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. 

Digital Fluency Intensive #6

Our focus for our 6th DFI session was all about dealing with data. This was definitely the perfect timing to have this session as we near the end of year with all our data analysis for end of year testing. This will also help me to collate data and how best to show progress/achievement from my own inquiry as part of our CoL role.

My 2 interesting things I learnt was the use of Google My Maps and Pick a path option in Google Forms. My maps was great to see the potential it has when teaching maths or showing a classroom profile in terms of where students are from using the world map. Forms would definitely be an option to use in class more often - especially with the current quiz form I am currently composing - as students are really interested in being tested on current events.

Google Sheets - this great tool just got better as I learnt more things I can do on it. I use sheets daily for planning, student turn-in sheets, and for team data collection. Something new I've learnt how to do today and will be sharing with my team is analysing our students blog post numbers. Here is a graph I've created using sheets about Zaeeda's blog posts over the years. From here I could have some really good learning conversations with her about her blogging over the years and ask maybe why she has only blogged in Jan this year and last. It could be that she didn't take her chromebook home over the holidays? I will definitely be revisiting Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge's blog post to follow through on her statistics unit as part of our maths programme in Term 1. Thank you Robyn!

Digital Fluency Intensive #5

Enabling Access: Sites

This was our focus today for our first DFI back in Term 4. This was great timing as some of us are preparing already for 2020 and our new class/team sites.

In our Connecting with Manaiakalani session, Dorothy reiterated our Manaiakalani message that Connected Learners Share - Tohatoha. This is definitely true both online and in person. A great reminder to us as teacher to continue to keep this in mind as we start Term 4.

Our deep dive session dove into a heap of different sites and shared what we thought were visually appealing and if it was user friendly for learners. Following on from this each of us then presented our own class/team site and took the cohort on a tour of our site and where everything is. Our cohort were then given the opportunity to rate and give feedback about improvements we could make. This proved a very worthy activity as you become so used to your site because you use it daily, that if a third party comes along, are they able to find things so easily. Some key comments from peoples feedback were that some teachers hadn't shared access for everyone to view their students learning, and someone also made a comment about the class blog button not being easy to find which is true as this is not labelled but simply linked to each teachers name. I have already started working to make these improvements to our site.

Our last session was lead by Gerhard who took us through making buttons, and banners for our DFI sandpit site.

This was a great exercise and I can now confidently say that I know how to make buttons for my own inquiry sites in the future. During this time I also managed to have a go at the DFI google sites challenge. You had to complete the set of instructions in creating a site within 5 minutes. I took 8 minutes to complete mine so will definitely need to keep practising this at a later time.

Something I'd like to add to our current site is an image carousel as I know my learners would love seeing school wide events on display rather than hidden in a folder.
One cool tip I picked up today: Normally when taking photos of students learning or events, I take it on my phone, then upload 9 at a time to students blog photos folder which students have access to on our team 5 site. This takes a while and I normally get students to start writing their blog while I upload. Today, Shiralee and Rachelle shared that if we click into the folder first on our phones, press the plus button, click camera and WALLAH! You can take photos and this goes straight into the folder without adding to your gallery on your phone. I will definitely be using this tip from now on. Thank you ladies!

The story behind the data

Here is a break-down or analysis of each of my target students results

FM - Here is my previous blog post about his results

AV - Just over 1 year shift in reading age. This student is a second language learner of English and joined our school in 2017. She has moved a whopping 8 levels from Level 9 - Level 17. Her reading accuracy was 98% but she has struggled with comprehension. She normally takes a lot longer to get through a test than others in the group. At times she is able to verbalise what she is finding difficult. After her mid year testing at level 12, her level 13 test in August came out at 100% decoding and 100% comprehension. I felt it was far too easy for her so we skipped level 14 and instead tested her at level 15 (orange).

LL - 1 year shift in reading age. This student has full time hours and also gets additional learning support from Dev Charles for 1.5 hours a week. This has been reduced from 5 hours a week as LL was becoming difficult during the sessions with Dev and not much learning was going on. The 1.5 hours has been more beneficial and rewarding for LL in terms of willingness, attitude, and task completion. Dev is quite happy with this set up as well. Reading accuracy 97% and 100% comprehension. She didn't get to test again due to time restraints and a busy timetable.

SK - 1 and a half years shift in reading age. This student is very talkative and at times can interfere with others in the group by being overly helpful, so others don't get a chance to try out words for themselves. She is quite onto it, in terms of picking up reading strategies being taught. What I have come to realise through group observations is, a lot of her learning or retention is all dependent on how she is feeling. The more praise you give her, the more she thrives and strives to do more. This has been in my opinion one of the key elements to her making shifts this year. This has been confirmed by her comments the next day when she says, "Thank you for teaching me yesterday Miss, I feel better because I know new words and can read a bit faster now." Her test at level 19 came out at 99% decoding and 100% comprehension. Again, time restraints and our hectic timetable in our Y7&8 have meant we didn't get around to testing her up.

PT - 1 year shift in reading age. I've been talking to my in-class support worker (teacher aide) about student PT and we agreed that he is a very capable reader and is able to pronounce 3 syllable words quite confidently. He has a slight Tongan accent that sometimes sounds like he is mispronouncing the words. But having read with him for almost a year, we have picked up on the fact that he decodes perfectly and with a translator, is also able to answer comprehension question correctly. His use of expressions in his voice are another indicator for good understanding when reading a text. He has yet to fail a test but due to his reluctance to being tested 2 tests in a row, it is a slow progress testing him up twice a term to reach his full potential/true instructional reading level. Decoding came out at 98% and 100% for comprehension.

