T-shaped literacy in high schools

In our Secondary Connect, we were very lucky to have Associate Professor Aaron Wilson with us from The University of Auckland talk about how we can develop T-Shaped literacy across our secondary school subjects.   Here are some of the key takeaways for me.   

It's important that students are able to understand the purpose of texts and importantly how authors have framed texts.  Encouraging students to determine who an authors' intended audience might be, helps readers connect with the purpose of specific.  

Students need to understand the purpose of reading specific texts,  not only for their own understanding but also to elucidate an author's perspective.   Knowing the purpose of a text is very closely linked to motivation and necessary for high-level thinking

The kinds of questions we could be prompting students with include 

• What's the viewpoint of the writer?
• What ideas is the author trying to convey?

Partnership leaves North schools well prepared

Our recent experience of Covid19 and the urgent shift to online learning highlighted the need for teachers to be digitally fluent.   Bay of Islands College teachers can feel proud of the fact they were prepared and ready to cope with this change.  Over the past three years, the school has embraced the challenge to move from an analogue traditional classroom to a digital environment. 
Their efforts were highlighted in the Northland Age this week.  

The four Northland primary schools and one secondary school that make up the Kaikohekohe Education Network had no idea how fortuitous their six-year partnership with the Manaiakalani Education Trust was going to be until the Covid19 lockdown entered their lives.   Read the full article here...

Get creative with google slides and animation

Google animations are a great way to engage students with their learning and will easily give them another way to show their understanding.  Here are some ideas where you could include animations in your lessons;

• To show a cycle or process
• Retell a story 
• Re-enact a historical event
• Demonstrate a scientific concept or experiment
• Explain how to solve a math problem
• Show their understanding of Geometry 
• Define a vocabulary term 
• Create a visual journey of a trip
• Create a timeline

There's always a bit of fun to be had when making animations.  Using google slides, duplicate the first slide, move the objects a little and repeat this process until you have at least 10 - 15 slides.  The car animation below has 35 slides.  The more slides you have the more you can adjust your timing and your animation will run smoothly.  The final trick is publishing the slides to the web.  Choose the embed code if you want to post your animation on your blog, select small so it will fit nicely in your blog post and adjust the timing of your animation to make it run faster.

Covid19 and our wellbeing

I thoroughly enjoyed the Ministry of Education's recent webinar on Wellbeing with
Chief Education Scientific Advisor Stuart McNaughton, Associate Professor Melinda Webber, Teachers Raiha Johnson (Waverley School), Jason Swann (Otahuhu Primary), and Maya Edmunds the Head Girl at Onehunga High School.

I felt the overall wellbeing themes from the panel today were about re-establishing connections, building on everyone's' learned experiences from Covid19,  being patient and kind to one another.

The changes that occurred during the Covid19 Lockdown have significantly impacted all of our lives in varying ways.  Consequently, work and school life will be different as we move back into Level 2 for teachers, students, support staff and the wider community.  Forgive the cliché ‘it won't be business as usual’ but we're not going back to what we had before.
I see this as a prime opportunity for schools to re-evaluate how they do things, what's working, what we should keep and what we should change.

First and foremost when schools reopen on Monday, it will be important to focus on rebuilding connections with teachers, students and the supportive wider community of our schools.  We'll need to be patient and focused on the positive. We also need to be offering reassurance to our students and above all to empathise, by being kind with each other.  Stuart McNaughton advised, routines will be really important for those returning to school and will give students a sense of normality and stability which will help them reintegrate back into school life.  Being adaptable, agile and responsive to students’ needs will be key to developing a connected and supportive culture. 

McNaughton also pointed out that some students will have experienced significant stress during the lockdown period and may continue to do so as they come back to school.  Some will be impacted by the digital divide and may feel excluded from learning, particularly if they did not have access to a device or the internet.  Let's remove those assumptions that every student has been able to access their learning through technology and be prepared to catch some students up.

Spend time inviting students to share their experiences.  Helping them to find connections with one another will encourage them to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance.  What can we learn from our student's whanau and how can we make our learning more inclusive with families?  Nurturing connections with whanau and including them in future planning will help develop a strong community based on shared principles.
How can we turbo-charge technology to connect with whanau?  Visible learning through class sites, class and individual student blogs is one way parents can keep up to date with what’s happening at school.

