Upcoming NCEA changes

 Since late 2020, secondary school teachers from across the country have been learning about the upcoming changes to NCEA.  In my role as Manaiakalani’s Secondary Specialist, I am fortunate to be a part of the ACCORD training days administered by the Ministry of Education.  I’d have to say, the changes are a positive step forward. This is the first significant change since the forming of the New Zealand Curriculum (2007) document.  The amendments include changes to the Literacy and Numeracy Standards and subject specific NCEA Achievement Standards.

The purpose of the change for the Literacy and Numeracy standards is to strengthen students’ understanding and to apply these skills in diverse contexts.  Hence, all secondary school teachers, regardless of subject speciality, are being asked to include elements of literacy and numeracy.   

Students from Year 9 upwards will have the option of taking Literacy and Numeracy in English or sitting the Te Reo Matatini me te Pāngarau Standards.  

The Literacy and Numeracy standards will be assessed online through a NZQA Common Assessment Activity.  

Initially, students entering the Te Reo Matatini me te Pāngarau standards can choose to complete a NZQA Common Assessment Activity or submit a portfolio of work.   This will be reviewed by NZQA following the first round of assessments.

To meet the requirements, learners will need to pass:

• either literacy or te reo matatini; AND 

• either numeracy or pāngarau to meet the requirements.

Each standard or set of standards is worth 10 credits; however, these credits do not count towards the 60 credits required for NCEA. 

Students must pass both the Literacy and the Numeracy standards in order to achieve NCEA. 

Although the changes will not become mandatory until 2023, teachers are being asked to give immediate thought to the inclusion of literacy and numeracy aspects in all subject areas. There are also around 250 high schools running pilots in 2022.

How teachers embed literacy and numeracy learning opportunities within topics that involve authentic scenarios will be key to aiding students’ understanding. I’m sure this will be a highlight of our upcoming Manaiakalani Department Discussions as we share practice and examples of what this could look like.

Literacy Standards

In literacy there are two unit standards, one for reading and one for writing. The reading component includes three big ideas: Learners make sense of written texts, learners read critically, and, learners read for different purposes. This approach aligns really well with Manaiakalani’s Designing Learning With the End in Mind research framework and will be a valuable tool for teachers’ practice as they work towards meeting the literacy criteria. Furthermore, with so much emphasis on the need to develop students’ critical thinking skills and the ability to discern fact from fiction, the literacy component should provide plenty of material for real world contexts appropriate to developing students’ understanding. More information and the Literacy Learning Matrix can be found on the new NCEA.education.govt site.

Numeracy Standards

The Numeracy standards cover Mathematics and Statistics in applied situations. There are two central themes; Process Ideas and Contents Ideas. The whakatauki that’s guided the development of the Numeracy Standards, Whiria te kaha tūātinitini, whiria te kaha tūāmanomano refers to threads within our societies that include academic, social, emotional, and cultural realms.

I am interested in learning how teachers plan to incorporate numeracy across the curriculum using real world scenarios so students can apply their learning. For the breakdown of the Numeracy Matrix and more information go to the Numeracy page on the NCEA Education Site.

NCEA changes

Every NCEA subject area has had changes.  Some subjects have received more NZQA Achievement Standards, while some are being consolidated to offer fewer quality assessments.  For more information, see the individual curriculum areas.

Teachers are being encouraged to make use of the following sites to aid their practice. 

• The learning progression framework
• PaCT - The progress and consistency tool. 
• e-asTTle 
• TKI

Term 4 Manaiakalani toolkits

Effective workflows for secondary school teachers 

Yesterday I ran a toolkit on developing effective workflows for secondary school teachers.  I wanted to share some ideas about streamlining your online resources to enhance visible teaching and learning.  

For me, it's essential to establish a good foundation with your file management system.  Naming files systematically helps you to retrieve and search files in your Google Drive.  This can be especially helpful if you are looking for files from previous years. In addition, an agreed-upon file naming convention can help everyone locate necessary documents for shared resources within departments or schools.  

When it comes to creating visibility through a class site, ensuring folder permissions are set to 'anyone with the link can view' will automatically mean files within that folder can inherit those permissions.   It's also possible to have files in multiple places, which allows you to have learning resources in your department folder and in a folder associated with your class site.  

