Bursts and Bubbles

Today our Manaiakalani CoL teachers all shared their inquiry's for the year in 3minute bursts. Here is my 3mins sharing for bursts and bubbles session.

Talofa Lava

Inquiry focus: 
How can we better support students in reading who are ‘stuck’ in their learning (4+ years behind) and prepare them for college.

2 catalytic aspects of learning I targeted are:

• Reading Mileage
• Vocabulary Acquisition

Why? I believe unlocking these 2 things will open learners capabilities towards accessing the wider curriculum.

Identified this as my focus when I noticed:

• 8 students in Y7/8 class (11, 12, 13 year olds) reading 3-4 years behind. 
• Reading age of 5-7 years old

To build a rich picture of my students learning I:

• Looked through black folders - records of all their learning @ PES
• Anecdotal notes, reports, special needs referrals

Sources of data used to measure progress:

• Running records
• Student voice surveys
• Sight words/spelling tests
• Anecdotal notes on learning behaviours

Main patterns of student learning identifies in the profiling phase:
Strengths:

• Interested in topic related texts
• Could work towards visual goals - coloured reading levels

Weaknesses:

• Basic as - connecting sounds with chunks of letters
• Connecting chunks together
• Needed purpose to read / motivation/ interest maintained
• Retaining what they’ve learnt

CoL across school teachers helped to identify them and address them, Donna & Clarelle

Profiling my own teaching showed I had strengths in:

• TESSOL strategies/principles
• Breaking down tasks to more manageable levels

Found students would make more progress if I developed a scaffolded self-sufficient routine for learning. This required:

• Consistent child support help
• Variety of engaging and do-able activities
• Interesting texts

Changes I made to my teaching were:

• How I utilise micro-teaching time in class. Rather than focus on getting through a text we did a deep dive. This is unpacking words/phrases extending students vocab by looking at it in and out of context & making connections to related word families.
• Creating more fluid discussions amongst group. Rather than T-S-T-S. We encouraged a fluid S-S-S-S
• More organisational one: Different text every day - follow up sight words and online stories to listen to.

Experts and literature which have helped me make these changes:

• Combination of Jannie Van Hees’ “Generating dialogic conversations” and deep dive/higher expectations
• Betsy Sewell’s agility with sound workshops.

Overall I would rate the change in student learning as highly successful

Evidence is in:

• Student voice surveys
• Shifts in reading levels made this year alone (2-8 levels) compared to their last 3 years of schooling from 2016 (2-4 levels combined)

Digital Fluency Intensive #9 - Exam day

Hallelujah! I am definitely thrilled to have passed the Level 1 of the  Google Certified Educator exam. It put into practice a lot of what we had covered in DFI. 

Our last session of DFI covered the term 'Ubiquitous' - Anytime, Anywhere, Any pace. 

This means, due to digital affordances, our learners have the potential to be experiencing high quality learning experiences right now while we are here at DFI. This is especially important and crucial for the learning of our students who generally are exposed to 30,000,000 less words than students living in higher decile areas. 

The following image shows the effects the Summer Learning Journey can have on students who take part in the holidays. As teachers, if we make it an everyday practice to make all learning rewindable, and check on our learning online during the break, then we are ensuring that all of our students have the tools they need to be successful. I found this rewindable accessibility especially helpful during the Level 1 exam. 

I feel very grateful to have experienced and tried out the various skills and tools covered in the 9week DFI course. More exciting than passing the exam, are the rich rewindable resources/tools now available to us! Knowing where to find it and being able to help others with new things I've learnt brings more meaning to our Learn, Create, Share journey. 

Thank you to Gerhard and Dorothy for the fun filled whirlwind adventures and life hacks online. I've definitely enjoyed my time.

DFI Cohort #3 - 2019 signing out!

Digital Fluency Intensive #8

Session 8 already! Today's session was all about Devices: 1-1 devices using chromebooks or ipads.
Today's pedagogy was about Cybersmart and more specifically using the right language when talking with our students. Here are the cybersmart lessons available on the Manaiakalani site. Check out my screencastify further down this blog post for a tour through one of the options 'Smart Learner'.