Melinda Webber reminded us to look for what gains students have made during this time.  What key competencies would have happened at home?  Things like resilience within whanau, communication skills built with one another and the opportunity for students' to observe other people's perspectives.  How timely that the Covid19 Lockdown occurred in the lead up to Matariki.  This is often a time of reflection,  so ask students, what did they learn about their whanau during this time of social distancing?  What are they grateful for?  What are their goals for the year? Who can they work with to achieve their goals?

For those students who did participate in online classes, what was their experience of learning online like? Many of our students were engaging in an online class in Google Meet for the first time.   What new skills did they learn, what did they struggle with?  Shared experiences provide purposeful conversation starters that will hopefully encourage students to open up and feel connected. 

In the virtual classes I was involved in, I found many of the high school students were reluctant to have their camera on, some were shy to talk or share their learning via screen-sharing.  Spending time developing student's confidence for communicating in video conferencing is something we’ll have to include in our lessons. Manaiakalani's Cybsermart programme helps students develop these skills and gives them opportunities to learn about the differences between public-private sharing.

Maya Edmunds, the Head Girl of Onehunga High School spoke so well about her own experiences and encouraged teachers to show they care about their students.  Let them know you value their opinions and ask them to contribute to the design of your lessons.
It’s a really valuable time to be gathering student voices about what they enjoyed and what they found challenging to help us evaluate and make improvements.

I have enjoyed my time working from home supporting teachers within the Manaiakalani Outreach programme.  My days have been packed with Google Hangout Meets all over the country facilitating with the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive and providing professional development for my individual teachers.   I work with a dynamic team who have helped me to feel connected, valued and part of a collective that is really making a difference in people's lives. 

In terms of my own well being during this time, I've been able to develop a better life/work balance.  For me that has meant, spending more time with my husband, being able to exercise every day and take time out in the fresh air.  I've come to appreciate what I treasure most and what I can live without and I'm looking forward to seeing a positive change in education, one that is more inclusive for everyone.

Covid19 Wellbeing Guide

Python programme to guess your age

I've been playing around with Python this week and this time I've written a programme that can guess how old you will be in any given year. Click the run button and give it a go.  I love to hear how you found it or have any ideas for extending on this. 

DFI Online - Our Cybersmart day

Wonderful to reconnect with everyone today at our online DFI.  Today's focus was on being Cybersmart and ensuring we teach students what that means.   Fiona Grant gave us a really comprehensive overview of the Manaiakalani Cybersmart programme.  She talked about how it was developed and emphasised the importance of giving students time to practice the foundational skills of being Cybersmart, especially in today's online interactive world. 

The default for our learners should be positive, thoughtful, helpful when they connect online.  They need to be able to discern from the plethora of information on the internet what serves their interests and what they should ignore.  Giving students lots of opportunities to engage with people positively online like when they are posting and commenting through school blogs, will help them to develop confidence interacting in an online space. 
Helping them to understand the difference between what's ok to share publically and what should be kept private is fundamental to them establishing a good digital footprint. Posing the question; what kind of information are your sharing about yourself?  What will we be able to find out about you in ten years time?  I imagine this could cause a bit of internal conflict for some of our teens, who in those formative teen years spend a lot of time focusing on their online image.  Inviting students to discuss how they feel about sharing online, looking at examples of good and bad sharing.  Within the Cybersmart curriculum is a whole range of resources designed to educate students from the correct use of digital media to developing their smart footprint, how to be smart legally and more.  Click here to see the full programme.

Our aim should be to use Manaiakalani's Cybersmart programme to foster active, involved lifelong learners who are empowered to interact online positively. 

Term 2 week 1 - Covid19 Lockdown

What a fantastic week it's been, this online teaching really suits me and judging by the feedback from the teachers I'm working with it's suiting a lot of them as well.   The teachers at a high school I'm working at are so encouraged by the high number of students who have been turning up to their online classes during this first week of term two.    I do wonder though how it's working for students, their experience could be very different and we need to take that into account in the coming weeks.

To support our teachers with some of the new skills they'll need for online teaching my colleagues and I from the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe Clusters have been running some short online toolkits.  Today I ran one on Hapara Teacher Dashboard.  Hapara was originally developed by the Manaiakalani hackers' group to give teachers visibility to students' learning and forms an essential tool for teachers delivering Manaiakalani's Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

Python challenges

Today I was working through some CodeWof tasks with Python.  It's been a few weeks since I've practised so it was pretty hard, the success though when you get something right is so satisfying!  I only wish I was having more of them.  Fail Fast is the programming mantra.  Keep making those mistakes, it's the only way to learn.