During the toolkit, a highlight for me was hearing from secondary school teachers in other schools and learning what works for them. For example, Jayne Abernethy,  a Science teacher at Hornby High School, shares her site and how Toby's bookmarking tool helps her compile relevant online resources for her Year 13 students.  She then embeds those links back into her site.  

Juliet Buenaventura, a maths teacher also from Hornby High School, shared her site set-up.  I really like how Juliet has organised her site with the Learn, Create and Share headings. This is a great way to organise her learning resources with each year-level task associated with drop-down menus.  Here's a link to her site.  

I really enjoy it when teachers share their practice. There is so much to learn and be inspired from each other.  

If you'd like to see the recording from this toolkit or review previously held toolkits, you can search the Manaiakalani archive by clicking here.  

Manaiakalani Share staff meeting

This week we ran our first online nationwide Share staff meeting involving over 500 participants.  There was a lot of sharing and rich conversations about our inquiries.  Key topics were focused around students' well being, culturally responsive pedagogy, reading, writing, maths and leadership.  We worked in small online groups, giving everyone an opportunity to have their say and to share their ideas.  

My group was made up of secondary school teachers from Ōtaki College and Tamaki College.  Our chosen topic was Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.   

A colleague of mine for several years Ruth Hills from Bay of Islands College is highly regarded for her knowledge in this area.  Just last year, Ruth gave an online presentation at one of our Secondary Connects, titled Blogging through a culturally responsive pedagogical lens.  Ruth shared with us how she had managed to extend students' writing ability through the use of the shared class blog for senior Year 12 PE students.  These students were responding to Ruth's provocations on leadership, take a look here at the blog post titled Evaluating your leadership strategies and you'll see there are 44 comments from her students.  These are well thought out comments, and as Ruth refers to her in her recorded presentation, it's clear that students were learning from one another.

I really enjoyed having online staff meetings.  It was a bit of a lottery in terms of who you were teamed up with, but I thought this was a real positive because you got to meet people who may not have ordinarily come together.    Manaiakalani are planning to run this again next year in term 3.  

Create day on DFI

We had an awesome day with our DFI cohort and exploring everything about Media.  This particular day focuses on being creative with technology to do things that we couldn't ordinarily do without it.  When we look at creative tasks, there's always something for everyone; even the experts amongst us come away with a new trick up their sleeve.  

I was looking for something a little different to do with Google Slides and came across a great idea from Ditch that textbook.  A colleague of mine was also looking for something that would hook and engage some year 9 boys who were struggling to get on board with their learning.  

Building on the idea of Parson's Problems, I created the slides but left some links broken and unfinished.  I first came across Parson's problems last year when I was studying Teaching Programming at Canterbury University.  I'm interested to see whether or not students engage with this approach.  I think the idea of designing their own app, which will run in the web browser and through their blog, will hook them in.  Potentially they could download it and add it to their phone with a shortcut that then plays in the browser.  This is a great task that will align with design and developing digital outcomes from the new digital technologies curriculum.  It's also a good introduction to computational thinking and programming in something like Scratch or Python.  

First day with our online cohort

Today was the first day of our online DFI cohort for term 3 and this is a photo of the wonderful people in my bubble.  Our group is made up of talented educators from right up north in Oruiti, near Kaitaia, down to Papakura, across to Gisborne and finishing up in Greymouth and Hokitika.  We had a fabulous day together getting to know each other and learning about some of the foundational kaupapa of Manaiakalani. 

Northland DFI cohort is underway

 It's wonderful to have our kanohi ki te kanohi Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive in Northland this term.   We have a wonderful group of educators in this cohort from across the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe Clusters.  As with all our DFI cohorts they represent primary and secondary teachers, deputy principals and principals. The collective expertise in the room sparks rich learning opportunities and diverse conversations.   

Over the next nine weeks, we'll come together to understand the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy; the workings of Learn, Create, Share.  One of the real highlights of my job is supporting teachers through this process and seeing them grow.  Often our kaiako are nervous with anticipation of what's involved in the course however, it soon becomes apparent just how worthwhile and useful this professional development is.  Not only will teachers' workflow improve but they will have the pedagogy to support teachers' practice for working in 1:1 digital environments.   

