DFI 9 Ubiquitous as pedagogy/kaupapa

Ubiquitous means 'able to learn anywhere, any time at any pace'. We place the learner at the centre of the learning when we not just allow, but plan for and act upon ubiquitous learning; learning doesn't belong to the school nor to the teacher, it is a viral context we are positioned in. What is not looking like ubiquitous learning in our kura currently? And why?

Lock down provided us a learning curve for how ubiquitous we really are. We had no lead in educationally, to covid-19 level four - the 72 hours we did get from level two to four would not be providing an opportunity to force one to happen with our rangatahi. We sat very nervously as a staff when the announcement was made, in our learning commons as it enabled us to spread out, listening to directives made by our senior leadership team, knowing full well they were having to invent the process as we went. Google Meet had already been allowed onto our systems by Harry our fusion technician that day in a pre-emptive move for us, as was google chat. Google chat was then discussed and disabled temporarily while we decided what our next practical step would be. All staff were initially instructed to have NO google meets with classes until we had ascertained a process to support our rangatahi and kaiako well-being. 'Unsure' doesn't really cover how we all felt going forwards. 

What am I proud of?

Having worked hard on my google site not only for my rangatahi learners but also for other kaiako to have as an example meant that I knew I had a structured and manageable way of delivering content. I was also in a fortunate position of knowing that my department staff were in fact using it as a model prior to this, so we had an aligned approach. 

What do I regret?

Before we went into lockdown, our rangatahi using their email with purpose and process was not there. We made these presumptions that our young people knew how to manage email and possibly even Google calendar, when in actual fact, some had never even opened them. Our/my first regret is right here. Students just didn't use email, yet a lot of teaching went there instead of on teacher sites with a directive to use these alone to access work. Students were up to 25+ unopened emails in some cases during this time from staff.

My second regret lies in what I could have done to affect how Google Meets played out; A plan at our kura was established for the first week of term two - following two strange weeks of learning from home with countless emails and shifted school holidays) to reconnect with rangatahi from a pastoral level first. All learning advisors and form teachers would contact each whānau one by one and check-in using google meet, getting us all used to this new technology. No formal teaching was meant to occur while this happened. Except it did, and it undermined that effort we were making to put well-being and front end curriculum first. Form teachers and learning advisors were not yet through google meeting with whānau, but class meets were being scheduled for curriculum - through emails generated by google calendar that many of our students did not regard as the norm. I did not make the decision to go with well-being first (though I adamantly agree it should have been top priority) and I didn't hold a position of authority over anyone who pursued this goal. It is a thing that happened that I couldn't control, but yet it impacted my charges - year 12 as a pastoral dean and later on, my curriculum area, as one that did not push the learning out in the first week, instead leaving the time until pastoral and well-being was sorted, as I saw it. Students were up to 40+ emails unopened in some cases by now. Keeping in mind MOE delivered chrome-books had not arrived in most cases. Those waiting on modems got them but often didn't have them connected up. My regret and frustration and brewing resentment was with the growth in inequity the scenario generated and the failure of others to see this occurring, rather there was that blindspot in empathy:

It appeared that telling staff NOT to do this was not effective, as it became a strange little competition to have the most engagement, without acknowledging the growing divide it was creating - it was like this fear of not being a good enough online teacher took over and one was not able to stand up on the balcony and observe the ball because one was too busy dancing in the competition. Once Google Meets for curriculum were all 'good to go', the ideal set out was for no more than one per week per class. Unfortunately, this also generated the competition again and no amount of persistence inhibited the several times a week in some areas that these were held.  It became overwhelming as a Dean trying to hold things together for the sake of whānau who wanted their child learning from home, teachers who wanted the engagement and young people who were just overwhelmed and over it all. I finished lockdown never ever wanting to go back into level three again. The empathy blindspot was perpetuated by the lack of physical nearnesss, as even though you can see someone in a google meet, you aren't truly connecting to their wairua through google meet. I defy anyone to prove me wrong on this; when you are physically present with another human, you are reacting to their wairua, you are adjusting your 'stance' somewhat to theirs and the relationship develops one way or another based upon this. That is not a possibility in a Zoom or Google Meet. You will see a controlled view of the other and a lot can be disguised or misinterpreted through the technology. Physical proximity is always going to be required, no matter how online we are. How often is a text or email or post on social media misinterpreted because of how each of us reads tone in written communication, rather than hears it from its author? 

