So today I'm learning about FlipGrid online. I've been wanting to learn about this amazing tool for months now and couldn't manage to find the time to read about how to use it, despite the fact that I'd signed up for it all. Amazingly, up popped up this incredible webinar in my email. I've been watching this in my free lunch/intervals and am so enjoying the concept - not just a webinar about how to use FlipGrid, but a step by step talking through why we should look at the DOK (Depth of Knowledge) being utilized in effective digital tech.
Holly Clark features here and she's one of my favourites.
Check it out for more info:
FlipGrid webinar here
Takeaways for me included:
Link to Jo Bowler's Mathematical Mindsets book - I have a great Jo Bowler book somewhere - where have I put it? I must get it out again.
Also using Chatterpix and iMovie with FlipGrid to share math concepts or professional learning
Holly Clark talked about how:
"Effective technology integrations happens when we make student thinking visible".
She also talks about how important Students Voice and the Sharing of Student Work is. I'm excited about where this could lead.
I'd like to create a FlipGrid for illustrating a process of the students to go through. Looking forward to this one!
Friday 27 October 2017
Tuesday 24 October 2017
Target Group Review - Inquiry Learning Process
At the beginning of the year I was really looking forward to making a difference for our priority learners... but I have to admit, I was quite challenged by how I was going to make this work from a workflow capacity, with all the paperwork expectations accompanying priority learners.
I wanted to try to follow an inquiry process that was more user-friendly than the haphazard approach I'd used in the past.
While I like the concept of the TKI model we use here:
(http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/var/tki-nzc/storage/images/media/images/tu-images/teaching-as-inquiry2/34163-1-eng-NZ/Teaching-as-inquiry_reference.png)
I feel like it needs to be more simplistic.
What's one thing I'm going to change?
How am I going to change it?
How am I going to make sure it happens?
How will I measure change / progress / achievement?
Did it work? In what way? How do you know? Would you do it again?
How does our Target Group work stack up against this.... up next.
I wanted to try to follow an inquiry process that was more user-friendly than the haphazard approach I'd used in the past.
While I like the concept of the TKI model we use here:
I feel like it needs to be more simplistic.
What's one thing I'm going to change?
How am I going to change it?
How am I going to make sure it happens?
How will I measure change / progress / achievement?
Did it work? In what way? How do you know? Would you do it again?
How does our Target Group work stack up against this.... up next.
Sunday 22 October 2017
Deliberate Acts of Teaching Continued - Collaborative Spaces
Leading on from the past post, my colleague and I got together, feeling like we might be more effective as a team in looking at our target group kids collegially. This also made sense as we all need to know who our target group kids are and what we're doing with them, as they will rotate amongst us this term. We felt concern around how we could support the kids as base group teachers when time is precious and it's tricky trying to fit all our learning in, even before we attempt to find 'additional' time to work with these targeted learners.
It was great to work smarter by being collegial. We came up with a series of lessons we could implement with the kids as well as use across our Hub. We wanted to keep the planning quite simple and ensure that we had all our resources ready to do and we could simply sit down with the kids every day and get some learning done with them. Inquiry time is often quite useful for this as our learners are working towards a project that requires a lot of research. In term three, they were creating art and inquiring into the reasons for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as well as looking at Innovations such as the Great Ocean CleanUp to see what positive impacts individuals and projects have also had. This was great timing for us to be able to work with these priority learners. Scheduling the time with these students was what really made the difference as we were finding that otherwise they weren't getting any extra teaching time.
The planning we did included a planning and reflection sheet for the kids, to scaffold them to see how they were being positively impacted by the extra time too and to help us to use their student voice in future planning.
We were also feeling overwhelmed by the need to ensure we were utilising our Learning Pathways, OTJ Sheets, Achievement Objectives and the areas that covered both PR1ME and our learner pathways. Mrs Barclay had also helped us to identify areas the students needed support on and we were keen to ensure everything was being covered without the need for everything to be done multiple times. It was heartening to see there was considerable overlap and we were covering a lot more than we'd thought. Planning in this way from the beginning helped us to see how the pathways and OTJ sheets aligned and we felt secure in the knowledge that we were meeting our targets.
It was great to work smarter by being collegial. We came up with a series of lessons we could implement with the kids as well as use across our Hub. We wanted to keep the planning quite simple and ensure that we had all our resources ready to do and we could simply sit down with the kids every day and get some learning done with them. Inquiry time is often quite useful for this as our learners are working towards a project that requires a lot of research. In term three, they were creating art and inquiring into the reasons for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as well as looking at Innovations such as the Great Ocean CleanUp to see what positive impacts individuals and projects have also had. This was great timing for us to be able to work with these priority learners. Scheduling the time with these students was what really made the difference as we were finding that otherwise they weren't getting any extra teaching time.