NCEA changes ACCORD at Tamaki College

 Last week I was fortunate to be able to join the team at Tamaki College for their Ministry of Education ACCORD training day.  This was the second ACCORD day for 2021.  The focus of this particular day was to unpack the changes being made to NCEA Achievement Standards in the coming years.  There are a number of modifications being made to the standards across all subject disciplines.  These will be phased over three years with new Achievement Standards for NCEA Level 1 in 2022, Level 2 in 2023 and Level 3 in 2024.  

There are four key changes which were noted as system shifts, they involve;  

• Well being
• Inclusion and equity - reflecting students identity 
• Coherence - Coherent Pathways Guidance Document
• Pathways 

Some schools are already underway with pilots for NCEA Level 1.  In 2021, pilots are being run in English, Visual Arts, Science and Religious Studies.  Bay of Islands College is undertaking 4 pilots in Level 1 NCEA Science.

It is recommended that the design of assessment reflects and reinforces the ways students have been learning. Collection of evidence for the internally assessed standards could include, but is not restricted to, an extended task, an investigation, digital evidence (such as recorded interviews, blogs, photographs or film), or a portfolio of evidence. See the full NCEA Level 1 - English Assessment Matrix 

For more information about changes to NCEA and further updates, you might want to bookmark the new home for NCEA. 

Weaving Māturanga Māori into the curriculum

The development and inclusion of Māturanga Māori in the New Zealand Curriculum is a significant milestone in education.  It's inclusion is believed to be foundational to our New Zealand culture which will lead to full participation, based on a system of values and beliefs.  To honour the mana of Māturanga Māori,  assessments will be available in English and bilingually.  

Things teachers need to consider is how can we weave Māturanga Māori into all our subjects, classrooms and the wider school/community?

Ubiquitous learning and rewindable learning resources

This week started off with a facilitation day at Bay of Islands College, followed by a staff meeting I ran on Manaiakalani's Learn aspect.     This term, we were looking at Ubiquitous learning and rewindable learning resources.   

Visible teaching through a class site allows teachers to make their learning resources available 24/7 which effectively means they are available from anywhere with an internet connection.  I like this idea because it allows learning to continue beyond the school gate and with whanau.  It also means there's a lifeline for students whenever they are away sick and, of course, if we ever have to go into lockdown again.   There should be no barriers to students with visible learning, which is why Manaiakalani recommends all learning is made available through the class site.  It should be the one-stop learning hub.

When it comes to creating rewindable learning resources, teachers nowadays are spoilt for choice.  Screencastify is an extension that sits in the Google Chrome browser bar.  It can record your screen with or without a webcam.  The app recently brought out some new features that allow you to show emojis, which are great for giving feedback to students without interfering with the document.  

There are, of course, other ways teachers can create videos, for example, using their laptop, phone, iPad or film camera.  Audio files embedded into class sites and Google docs are a worthwhile resource and provide extra support for students who may have trouble reading.   

 With rewindable videos, you also have the power to watch a video slower or faster.  

Ubiquitous learning came into its own last year during the Covid Lockdown.  Having everything visible online means our students can learn anytime, anywhere and at any pace.  When students have their own device and their learning has been designed by an effective teacher, students should be having a powerful rich learning experience.  

Let's not forget the powerful workforce in the classroom as well.  Students are excellent teachers who would gain a lot of confidence by contributing to teaching resources.  With so many young people being YouTube stars with tutorials from how to win in League of Legends to how to apply makeup, I think it's highly likely students could see themselves contributing to their peers' learning.  

   

Digital Fluency Intensive 2021

We're underway with the first online DFI cohort for 2021 and what a fantastic group of teachers, principals and deputy principals we have on board.  Sixty-eight educators from around the country will be meeting each Wednesday for the next 8 weeks to learn about the Manaiakalani pedagogy; Learn, Create, Share.  We'll also cover all the apps from the Google Education Suite supported by the pedagogy for why, how and when to use them.    I'd like to wish everyone in our cohort a very warm welcome, especially to the wonderful group in my digital bubble.  I'm looking forward to working alongside you over the coming weeks.  

