never before opportunity was a joint venture between Auckland University, Manaiakalani and Google allowing first year teachers to teach using digital tools – to ensure the most optimal outcomes. Digital tools in and of themselves will not help children learn; it is the way that their teachers use these tools that makes a difference. One of the most exciting things is that this is a new field, and we are still learning about the best practice. The MDTA placed me to team teach with a mentor teacher who had over 16 years teaching experience. My mentor teacher, Michelle, and I were also tasked with being one of two classes piloting the use of 1:1 iPads with our New Entrant learners. 

While we were teaching, Michelle and I also completed postgraduate study through the University of Auckland, focused on Accelerating Learning particularly for Maori and Pasifika learners. This highly innovative post-graduate model allowed Michelle and I to study together and gain advanced post-graduate teaching qualifications which were highly relevant to what was going on in our classrooms. 

More often than not, learners enter our school significantly below where higher decile learners would enter the schooling system. The innovations Michelle and I put into place, in combination with the unique learning situation of our class having two teachers enabled us to accelerate learning and produce whole class reading results where almost all our learners achieved the New Zealand standard after one year at school. This is remarkable and had not previously occurred at Pt England School in the last 30 years. 

In my second year of teaching, with my own class of New Entrants, I supported the school wide and cluster wide move in the junior classes to 1:1 iPads, assisting with professional development which Michelle and I had used in my first year. The most rewarding part is being able to use the knowledge that I gained in the MDTA school-wide, and across the communities of schools. I’m not just impacting my own class. 

I’m absolutely committed to teaching and feel privileged to have had such a supportive introduction to my teaching career. But most of all I’m thankful on behalf of the learners I teach. The philosophy of Manaiakalani and our close partnership with the Faculty of Education and Social Work, has made a difference to their lives and is enabling them to reach their full potential - that is why I love going to work each day.


More information about the MDTA can be found here.

This article which was published earlier this week gives an insight into the Manaiakalani Cluster.

Reading for Understanding

As part of our ongoing school wide Professional Development, today we had another session with Dr Rebecca Jesson, to upskill and provoke us in the curriculum area of reading.   Firstly we recapped from our last session and discussed as a team what we had achieved to date.  Some important reminders from that session were:

Widen and deepen vocabulary knowledge by:

• Multiple texts for word recycling
• Relationships between words, meanings and concept development
• Word walls for scaffolding

Increasing depth and breadth to allow learners to deepen their understanding as well as provide repetition of content learning over texts.

Higher order creation activities from multiple texts

Themes that cross texts - eg children who are heros

Rebecca reminded us that  ... "A good text should be both a mirror and a window" and that teaching vocabulary, is a "big ticket" item in our reading program.

New learning from today's session focused on:

Empowerment or self monitoring or agency or ownership by the learner.

We were encouraged to consider:

• scaffolding to support to independence  -  learners need to be able to stand on their own
• are learners offered opportunity to tackle things "without us" but with "support" from us

What would make the learner want to?   (motivation ... engagement ... of our learners) - free choice?

Ideally, we are working towards:

• learners who notice whether the text makes sense
• learners who notice whether they understand
• learners who problem solve
• learners who persist

As a team we discussed what this would look like and how we can scaffold learners towards this with such questioning as:

• How do you know you are right?
• Were you right?
• Did the text give you what you need?
• Did the text give you something you can use?
• Make the thinking visible - eg with highlighting, voice notes, screen-casting

As always, Rebecca has made me think about not only my deliberate acts of teaching but also my follow up activities and how I can give my learners more choice and opportunities to demonstrate their understand in creative ways.