What have I taken forward into the new era of schooling?

Pastorally, my communication to whānau is much more online following this. I was creating a video each week of lock down and sending it to my year 12's as a way of reassuring them that this would all end...soon... and ways to get through stuff. I wanted to carry the videos into level two and have one arrive in their inbox each Monday, but it has not been a thing I have managed just yet. I have however, made a weekly slide show with a small focus each week, which leading into our leadership-based next steps camp meant that we had rewindable content that matched up with the themes being imparted at this camp for year 12's. It was like a beautiful collision of pedagogy. 

I am not sure us Cantabrians take the threat of level three as seriously as we should; the idea that we would practice Google Meets just in case had not occurred to me and I doubt it had to many of my colleagues, unless of course they are holding back from bringing it up with the elearning leaders? On reflection it is not a silly idea to be investigating. Particularly in light of establishing and practising a tīkanga effectively before we need to rely on it. By having norms, rather than urgent need, we could stabilise the sense of competition that took over in a few areas if this were to happen again. A norm is something we have done before and are happy to practise, rather than a new directive that had to be made to get us going and feels foreign, because as Aunty Cindy says "you can say something 100 times, there will still be one person who never heard it". If it's the norm, that issue is removed. 

Questions this raises further for me:

What is good practice around ubiquitous learning in our kura currently? 

What is an interesting aspect of all of this so far?

What are our next steps around this?

At this point, I could provide answers to these questions but I think what I want to pursue is a solid framework around framing the elements of the kaupapa and pedagogy that exist already, with ways of stepping this forward further in the future. 

One of my biggest learnings through the DFI was about presumptions; just as we presumed our rangatahi understood email (when they didn't always and were just stabbing in the dark, or plain ignoring it), we presume the professionals we see interacting with a device are 'all over it' but there will be plenty of little things they don't know because they don't use. Is it because we are teachers that we presume we know everything? How cool was it for me to sit through a session about google docs, thinking, 'yeah I got this, what can I actually learn from this' and then a whole bunch of little things come up that improve how I function with it and what I do with a google doc?! Just because you know how to eat, doesn't mean you know how to cook. As those young people say 'mic drop' moment (the cringe this statement will illicit is absolutely intended). The DFI continued week after week in this manner - a lot of things came up that made me rethink ideas and challenged my stance and ultimately have effected not just workflow but pedagogy going forwards. A fully rewarding, worthwhile  experience. 

DFI Eight empowerment, computational thinking, coding and DDDO

From last week:

What has worked: I use Google Keep like, ALL the time now instead of a paper diary (RIP, I do not think I'm going to use you again dear old paper diary). I'm fully seeing why we should jump on the workspace bandwagon for the purposes of differentiation. I would like to see us use a call back day at the end of the year to re-introduce the amazing affordances of this product, but as Terry tells me, the whole staff would likely hate me for that gem of an idea (it was his idea anyway). I'm also extremely proud of how I can see the advantages and affordances of Toby Mini and am applying them in my daily teaching life. Super cool. 

What I need help with: Just that I can see that Explain Everything would be cool, but I cannot work it out to fit what we do just yet. Possibly this is indicative of too many things in my head. I may just need time. Also, I'm finding more and more that kura should pay for a teacher's cell phone. It is a bit mental how often we rely on these for just about everything, yet there is no compensatory mechanism. Quite possibly a tablet device as well should be paid for. It would certainly make doing our jobs as digitally fluent teachers much easier.

Opportunities I can see for myself and/or kura: differentiation meaningfully and a way of directing how our HoD's establish that as our normal; it is all very possible.