The planning we did included a planning and reflection sheet for the kids, to scaffold them to see how they were being positively impacted by the extra time too and to help us to use their student voice in future planning.
We were also feeling overwhelmed by the need to ensure we were utilising our Learning Pathways, OTJ Sheets, Achievement Objectives and the areas that covered both PR1ME and our learner pathways. Mrs Barclay had also helped us to identify areas the students needed support on and we were keen to ensure everything was being covered without the need for everything to be done multiple times. It was heartening to see there was considerable overlap and we were covering a lot more than we'd thought. Planning in this way from the beginning helped us to see how the pathways and OTJ sheets aligned and we felt secure in the knowledge that we were meeting our targets.
It will be really interesting to see at the end of the year if we feel this has had an impact on the learners, as it certainly felt like it made sense during the planning phase.
Collaboration Year Review
Wow it's been a big year and a great year professionally. I've thoroughly enjoyed the collaborative nature of teaching, both in terms of organisation and collegiality as well as the wonderful impacts on our great tamariki.
Our team has a positive vibe and we work well together - there have been no disputes and communication seems to happen naturally.
Due to building requirements, we have moved classrooms often and we end up in rooms that require more management to move between. It's been a challenge to our team collaboration and I've been proud of how flexible we've been throughout the process. It is my hope that next year will be more settled, though with continuing building work, this may not be the case. The end of 2018 should see us in our new modern learning environments and having a mutual space will be wonderful. Having our co-joined rooms this year (with holes in the wall through to each other's classrooms) has been really helpful for the transition for both us teachers as well as the kids.
Working together on programmes for the kids has been awesome! I hadn't realised how effective this collaboration could make us. In particular, working on our EOTC planning together was amazing. Being able to plan, undertaken and reflect on the whole thing was amazing. I really enjoyed the opportunities that we presented the students with and many of them were surprised with what they enjoyed. My base group were well planned for The Mind Lab and created amazing animations around protecting and preserving Tangaroa. Later, their visit to the museum meant they were excited to learn about how the Taruheru River has changed as a result of human impact... and they got to learn about where the first settler homes were. This was really interesting for them the following week, when they were in the Lysnar House room overlooking the river, making their clay pots, and realised that this was the house they'd seen in the old-school movie the week before.
Animation Movies about Protecting Tangaroa
This EOTC time was also lovely as us teachers could collaborate on the walk down there and support each other, so many of our challenging learners could still attend.
Looking ahead:
Next year, without all the moving around, it is my hope that our collaboration will improve even more. I've been impressed with what LH1 are doing with their 'Ignition Station'. My son uses this at home and it's an easy way to access all his learning in one place. He always knows what he should be doing next and has access to all the design briefs from the work they're doing. It's a phenomenal way to enhance learning and his self-management has skyrocketed as a result of this. I've been playing around with a Landing Page of our own and I'm really excited by its potential and am looking forward to seeing how we can grow and adapt this across 2018.
Learning Hub 5 Landing Page
Our team has a positive vibe and we work well together - there have been no disputes and communication seems to happen naturally.
Due to building requirements, we have moved classrooms often and we end up in rooms that require more management to move between. It's been a challenge to our team collaboration and I've been proud of how flexible we've been throughout the process. It is my hope that next year will be more settled, though with continuing building work, this may not be the case. The end of 2018 should see us in our new modern learning environments and having a mutual space will be wonderful. Having our co-joined rooms this year (with holes in the wall through to each other's classrooms) has been really helpful for the transition for both us teachers as well as the kids.
Working together on programmes for the kids has been awesome! I hadn't realised how effective this collaboration could make us. In particular, working on our EOTC planning together was amazing. Being able to plan, undertaken and reflect on the whole thing was amazing. I really enjoyed the opportunities that we presented the students with and many of them were surprised with what they enjoyed. My base group were well planned for The Mind Lab and created amazing animations around protecting and preserving Tangaroa. Later, their visit to the museum meant they were excited to learn about how the Taruheru River has changed as a result of human impact... and they got to learn about where the first settler homes were. This was really interesting for them the following week, when they were in the Lysnar House room overlooking the river, making their clay pots, and realised that this was the house they'd seen in the old-school movie the week before.