Smart learners - can be as simple as: just like you set your books up with date and ruling pages, set up your docs and google drive so students know the expectations and know the right folders to put their work in.

This smart learner lesson also carried into our session on Hapara - Teacher Dashboard. It was great to see the push for keeping it positive by always displaying dashboard not as a means to threaten kids or x them out of their tabs but rather as a 'norm' and focussing on more positive things like "Great to see ___ moving onto the next task..." We also covered many of the useful options available to us on dashboard. One new thing I found out was that I could see student's blogs which haven't been published yet and also anonymous comments that are highlighted in red. I need to make sure I check this more regularly as I never knew this.

I really enjoyed being in our students shoes and having a go at working off a chromebook and ipad. It definitely makes me realise just how talented students are who are able to draw detailed images on google draw as the touch pad is not as big and easy to manoeuvre as it is on a mac.

Our create challenge was to create a screencastify about one aspect of the cybersmart areas and talk through the lesson plans provided. Check out 'Smart Learner'.



We also registered for the Level 1 Google Exam for next. Looking forward to it.

Key changes I've made in my Inquiry

1. Summarise evidence about key changes in teaching and other factors that influence student learning.

At the start of the year, I had a few blog posts which covered the achievement challenge my focus in class fell under. This was achievement challenge #5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/key competency using language symbols and texts.

Initially I started looking towards a TESSOL approach in this blog post, then while analysing more the problem at hand, these were my findings in my blog posts 'Why I selected this challenge', and 'Why is it catalytic?'.

This inquiry process this year has been very useful for me and my teaching practice, making me reflect and pinpoint exactly what my deliberate acts of teaching (DATs) are before and after the chosen intervention. The 'Tools, Measures and Approaches' blog post sets out how I had planned to monitor this change in my teaching.

The following slides show the 2 main changes in my teaching practice.
1. Deep Dive sessions: Used a combination of Jannie's higher expectations and Words have power workshop and Betsy's Agility with sound workshop. This unpacked words into syllables and known word groups. It also extended into word families, root word and synonyms.
2. More fluid discussion amongst the group. (Jannie refers to it as generating dialogic conversations). This needed students to have a keen interest/buy in into the topic and some someone to have some prior knowledge about the topic.

This is my blog post about 'Collecting and Monitoring the changes in my Teaching'.

One thing worth mentioning is the change in STYLE of learning as this was a major factor to getting my target group on board and interested in wanting to learn to read in order for them to be able to read to learn. This change was bringing in the use of iPads and Explain Everything. It was a new and exciting new way to learn for the whole group. This gave them 2 days of learning and the other days were back to normal site work.

Here is evidence in the change in my planning for reading.

Here is the change in my site layout over the year to accomodate for the different style of learning, and being able to work independently from the site and not waiting for the teacher.

Digital Fluency Intensive #7

Our sessions with Dorothy looking into the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa have always been really good reminders for me personally. Even though I'd already heard most of it before, it is great to hear and be reminded of where this pedagogy came from, its back story or history. Today was all about empowerment. Great reminder that being in a Manaiakalani school and 1-1 chromebooks is NOT just a tool. But rather something that empowers learners, who then empower our whanau and wider community.

Today's session was all about computational thinking. This is thinking like a computer would, coding directions/instructions and also debugging or problem solving. Our kids have had great experiences with this part of the curriculum in Term 2 when we covered coding using scratch and students were able to use their animations to show their way around the world. Here is an example from Tha Zin's blog. 

We all had a go at trying out some basic coding on scratch and Vivian from OMG Tech took us through a simple coding experience that can be used to introduce computational thinking to beginners. This involved 6 players, each with a number (we used the distance from where we were born to where we are now). Rules/code was, whoever has the biggest number goes right (or straight if up against a wall) and the other person goes left. We carried this on and ended up with 6 players in numerical order at the end.

This was a great hands on session so even though it is not something I would personally take interest in (but I learn it for the sake of teaching my students and it being part of the curriculum). Here's another hands on activity we did about the called the zombie lights we used to distract the zombies so we could get away.

     

The image on the left is what we received in the pack and the image on the right is our completed zombie light.

I really enjoyed learning about the binary number system which is how you represent data using electricity (how computers are programmed) using 1 and 0.