The first challenge I took on board was to write a programme that would ask you for the year you were born, the current year and then it would tell you how old you would be this year.  Here's my code below which worked, YAY!

For the next challenge, I had to write a programme that would repeatedly asks the user for the current temperature of a machine.  The machine must shutdown if the temperature is 50 or greater, or if it is 0 or less. If the temperature the user has entered is within normal operating temperatures, then print Temperature OK. If the temperature is too high or low, then your program must stop asking for the temperature and should print Shutting down...

This part of the problem I got right but it what I couldn't figure out was how to use the 'while' function to keep asking the user what the temperature was.  I had another problem, there were floats in the inputs.  Floats are numbers with decimal points which in this scenario need to be rounded to a whole number. I think I have the round function, I can't work out how to put it together.  

Example:

• Function call round(x) returns the nearest int to the float value x
• round(45.6)
• Here round is the name of the function
• 45.6 is the argument

I've just come across the main keywords for Python which will be super helpful from beginnersbook.com 

Day 8 Lockdown

My day started out with a hangout meeting with our Manaiakalani supervisor Anne Sinclair.  I'm so lucky to have professional development support from Anne.  Our conversations are always so inspiring, leading me to come away full of ideas and purpose. 
Today we talked about what a unique learning opportunity, disruptions like Covid19 can bring.  As tragic an event as Covid19 is, it's also an incredible historical moment for everyone. 

Teachers and their students will all be having different experiences that will inevitably impact how we learn in the future.  The question is, how can we maximise the affordances of technology to help us understand what has happened at this point in time?   With all the data being generated around Covid19 there are real-time interactive maps like this one from John Hopkins University.  and a timeline map from Mapbox. 

New businesses, new ways of communicating, interacting, working, learning will emerge as a result of this global pandemic outbreak.  To respond to all this disruption in an educational setting, our pedagogy needs to be agile, culturally responsive and inclusive, something I'll be exploring further. 

The afternoon had a much lighter tone and I participated in Manaiakalani's Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Google Hangout led by Fiona Grant.  Thirty-eight educators from around the country joined in, sharing and discussing ideas of how to make the most of the Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu programme.   Fiona reminded everyone about encouraging students to include images or videos that are visually eye-catching for their readers.  Not only will this help students develop their understanding further but their posts will likely attract more attention, particularly in our twitter feeds. 

DFI: Workflow

We started off the day with a presentation from Anne Sinclair about Learn.  Anne is a fantastic presenter, sharing her years of experience and passion for learning this was an inspiring listen.  What I really liked about Anne's presentation was her reminder to everyone that Learn can and does look different in every school. 
For me this is a crucial element to the success of the Manaiakalani programme and gives school's the ability to make Learn, Create, Share their own, representing their community and learners.  This image below (from Manaiakalani's Learn presentation) shows a snapshot of some the many different styles and learning programmes within Manaiakalani's schools. 

Some of the ideas shared in our group discussion about Learn today included;

• Learning as a teacher and ensuring our learners learn. Learn together!
• Purposeful and engaging. Encourages and fosters student curiosity
• Students, teachers and whanau as  learners and teachers
• Ako is learning, growing, and persevering through the unknown; new topics, experiences, and opportunities
• Relationships and exciting learning experiences based on their interests

It was a really purposeful day and I hope that our cohort felt they had plenty to go away with particularly in terms of organising their school workflow.  The more we are learning online, the more crucial it is to feel confident navigating in a digital environment, whether that's administrative work or developing resources for learners it needs to be streamlined and effortless. 

Sensemaking 2019

Reviewing the slides from last year's Woolf Fisher Sensemaking presentation (November, 2019) the key themes for the Te Hiku 2019 Observational Data were;

Findings from the class observation data suggested there was more of a prevalence from teachers to give evaluative feedback, which I am guilty of at times too. It's that waffly kind of stuff like well done, good on you.  Feedback that is much more worthwhile for students and gives them something tangible to improve on is descriptive feedback i.e. I see you have used a variety of sentence starters to grab attention);
I am mindful of being specific with feedback in my facilitation role when working with teachers and something I learned at Toastmasters years ago never lets me down.  CRC, Commend, Recommend and Compliment. 
Within my own teaching practice, when I'm working alongside students, I need to tighten up a bit on giving bite size chunks of descriptive feedback that is specific to our learning intentions.   Jess Henare, the Deputy Principal at Kawakawa Primary School gave a good presentation at one of the Kiakohekohe Cluster PLG's last year.  The image below is from her resource and here's a link to her full slide deck.  Note to self: make time to revisit this when planning my next lessons. 