Animation Movies about Protecting Tangaroa
This EOTC time was also lovely as us teachers could collaborate on the walk down there and support each other, so many of our challenging learners could still attend.
Looking ahead:
Next year, without all the moving around, it is my hope that our collaboration will improve even more. I've been impressed with what LH1 are doing with their 'Ignition Station'. My son uses this at home and it's an easy way to access all his learning in one place. He always knows what he should be doing next and has access to all the design briefs from the work they're doing. It's a phenomenal way to enhance learning and his self-management has skyrocketed as a result of this. I've been playing around with a Landing Page of our own and I'm really excited by its potential and am looking forward to seeing how we can grow and adapt this across 2018.
Learning Hub 5 Landing Page
Tuesday 30 May 2017
Deliberate Acts of Teaching
It's been great to get some clarity. Deliberate acts of teaching (or D.A.T.S as they are sometimes called), are a party of teaching and learning that have long been a requirement, but actually narrowing these down to definable strategies we are able to discuss and inquire into has been refreshing, to say the least.
Looking into our Gisborne Intermediate School Curriculum, after we explored the components of Deliberate Acts of teaching during a Team Meeting, I decided to try to make them really explicit in my planning for my Target Writing Group students. I began with a document I could use when planning for the kids and decided it would be great to be able to add these documents to the target group modeling books / learning scrapbooks and make notes about evidence throughout my inquiry into the impact it could have.
Find this document here
Following this, I was interested in learning more about the strategies and located a copy of Clarity in the Classroom, which our DP kindly leant to me.
I copied the section on the DAT strategies and decided to add notes to enhance my understanding of them. What I was really looking for were examples and language that I could employ with our kids.
In the process, our DP also mentioned that most of the information around DAT's had come from Effective Literacy Practice, which I already have and know well. Not well enough, apparently, as this great text is full of information around DAT's, which is part of what I'll unpack next.
I enjoy the learning.
Now to put it into Action.
Looking into our Gisborne Intermediate School Curriculum, after we explored the components of Deliberate Acts of teaching during a Team Meeting, I decided to try to make them really explicit in my planning for my Target Writing Group students. I began with a document I could use when planning for the kids and decided it would be great to be able to add these documents to the target group modeling books / learning scrapbooks and make notes about evidence throughout my inquiry into the impact it could have.
Find this document here
Following this, I was interested in learning more about the strategies and located a copy of Clarity in the Classroom, which our DP kindly leant to me.
I copied the section on the DAT strategies and decided to add notes to enhance my understanding of them. What I was really looking for were examples and language that I could employ with our kids.
In the process, our DP also mentioned that most of the information around DAT's had come from Effective Literacy Practice, which I already have and know well. Not well enough, apparently, as this great text is full of information around DAT's, which is part of what I'll unpack next.
I enjoy the learning.
Now to put it into Action.
Sunday 28 May 2017
Learning in the Fast Lane
I love this book!
I'm so enjoying going back over it! Rae Black introduced it to us in Waimata in 2016 when she was studying ALL (Literacy) and it was great to have it brought to our attention again this year.
I particularly love the section about Success Starters and am always reminded to go back to that when I feel my reading programme has lost its spark. It's so easy to get hung up on getting the work done, that it's easy to leave off this great ignition in the beginning and really not fire the lesson up.
This time when I went back to the reading, it was the TIP Chart that resonated with me. I heard Carrie mentioning a TIP chart when working with her Enrichment kids the other day and so when I read about it again, my interested was piqued.
I was thinking about how great a TIP (Term, Information, Picture) Chart would be for the frogs reading unit I'm going to run with a group of my boys who aren't that fond of reading. There will be a lot of terms within our frog readings (amphibian, chorus, cold-blooded, habitat, predator) that will require them to develop an understanding and this will be a great tool to help with this.
Further to this, as I kept reading, I realised that some of the Success Starters would be particularly useful in this context as well. I'm excited to see how they work for us this week, now that we've finished our speech planning and can focus in more strongly on our reading programme this week.
I'm so enjoying going back over it! Rae Black introduced it to us in Waimata in 2016 when she was studying ALL (Literacy) and it was great to have it brought to our attention again this year.
I particularly love the section about Success Starters and am always reminded to go back to that when I feel my reading programme has lost its spark. It's so easy to get hung up on getting the work done, that it's easy to leave off this great ignition in the beginning and really not fire the lesson up.
