DFI day five - Visibility

Last week I felt really empowered that I was able to use so much more of Google Sheets to see how a selected learner was tracking with writing mileage. One of the things I am enjoying is that the way we are progressing through the DFI has allowed me to reflect on my role as an e-learning leader just as much as a classroom practitioner. Most sessions whatever I learn or make can be used straight away within my roles back at kura.

Today's focus being on visibility, tools wise, we had a lot of time with google sites.

Notes from Dorothy's Session:

Visible is the theme today - this is from our kaupapa. Can you see it or can you not? At school and in the home. Visibility between colleagues is just as important. Passing and failing has been the way we have done thing previously. Fail dominates some whānau because we have kept most of the learning journey hidden for so long. There can also be that cyclical nature of schooling - if older whānau struggled, the mindset could be repeated in future generations without an awareness of how that is impacting success in other areas of life. The education sector needs to shoulder this. The learner who has the ability to read the teachers mind is the learner that succeeds with ease - is that fair? So, when a child has cultural capital they are likely to succeed. What about when the child doesn't have this background of success?

Visible learning is the whole learning process - planning, process, outcomes and assessment.

This point comes back to when you set up your teaching folder in google drive for the year - setting the default to visible. There is very little that needs to be private. Dorothy dares us to change our settings so that we change files to private, only when you need to. Our teaching and learning process becomes highly visible to anyone who bothers to look at this point. It is not advocacy for making private student notes and records visible, it is advocacy for a change in mindset as to how we allow others into our practice.

Removing password barriers is worth a further discussion in areas where these could inhibit cultural capital developing. What actually needs a password? 

If a child's education is wrapped in the bubble wrap of passwords and different apps and nothing clear, then when the child goes through those difficult moments and shuts down, whānau is truly shut out in an even more profound manner than when everything was on paper with a pen. Dorothy used the example of when her own son went through that stage of responding to everything with a grunt. She could still always go through his backpack and books and see what he was learning at school as a way of remaining connected to it and monitoring his own cultural capital development. what happens to our digital learners when this happens and our kaiako have put up so many barriers and passwords for safety? Whānau have no way in. 

There is a parent portal into Hapara and a student app. We are not using it. This is a big gap in my knowledge. Both tools would provide visibility potentially, but we may be bound to kamar as the parent portal is something that we push out. How much more one is effective over the other is something I don't have knowledge over. A quick google search suggests that its use is quite different to the Kamar app and to me it seems a shame that both cannot be one. 

Kamar allows a parent to keep updated with absences, notices, NCEA credits. However, Hapara is about seeing the actual work a child is doing in class. I would like to know more about what it looks like when it is working effectively in a school. 

Manaiakalani google class OnAir is another way our practice can be made visible and shared with other kaiako. Towards the end of this year, start of next year, Manaiakalani will be sending out a pānui for teachers who want to participate in being a class OnAir. There is a full te reo Māori kura class in Ōtaki is happening through this as well. This is all around sharing good practice and making good practice also visible. It is another opportunity worth promoting to our kura as both viewers and participants. 


Hapara hot tips - in Dashboard<Sharing

When you think that a doc is gone for good, you can usually find it here under sharing. deleted docs allows you to see when a child has removed a doc from their drive. you can also see docs that the child has forgotten to put into your subject folder in the first place under 'unshared'. 

Treat students filing their documents as a routine part of tidying up. just the same as tidying the desk. Lots of their stuff just ends up in the front of their drive - we shouldn't be accepting that just the same as we wouldn't be accepting them keeping a physical workstation a mess. make it routine, part of our tīkanga. 

Multi modal deep dive:

This is the ability to transfer information in a variety of ways. Kids have so many highly interactive spaces and information transfers going on. Are we competing? Are we inspiring? Do we want to compete or just engage? I think its something of a balance and again we are providing some training wheels, not unlike our use of blogger over something too cool and likely out of date in 6 months time anyway. Multi-modal should be present within all teaching sequences at our kura; for example:

Our Level one 1.1 programme is taught in a multi modal manner:

The standard as the main text:

The theme for us is Developing a kaupapa level one art, this is something we have set as our purpose to all learning for the year in senior art - develop your kaupapa before you start your practical work for any standard. The research standard here is a good way to start this and keep the purpose in the research as well. 

The complementary texts provided to the students are the word banks and vocab lists presented with these resources:

The scaffolding text is a series of slideshows that illustrate significant teaching points for the selection of 'must do' artist studies:

Our challenging text is a stepped up version of how we can analyse art works, that goes beyond the tasks set out in the instructions for the standard

Learner Selected text starts to spell out how this work is formational for the year's body of work. Students have choice, but it is curated; another example of digital training wheels. 

Additional texts for students to examine are the checklist for the standard and screen-castify videos made to help students see their assessment in parts, over lock-down in April, in order to complete the work away from kura. 

I strongly feel that if a Visual Arts teacher can curate a multimodal exemplar of a teaching and learning resource, then it is something all areas and levels can come up with, as it represents good teaching practice. there are a range of modes involved, the information is presented more than once and reliable supporting and student selected resources accompany the sequence. 

It is a way to capture as many learners as possible, without pigeonholing anyone as a specific 'type' of learner. it means our learners get the opportunity to digest learning in a variety of ways, which has to be broadening their educational experiences, is no-judgement when we present it for rewindable learning 

Te Ara Tuhura cluster data suggests that multimodal works for engagement.

CHRISSIE BUTLER from core ed, UDL. all about avoiding the idea that one size fits all. We often revert to this when time is stretched. Acknowledge from the outset that there are multiple ways of understanding and perceiving information before the learning cycle starts. Presenting it in a range of ways. We often start with learning in mind for ourselves - the default is 'me', yet that is not our classroom default setting or at least it should not be.

Some learnings I can take and apply/extend: 

• Adding audio files that read the site out is helpful. Online voice recorder and a chrome extension specifically for slides.
• With the high engagement using multi modal, conversation and discursive practice cannot be left behind. That is another balance point. 
• How can we use the Hapara parent portal effectively? Added to agenda for our elearning meeting
• Challenging how visible we are as a kura, digitally
• Promoting google class OnAir to staff as a resource
• Can each of our learning experiences be slotted into the multi-modal text database format? Should this be something of a requirement for any major teaching sequences? It certainly helps strongly address high leverage practices put forward by Woolf Fisher. Again, that is something our e-learning team need to take to the table and extrapolate out for staff as a model of practice (we have no staff meeting slots this term... that's a possibility to be changed).