DFI day four analysing student blogger data SHARE

 

   

Using Molly's blog, which was begun in 2016 when she was in year 7,  I have analysed the data on a google sheet and used the insert chart function to visualise the data. 

I also like seeing the data as a table however, as I can see trends over the year a bit more clearly. 

What concerns me is that Molly finished last year as a year 10 student with a whopping 98 posts, and this year we have 10 - her first year of NCEA.

Drilling a little bit deeper, I'm interested in the word count for an average post. 

Her most recent post - Avatar the last air bender, has 1770 words. It is her only post for August this year and at 11 days into August, it would be likely she would write possibly two more posts equalling just over 5000 words for the month. For the whole of August last year, Molly wrote 8931 words across all of her 18 blog posts. This means her writing mileage is going down over the course of the academic year. 

All of this was in response to learning some of the deeper affordances of the functionalities of google sheets, which although I found challenging (numbers and formulas that I rarely have cause to use) was extremely interesting. 

Molly is a very high achieving student with a clear voice in her writing. However, using another example of a low achieving priority learner currently in year 13, with no NCEA qualifications to his name, the last time he posted on his blog was as a year 10 student when he was clearly forced to do so for 'passion projects'.  There was very little data to input onto a form for this young person. One student here will get NCEA but will it be to the best level she can manage? Are we allowing her to slide down with the falling writing mileage? The other student is yet to achieve level one, which is exactly what we do not want. The lack of traceable writing mileage is a damning factor, and one that needs to be put up as an example of what we don't want to happen from this point onwards anymore. 

Today's focus was on Share - Tohatoha. 

Notes written while we listened, and clarified during presentations:

The purpose of blogs is NOT to connect with whānau first and foremost, it is actually to teach our kids to be cyber-smart first and foremost.

I really enjoyed Dorothy's session this morning as to have a case put forward as to why we stick with using a somewhat clunky "blogger" as opposed to using something with bells and whistles as the culmination of the learning process made a lot of sense and it was one of those good pragmatic arguments that doesn't have many holes to pick an argument from; When your child learns to drive, do you buy them a Ferrari to learn on? Or do you buy them a basic model car that is safe? We are teaching our rangatahi how to navigate an online world appropriately, professionally, and with maturity. Blogger provides the functional resemblance to our learners' online world - but its not tik-tok, facebook etc... there is a reason we don't shift from this to a trendy space, this does what we need. We are able to provision it and look after our learners safely. We cannot do that with other platforms particularly for primary age kids. Single sign in is functional and easy, our three-check system for blog comments also contributes to safety. Google also has the largest audience, so that is why we use it in order to create that audience in amongst the three check system. It has therefore become the tool to support our cyber-smart curriculum, not just a thing we do every now and then. Buy your hot car later on.  We can build an authentic audience globally as we wish to, and keep our rangatahi safe online. Their voice can be authentic and educative. Learning safe and sensible manners/tīkanga online is something we should be valuing when we know how poor an environment online forums and communities can be. 

Lockdown created a sharing explosion. Human instinct is to share. Even though there are personality types who don't, for most of us it is an instinctual process. All the Manaiakalani pedagogy has done, is tap into the psychology of this and now explore the digital component that previously wasn't there. The speed and amplification that digital has brought to us means we share in real time. Zoe Evans blog being shared by the principal on facebook is the digital equivalent of getting a sticker on your book from the principal. It's now done with speed and amplified through our kura social media.

Sharing with purpose; it has to be a real purpose, not something made up - the example of an English teacher making a class write letters to the editor and it's fake is not this. REAL sharing would be to write real letters to the editor. The purpose needs to be real, the audience needs to be real. Create an authentic audience, people who choose to listen to you. Blogs have enormous data as demonstrated above. Google analytics can be added to your site so you can examine your real audience. In examining it, you can build it and again develop and refine that purpose to the sharing aspect of LCS.

Connected learners share - four levels of sharing - face to face, face to group, larger groups - digital, self to world (digital).

Share is a whole understanding that share is the finishing point - lots of kids don't finish what they start, yet they do gain skills along the way. This lets that learning process down. Achievement, accomplishment is not just linear, but cyclical. The starting place for new learning is sharing.

Graphics from Dorothy Burt, Manaiakalani 2020

My thoughts afterwards:

I have had a few days to sit on this and reflect in my own space as an educator about what we covered on Tuesday. 

Yes, we share to finish learning, but it starts another learning moment in time. Also, how are we starting from the top down and modelling LCS so it is not just an infographic stencilled onto our wall at school? Sharing the outcomes of our meetings has become lost in recent times - I said this as my feedback from the week before within the DFI and now I feel like it is something that has become a gap in our processes. 

Sharing is not always going to be a blog post. It is always going to be necessary at HHS now that we are here. From this, what I am endeavouring to do as an e-learning leader is to provide feedback from our weekly e-learning meetings at Friday morning staff briefing. It is time also, to ask our kura to consider why we no longer 'bother' with minutes for our after-school meetings, as if this is a quaint practice fallen out of fashion.  We cannot model LCS if we are unwilling to record our own learning and provide rewindable opportunities to ourselves. 

Two further problems have arisen from being on this DFI and stepping back up on the balcony to be aware of the ballroom below:

1) The random nature of setting relief with sometimes a day reliever and sometimes an under-code staff member and then again sometimes our part time art teacher means how one can share the work needs to be pretty tight. 

2) The unpredictable nature of a TA working should to shoulder with a high needs child who has digital affordances when the TA does not. 

This has led to me putting a discussion document together to explore how we could provide better affordances to our paraprofessional and day relief staff at HHS. The document hasn't been shared past the e-learning leaders as of yet, until I am clear about who and how this could affect, but the main stumbling block is again, funding and access to devices, except this time it is devices for staff that are at issue. 

Both scenarios currently have that missing step in common; how do we SHARE what we are doing beyond our own queendoms? A relief teacher who can access relief work on a pre-prepared relief teacher account at HHS and be assigned. A chromebook for their time relieving at the school, and a TA who has their own device, and is participating online with their high needs students are both amplified examples of digital experiences. 

The time and space to complete the DFI allows me the 'creative dreamtime' (Webb, M. 1995) most creative people require to explore and cement a pathway to something new. Ultimately from this, I would like to see all of our TA's able to sit remotely as well as shoulder to shoulder with their student of need to work, with a chromebook that is leased for the school not unlike our teacher laptops, rather than this system where a TA is seen as a less important staff member.  I would like to see Uru Mānuka with a pool of digitally trained relieving teachers who could be deployed across our cluster between schools even as necessary. Each one with access to a google calendar of relief notes that the absent teacher adds, ensuring their site is hyperlinked and any digital resources and how-to's that might be necessary are there too. Also, I would like to see our SLT noting the importance of modelling LCS, by ensuring meetings don't happen without 'minutes'/rewindable learning.  It is practicable at this point in our journey that all meetings are in fact openly and obviously structured around LCS, and that within a meeting, knowing that this does not have to be fully linear to work. 

Finally, addressing writing mileage with staff - Molly's example and the young person I wont be naming here as a comparison, are examples I can raise awareness of. Writing mileage as a traceable feature using our blogs is effective. It can not only provide data for where a child is at, it can potentially provide data of where they will end up in our qualification system as well. I would like to do a little more of this analysing, and build up my theories and ideas for next steps based upon this.