This time when I went back to the reading, it was the TIP Chart that resonated with me. I heard Carrie mentioning a TIP chart when working with her Enrichment kids the other day and so when I read about it again, my interested was piqued.
I was thinking about how great a TIP (Term, Information, Picture) Chart would be for the frogs reading unit I'm going to run with a group of my boys who aren't that fond of reading. There will be a lot of terms within our frog readings (amphibian, chorus, cold-blooded, habitat, predator) that will require them to develop an understanding and this will be a great tool to help with this.
Further to this, as I kept reading, I realised that some of the Success Starters would be particularly useful in this context as well. I'm excited to see how they work for us this week, now that we've finished our speech planning and can focus in more strongly on our reading programme this week.
Tuesday 28 March 2017
2017
Wow it's hard to believe that 2017 has come around already!
Things to recap at this point:
Collaborative learning, New School Organisation, Deliberate Acts of Teaching, Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development.
Collaborative Learning:
This has been awesome! I'm so enjoying working with other people; bouncing ideas off each other, sharing successes and challenges, and getting to know the kids together. I love that we're going about this process slowly, getting to know each other and undertake collaboration within curriculum areas one at a time. At the moment we're more cooperating than collaborating for maths, but I think we'll evolve as time goes on. This will present a bit of a challenge in maths around Student Learning Conferences... so we'll need to think about that. Best practice would suggest that we should all be seeing the kids all of the time, so it will be interesting to try to work out out to do that.
New School Organisation
Glen and Herman and I had a productive and exciting meeting today, deciding on what our direction could be next for e-Learning. My focus will be on how to integrate e-Learning with our other curriculum areas. Now that our Learning Pathways etc are all up and running, it's going to be an exciting thing to work through. I've started already and it would be amazing to design some samples that students could work their way through and track their own progress. I'm also looking forward to designing an independent programme for our extension writers that would be motivating and personalized.
Deliberate Acts of Teaching
It was great to have this really spelled out in our Team Meeting today. Many of these things we do already, but it was great to be able to talk through them, reading and sharing back on a section each. I really enjoyed our Team Meeting Time being more about professional learning and less about the admin stuff which I could read myself.
Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development
This has been quite fun. I'm trying to design some quite simple formative assessments that cover many of the aspects that our writers struggle with often and use this to support writing and maths. Now that I have a clearer direction around our e-learning roles, I'm wanting to integrate that too. It will be really cool to see how it comes together. I'm hoping that it can be run quite simply and that I can find ways of putting HyperDocs together so that these can stem from our Learning Pathways. This will help us to personalise the kids' learning.
It's been a busy term so far, but with camp and assessments done, it's really awesome now to begin to get down to some targeted needs-based group teaching. The kids are much more settled and I'm really enjoying my time with them.
Things to recap at this point:
Collaborative learning, New School Organisation, Deliberate Acts of Teaching, Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development.
Collaborative Learning:
This has been awesome! I'm so enjoying working with other people; bouncing ideas off each other, sharing successes and challenges, and getting to know the kids together. I love that we're going about this process slowly, getting to know each other and undertake collaboration within curriculum areas one at a time. At the moment we're more cooperating than collaborating for maths, but I think we'll evolve as time goes on. This will present a bit of a challenge in maths around Student Learning Conferences... so we'll need to think about that. Best practice would suggest that we should all be seeing the kids all of the time, so it will be interesting to try to work out out to do that.
New School Organisation
Glen and Herman and I had a productive and exciting meeting today, deciding on what our direction could be next for e-Learning. My focus will be on how to integrate e-Learning with our other curriculum areas. Now that our Learning Pathways etc are all up and running, it's going to be an exciting thing to work through. I've started already and it would be amazing to design some samples that students could work their way through and track their own progress. I'm also looking forward to designing an independent programme for our extension writers that would be motivating and personalized.
Deliberate Acts of Teaching
It was great to have this really spelled out in our Team Meeting today. Many of these things we do already, but it was great to be able to talk through them, reading and sharing back on a section each. I really enjoyed our Team Meeting Time being more about professional learning and less about the admin stuff which I could read myself.
The link to the TKI site where the Deliberate Acts of Teaching are covered is here
Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development
This has been quite fun. I'm trying to design some quite simple formative assessments that cover many of the aspects that our writers struggle with often and use this to support writing and maths. Now that I have a clearer direction around our e-learning roles, I'm wanting to integrate that too. It will be really cool to see how it comes together. I'm hoping that it can be run quite simply and that I can find ways of putting HyperDocs together so that these can stem from our Learning Pathways. This will help us to personalise the kids' learning.