AT - 1 year shift in reading age. This student still has frequent absences throughout each term. However, when he is in class, he has shown interest in the topic books he has been reading about different animals. This has kept him engaged long enough to complete set tasks each day. His reading tests still start off with what has now become his standard comments of, "I'm dumb Miss. I'm not gonna pass this test". But once I show him the level in which he is reading at, and where he used to be before, we tend to set a goal (aim for purple) and this gives him a little bit of motivation to even give the test a go. He definitely looks to give a 'worst case scenario' before giving things a go just incase he does not pass. He has yet to fail a reading test. I have been careful in how far/hard I push him as I am fearful that when he does get to a point that he fails a level, it would confirm his statements as true and might effect his fragile motivation to learn. His last test was 97% for decoding and 100% in comprehension.

GW - 6 months shift in reading age.This student I still haven't quite seen or been able to pin point a pattern of behaviour or a pattern of learning for him. Each test has been different in terms of attitude, effort, behaviours, and also willingness to talk at times. However, it is great to see him make shift. He was very excited (in a shy way) about making any shift so we hope to keep working with him throughout this last term. It is nearing the end of week 1 of term 4 and student GW has yet to return to school so will wait and see. His last test at the end of Term 3 was 96% for decoding and 5 out of 6 question correct so that's 80% for comprehension.

RF - 1 and a half years shift in reading age. This student has gained confidence from moving groups and working in a group with more able readers. She has a positive attitude during testing and is always willing to give things a go. She has taken ownership of her own learning by asking for some short tasks she can do at home and this has added to excitement about reading. I cannot attribute much of my deliberate acts of teaching for this students achievements as her learning has taken off through self motivation and determination. RF got 98% decoding in her test and 70% for comprehension.

Update on last target student being tested

I felt it was necessary to write a separate blog post to update my last target student who was tested.

Originally, despite student FM being low academically, he still didn't qualify for much funding in terms of in class support as he was absent 50% of the schooling year. In Term 2, we had serious talks with other agencies and the family for a plan of wrap around support to ensure FM and siblings attend school more often. This started a new path for FM and we were also able to apply for some funding to support his learning in class.

Unfortunately, he has started to miss days again towards the end of this term hence why he missed the first round of testing with his group. Here is some data as his test results are not quite straight forward.

I tested him first on level 11 and he read well enough, but stumbled on some easy words (HFW) but showed he was able to pronounce chunks of an unknown word. The comprehension questions he did really well in and was quite confident with his answers. Because of this we decided to try level 12. This was definitely a lot hard, decoding wise, and it took a while to get through the whole text. Despite this, he still managed to get all comprehension questions correct. I decided to end the testing there and analyse the data. I discovered he got 95% accuracy rate for level 12 which puts him at instructional level, not independent. So I went back and analysed level 11 accuracy rate and discovered that was also 95%. So because of this, I've decided to bring FM back to level 11, so that he can work on his fluency and decoding skills.

Another point to note is, due to FM being absent on the groups testing day, he also missed out on the pre-test prep talk that I try and take the group through in terms of what to expect and remind them of some of the reading strategies we've been working on in class. I didn't have time during class to take FM through this same process and so his testing started without this support/reminder.

                      

End of Term 3 Update

As Term 3 comes to an end, I feel like I have lost a bit of my focus and traction with my target group and the goals we had set at the start of the term. I will be using the holiday break to review where I am in my inquiry and how best to go forward into such a busy Term 4 and still make the most of it for my group of learners.

What I can report on are the testing behaviours and results for their running records for the end of this term. Here are the levels or reading ages from the end of 2018 to now.

I have shown these shifts to each individual in my target group and I don't think they truely understood the enormity of their success until I showed their progress from the last 3 years where they hardly made any shift at all. Once this sunk in, they were absolutely excited and ready to take another test now! We talked about what this means for them, what they can now do and couldn't do before, and we also covered what they need to work on individually in order to keep doing better in the next test. My next task is to set them up to take PAT tests to the best of their ability.

One of my hypotheses I was keeping track of throughout the year is being test ready. I covered this briefly in my End of Term 2 update. My actual notes during testing look like this on the right -->

But a more cohesive version of notes for their behaviours and actions during testing are below. Although I had 1student missing from this testing, I do hope to catch him before the end of the term of early in week 1 next term.

Additional information: I've shared this post with my school-wide inquiry group as well as my Team 5 group of teachers. They have helped me by adding notes and comments to students behaviours outside my class and what they are like with them. Here I am reminded that some students have other needs. An example is student AT, who actually needs to ensure he is taking his meds for ADHD as his behaviour shows he is not. His home class teacher has also given extra information that may help me better cater for him next term.

Digital Fluency Intensive #4

Todays focus was collaborating around google sites. What a task they set for us today. It was definitely great to be able to start a site from scratch over and over again so we go used to where things were and how to line things up so it looked neat and tidy.

Here is a link to my multimodal site - Idenity.

A lot of the information or linking of texts was taken from Angela Moala's multimodal spreadsheet which is a collection of texts which make up a multi textual series of learning. The only things I had to create were the learning tasks that linked up the different texts.

Dorothy also went through some of Woolf Fishers research about T shaped literacy which our team of teachers in Year 7 & 8 have been looking at over the last couple of years. This is taking students through a literacy lesson that is both deep and wide. This is ensuring you as a teacher are diving deeply into a main text with your group of students, but also providing opportunities for them to work independently on activities with a variety of other texts/videos. This was the purpose of us creating a multimodal site.

One take away I will definitely remember to keep in mind for the rest of my planning, is to ensure I provide opportunities to empower students through free choice of texts to read. This is also added on at the end of my site.

I would love to keep creating multimodal sites like this for my teams inquiry studies or even during units of learning in literacy.
Thank you DFI for another workshop filled with useful knowledge and tools to use daily.