The origins of the Manaiakalani programme started back in 2006 at Point England School.  Thirteen more schools in East Tamaki joined Point England School and formed the Manaiakalani cluster.  The success of this first cluster spearheaded the development of the Manaiakalani Outreach and five more clusters.  In 2021, the Manaiakalani programme is delivered in11 clusters worldwide, including one virtual cluster.  Over 100 schools are represented in the 11 clusters, including 23,000 learners in primary and secondary schools.  It's an exciting time to be involved.  

Manaiakalanai Wananga October 2020

The annual Manaiakalani Wananga is always rich with inspiring speakers.   I come away feeling motivated and full of ideas to try and implement.  One of the highlights was hearing from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre's Associate Director, Dr Aaron Wilson's.  His presentation unpacked the 2020 data from across all Manaiakalani schools nationwide and represented trends from online observation data.  

Aaron prefaced his presentation by explaining that understanding the online observation data begins with identifying student learning patterns.  Analysing these patterns helps identify strengths in teacher's practice and raises some important questions, such as retooling teaching practice, to make it more effective for students' learning.   Significant gains have been occurring with students writing, showing that after three years at Manaiakalani schools, students are making twice the expected progress in one year.   Writing achievement is showing promising results. 

However, a recurring theme within the recent data showed an over-representation of lower achievement and lower progress rates where reading is concerned.    

Aaron explained that students need to develop strong foundational reading skills in the early years of school.  Furthermore, teachers need to have the diagnostic ability to recognise students who need extra support.  They also need to know what steps to take to ensure students get the guidance they need.  

The overall reading pattern showed the trend in many schools that students can get to Year 4 with basic literacy but have irregular patterns for the preceding years.  The key goal is to disrupt this pattern by implementing high leverage practices and increasing students' reading mileage.  Aaron emphasised how teachers' planning is imperative to lift students reading using high leverage practices. 

The Shanahan & Shanahan model (see below), places basic literacy, i.e. letter recognition and phonetic sounding, as a necessary skill.  We still have some work to do to help students achieve intermediate literacy. 

Mirror texts (where students can see themselves in a text) encourages students to connect with what they are reading, making it relatable and purposeful.  

Window text, on the other hand, gives students a view into other worlds and cultures.  Window texts provide opportunities for students to recognise ethnic diversity and empathy.  The challenge for teachers is to incorporate both mirror and window texts.  Ideas to consider are;

• What opportunities are we offering students to read about non-European and non-western worlds?   
• Are our texts representative of the cultures within our class, and are we also using window texts to expose students to different cultures?   
• How can we help our students see themselves in what they're reading?  
• Plan to use texts that open students' minds to the wider world to help engage students in literacy and literacy development.  

Metacognition challenge: 

How are we developing and planning for metacognitive challenges across a range of abilities?  What support and scaffolding do we have in place?  Are these resources easily accessible from the class site? Reading in a specific subject area is a specialised skill at high school and must be taught consistently.  Teachers can help students understand by discussing specific texts with students and conversing about a text's structure.  This approach helps students to interpret the key messages or big idea.  Another teaching strategy involves having students unpack topic-specific text and to aggregate vocab pertinent to the genre.  

Class site design to aiding reading:

Aaron advocated for teachers to plan for and to include teaching strategies on their class site for students to refer to.  It would benefit students and be a resource for parents to engage with their child's learning. 

Critical Literacy:

How then might we develop students critical literacy skills?  Aaron advised critical literacy is not something that can happen spontaneously in the classroom; it needs to be deliberately planned.  Additionally, purposeful, engaging activities should be part of a teacher's planning.  These resources should be scaffolded for the best student outcomes. Teachers also need to be mindful that they are not putting a ceiling on students learning and limiting their ability.  Questions for teachers to consider are;

• Are we providing opportunities for students to evaluate multiple texts and then discuss them?
• Have we factored in planned activities for group discussion?
• Are we giving students a choice of text?
• What options and choices are we giving students to Create and show their learning?
• Have we provided a range of texts in terms of length and complexity? 

Professional development:

There is a need for systematic support to help teachers design and develop reading resources.  The recent classroom observations showed a shift in teaching practices towards multiple texts, so there is progress across our clusters.   The wero or challenge is to think about how we can work collaboratively and collectively to disrupt and improve reading outcomes.  

Our overarching goal could be for students to be reading like a writer and writing like a reader.

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.