It's been a busy term so far, but with camp and assessments done, it's really awesome now to begin to get down to some targeted needs-based group teaching. The kids are much more settled and I'm really enjoying my time with them.
Monday 27 March 2017
Inquiry Learning: Reading and Math Successes
Wow what awesome learning we've been engaging in lately!
Reading:
The Book Whisperer is teaching me about how important it is that our kids love reading. That we build that enthusiasm for reading and that a huge part of building that enthusiasm has to do with NOT... KILLING... THE ..... PASSION. We do that by NOT going overboard on the written work kids have to complete after they've read a great story. This lead me to an article on:
5 Ways to enhance reading by Reading Rockets and one of them was about recording what kids are reading on documents and adding their page number.
Trying some strategies - reading log record
This was amazing! We read and I set the kids the challenge of reading 100,000 pages before the end of the year. And when our silent reading started, it was so quiet! So quiet! The kids were focused and the time passed so quickly! At the end, we shared page numbers and I told the kids a bit about the book I was reading and we started talking about what a gift that we give others when we 'sell' a book to them. I wished in hindsight that I'd recorded the conversation because it was so powerful. We talked about how brave we are when we read and how sometimes when we don't, we are scared. We're scared of not being able to read. We're scared of not understanding. We're scared we'll find another book we don't love. We're scared of how we'll look.
And the kids who shared....? They were all kids who have either been reading texts far beneath them or they have been kids who didn't love reading. And they were all so excited about finding a text they loved. And they shared how they don't really like reading but now much they were surprised by the enjoyment of what they were reading! And so we coloured their names gold..... because it was gold that they'd shared, and gold that they'd persevered and been brave enough to be vulnerable and share back that they have been someone who doesn't love reading.
Success Starters is something else I've been learning about.
On page 49 of the book "Learning in the Fast Lane" it says:
"Success starters vary lesson by lesson. As compelling and riveting as possible, these activities spark authentic involvement rather than compliance."
I love this idea. This is where we go wrong. School has often been about compliance. I know one of the keys to encouraging reading in our classrooms is taking the compliance out of it and increasing the relevance and authenticity of it.
Going back to the text, there are a number of Success Starters including role playing, surveys, predictions, questioning, question cards, brainstorm (splash-sort-label),
Math:
Games - Fractions, Decimals, Percentages Relay
Individual attention - morning tea times with MathsGirl
Innovative Learning Environments:
Reading:
The Book Whisperer is teaching me about how important it is that our kids love reading. That we build that enthusiasm for reading and that a huge part of building that enthusiasm has to do with NOT... KILLING... THE ..... PASSION. We do that by NOT going overboard on the written work kids have to complete after they've read a great story. This lead me to an article on:
5 Ways to enhance reading by Reading Rockets and one of them was about recording what kids are reading on documents and adding their page number.
Trying some strategies - reading log record
This was amazing! We read and I set the kids the challenge of reading 100,000 pages before the end of the year. And when our silent reading started, it was so quiet! So quiet! The kids were focused and the time passed so quickly! At the end, we shared page numbers and I told the kids a bit about the book I was reading and we started talking about what a gift that we give others when we 'sell' a book to them. I wished in hindsight that I'd recorded the conversation because it was so powerful. We talked about how brave we are when we read and how sometimes when we don't, we are scared. We're scared of not being able to read. We're scared of not understanding. We're scared we'll find another book we don't love. We're scared of how we'll look.
And the kids who shared....? They were all kids who have either been reading texts far beneath them or they have been kids who didn't love reading. And they were all so excited about finding a text they loved. And they shared how they don't really like reading but now much they were surprised by the enjoyment of what they were reading! And so we coloured their names gold..... because it was gold that they'd shared, and gold that they'd persevered and been brave enough to be vulnerable and share back that they have been someone who doesn't love reading.
Success Starters is something else I've been learning about.
On page 49 of the book "Learning in the Fast Lane" it says:
"Success starters vary lesson by lesson. As compelling and riveting as possible, these activities spark authentic involvement rather than compliance."
I love this idea. This is where we go wrong. School has often been about compliance. I know one of the keys to encouraging reading in our classrooms is taking the compliance out of it and increasing the relevance and authenticity of it.
Going back to the text, there are a number of Success Starters including role playing, surveys, predictions, questioning, question cards, brainstorm (splash-sort-label),
Math:
Games - Fractions, Decimals, Percentages Relay
Individual attention - morning tea times with MathsGirl
Innovative Learning Environments:
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