Core Business

Today was our first day of the Northland Digital Fluency Intensive Cohort#1 for 2020.  Our group is made up of 15 primary, secondary school teachers and principals, from as far north as Paparore School to Bay of Islands who kindly hosted us in one of their recently upgraded classrooms.
I do enjoy the DFI, it's a real highlight of my week and brings with it a great opportunity to network with teachers in the Manaiakalani Outreach schools from both the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe cluster.

Dorothy Burt, the Manaiakalani Education Programme Lead was with us and started the day with the origins of Manaiakalani since its inception. Although I've heard Dorothy present this a few times now there is always something for me to take away. 
Today it was Dorothy's innovative pedagogy with her student created podcasts which she started back in 2006.   Getting students to create their own podcasts was an engaging activity which helped to  improve students reading. 
Reflecting back on my own teaching practice back then, I was reminded of a dream I had to create a student radio station that could be broadcast throughout the school and to the wider community.  Back then of course, it was involved a fairly extensive process that involved procuring an unused FM frequency along with the sourcing of some expensive equipment to enable a big enough broadcast reach.

Now of course, technology has shifted so far that many of these barriers are removed.  There are plenty of podcast sites that provide an integrated platform for uploading and sharing self-made audio sound bites.  A quick search brought up How to Start a Podcast and while this site is aimed more at the adult reader, it's got some good references that I may well come back to. 
Talking some more with Dorothy today about this, got me thinking about how I could engage students reading by the creation of their own podcasts.  The possibilities are endless really.  For example, at high school level, students could be tasked with creating a podcast series as a class on a given topic, they could interview each other or better still record interviews with outside experts or members of their own community.  That's taking it off in another direction altogether of course.  A learning opportunity not only for content of a given topic but also students will need to write a script, think about what order they will present ideas, add audio effects and so on to make it an entertaining listen. 
Plenty of ideas bubbling around for me to investigate further and which may fit quite nicely for my assignment for Teaching Computing Programming. 

Kaikohekohe Teacher Only Day

The Kaikohekohe Cluster teacher only day got off to a great start at the beginning of the year.  Held at Paihia School it was an opportunity for primary and secondary school teachers to come together and share ideas.  We were very fortunate to have Dorothy Burt, the Manaiakalani Education Programme Lead with us as our keynote speaker.  Dorothy gave us a good reminder of how the schools within the Kaikohekohe Cluster have come so far in terms of teacher professional development since aligning Manaiakalani six years ago.  The video below is a summary of the day and an overview of the impact the Manaiakalani Outreach programme is having on the schools.

Canterbury programming workshop

I've just attended Canterbury University's three day workshop 'Learn Programming with the Department of Fun".  What a way to start a new decade!  Over 40 teachers, primary and secondary attended from around the country.   Professor Tim Bell and his Kia Takatū team delivered a fun and engaging three days that was a crash course into the fundamentals of computer programming.

1. Input
2. Output
3. Sequence
4. Selection 
5. Iteration 
6. Variable

We were split into two groups those who wanted to learn programming using Scratch and those who wanted to learn using Python. Having worked with Scratch for a number of years now I chose Python, something I've been wanting to get my head around for a while. I was anticipating it being quite a mental stretch for me but it was really a lot of fun. Although it was a crash course intensive, Dr Caitlin Duncan, our tutor, was great and explained everything in a very logical manner.
I learned more about variables, strings, operations, booleans, functions, conditionals and for loops.

Something that particularly struck a cord with me was how I could think about bringing in more focus when teaching programming for solving a problem rather than perhaps showing how to code something to move 4 steps for example. While knowing how to move a sprite around the stage in Scratch or change backgrounds etc.. is a useful thing to know what might make students' learning more purposeful is to first pose a problem for them to solve. Problems that directly align to the Design and Developing Digital Outcomes.
The thing I like about programming is that it's like solving a puzzle, frustrating as that may be sometimes.

With all the wonderful learning over the past three days, I'm very mindful that if I don't keep it up I'll loose it, so I've given myself a challenge to try and complete one Python task a day. Here's today's code, how to ask users for a specific number in this case their age.