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.

Integrating the new Digital Curriculum in 2020

In 2020, all New Zealand schools will be expected to cater to students so that they can learn skills to enable them to be flexible creative thinkers in a dynamically changing environment of digital technologies.  The two new areas compliment the previous technology curriculum;

• computational thinking for digital technologies – new
• designing and developing digital outcomes – new
• designing and developing materials outcomes
• designing and developing processed outcomes
• design and visual communication

The technology digital curriculum has strengthened by the integration of two new technological areas: Designing Digital Outcomes and Computational Thinking is aimed at providing teachers with a focus for implementing them via the Progress Outcomes.  The Progress Outcomes are designed to  align with Curriculum Levels,  however progression in understanding and capability for students is something that will be developed over time and it's unlikely this will follow a linear process.  I would imagine some students might be good at designing digital outcomes but lack the coding experience to support their idea.  As with marking a students' piece of writing using the E-AsTTle rubric, some aspects will be at their curriculum level and some may not.

At a recent webinar, I attended by Cheryl Pym from the University of Otago it was discussed how the current three technology strands, Technological Knowledge, Technological practice and the Nature of Technology are interwoven throughout the progress outcomes. 

Image Sourced:The revised technology learning area  - Pym, C., October 2019

This supports the foundational technological knowledge that students need to acquire in order to develop critical thinking skills that support them to be confident, curious, creative learners upon leaving high school.  It’s also important to develop students’ conceptual knowledge in terms of how technology meets the intervention by design model NZ Curriculum (2007).   Furthermore, maintaining the integrity of all five digital technology learning areas is necessary if schools are going to integrate technology across the curriculum.   A necessary conversation will be around defining how to identify progress, particularly from years 1- 10 with moderation and teacher judgement. 

Questions we might want to ask ourselves are;

• How do we identify progress?  
• How will we structure learning to ensure we are meeting all five aspects?
• How can I collaborate with teachers in my school and in other clusters?
• How can we develop coherent learning pathways?

Cheryl also suggested practising looking at the progress outcomes with a technology strand lens to identify where the technological strands fit.  Consider too, linking to local curriculum aspects within schools to provide those rich learning opportunities that are context-specific and relevant not only to students' interests but also to the wider community.  

Think about how to build programming into traditional subject areas for example students could create a digital story with Scratch using high-frequency words in literacy.  Providing opportunities for students to design games for learning will give them an understanding of why games are important in society (Nature of Technology).  They’ll learn what makes a good game (Technological Knowledge, Technological Practice) and how to write a good set of instructions (Computational Thinking). Creating an interactive pou using QR codes that are linked to digital content stored on the school website gives students the understanding behind Computational Thinking Progress Outcome 4.     

I can see potential for plenty of exciting and engaging lessons to include the new digital curriculum areas, exciting for our students because it will be future focused and challenging.  At the heart of it all there are ample opportunities for integrating Cybersmart elements to ensure our young people feel confident, empowered and participants in a Learn, Create, Share world.  

Making reading accessible with Wakelet

Looking for an alternative app to Padlet I came across Wakelet which is a great alternative if you are just wanting to compile a variety of digital media.  It has a good reading feature will be really useful for unpacking text with students as it can highlight any verbs, adjectives, similes and provide pictures as well as a dictionary to cue the meaning of the word.  There is even the option to have the text read aloud.  Here's my first moodbood, I'll definitely be adding this one to my classroom practice.

Design thinking at KPMG

At this term's Manaiakalani hui we were treated to an afternoon of Design Thinking at the KPMG offices in the Auckland Viaduct.  It was a lot of fun and felt more like play than hard work, creativity at it's best!

Design thinking can be used to problem solve a wide range of human related issues that encourages people to think outside the box to find solutions that encompass the needs of all involved.  Five steps are involved, empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.   Empathetic design thinking starts with participants, observing and listening to the problem at hand while putting aside all judgments and preconceived perceptions.  Approaching problem solving through an empathetic lens, potentially opens up those involved to consider everyone's perspectives and different viewpoints without judgement.  It helps to build a profile of the situation or person/s to really define the problem and identify the issue.  The ideate stage is where you go beyond thinking outside the box, no idea is too wacky or wild.  It's a time for getting ideas down, then categorising them if possible to establish recurring themes.   Developing a prototype and testing that prototype is an iterative process that could go through several cycles of elimination and refinement.  Key to this last stage was being able to communicate the issue, ideas and prototype to someone who wasn't associated with the project or it could have been the client.  In our group we found this part of the process helped us to identify things we'd overlooked or hadn't given enough thought to.

I was first involved with design thinking at a professional development day at Hobsonville Point some years back and I have on many occasions used this approach with digital design students at high school.   I'd like to learn more about how to best apply the technique with students in bit sized lessons over one or two periods to kick start a project.  I've often found that design thinking is something that goes over an extended period of weeks or even months but if I could narrow that down to an hour's lesson would be ideal with the changing nature of my facilitation.

Below is an image of me trying to explain to our team's design for the group.  I was lucky to have the very talented Anne Sinclair (who drew Danvery) along with vibrant Venessa Davan and Deborah Wallace in my team.
We came up with a fictional character called Danvery who left corporate life disillusioned with the exploitation of the natural world and the industrialisation of farming.  Danvery developed a business making bespoke edible coffee cups from seaweed that she hoped to see in every cafe through the country in a bid to encourage sustainable practice.