Dorothy's session today focussed on "empowered" as a part of the kaupapa of Manaiakalani. 

I remember Pat Sneddon coming to Hornby, presenting to us at Templeton Primary in either 2014 or 2015 and pretty much this exact quote coming out of his mouth. It may have been the first time someone presented me with te Tiriti in such a way as I saw that we could use it, almost weaponise it for a cause within education. 

Empowerment as a kaupapa is for both teachers and learners. A lot of educators prefer to use the word agency over empowered - sounds fancy, but is it actually what we want? Agency is a bit hopeless due to how lower decile communities - the association to the concept of social agencies who don't always help these communities has a negative connotation. Rather than continuously explaining the word, the choice was made to change it to empowered as that was the main concept that was used to explain it beyond the leaders informing and developing the pedagogy. 

This is not "just a tool"; it is transformative and therefore empowering. This concept is referred to in our curriculum, which was written prior to digital affordances being common to our classrooms. "Just a tool" detracts from empowerment. 

Matt Goodwin's blog link - which he wrote in reflection from lockdown was referenced in the speaker notes of Dorothy's presentation; http://pesgoodwingold.blogspot.com/2020/05/distance-learning-engagement.html

    "...Without having the students seated in front of me, how could I entice them to 'come to school'? 
    > Certainly a percentage of my learners had whanau who engaged with the online learning, and    'assisted the engagement' (in fact this was really cool to see our whanau making these connections to   school, and is a great conversation starter for what we could do to keep this going).
    > But there was a whole other percentage who managed themselves. They got themselves up in     the morning, got out their chromebooks and engaged with the learning and online meets that I provided.... "

During lockdown Matt felt that empowerment moved to a new level with their education. If they weren't into it, they didn't do it. They used their voice, choice and ownership of their learning. Are we un-institutionalising them? Yes, but probably to the detriment of their NCEA results, which is their formal measure, which maybe needs to be changed to reflect all of this. Our community standards still must be challenged to reflect that NCEA is NOT a measure of a safe, healthy, contributing and functioning member of society. Any 'schooling' should be about raising these, not moulding a child to be just like their teacher (great man theories) nor about creating specialist 'understanders' of a few skills in a range of areas, rather they need to be independent self motivated life long learners. NCEA is not fit for this purpose any longer as I see it and I find my frustration levels are rising in this area professionally.  

Some whānau in Tāmaki are earning $19.000 a year and still functioning with very good budgeting. When you are earning $19,000 per year and raising a family, yes you might be happy, but the lack of money does disempower you - no internet and no device to access it fluently would be indicative of this. Online shopping, bill paying, access to credit (laybuy, afterpay, etc), communication with those scared to be around agencies, let a long the information that one could use in managing the relationships with these agencies effectively and positively, all comes from that one aspect itself. Yet, there is the 'skin in the game' the parents are ensuring their is device ownership with. Not everyone is on that $19,000 bracket; we often refer to as the 'working poor', where there just isn't quite enough to go around, work is there but is not stable and the inequities that exist in every tier of our social constructs affect how these whānau can function and provide for their children. The 'skin' is still in the game at Tāmaki. It begs the question about our rangatahi and whānau. Are they putting their skin in the game? Our recent PB4L data suggests that whānau engagement is still our weakest area. It's the egg we struggle to crack. Everything else in PB4L's latest Tiered Fidelity something or rather, rated our practice as quite well embedded except for that. 

When our children are entering school with the mean performance of a three year old, they are consistently going to be playing catch-up. Starship hospital provide Auckland with a research measure to know this information. It is not just academic it is physical, emotional and spiritual - I think it is much like the B4 school check our little ones go through in Canterbury which I remember as a mum with a visit to the local nurses clinic - checking what skills our child had and how many letters they knew, as well as if they recognised emotional cues, amongst other things.

An average decile 10 child has heard 32 million more words than your average decile one child; not dependent on the language spoken. The questioning conversations to and forth with child to adult are potentially missing. AND there is a one third turnover of children in a decile one community at primary school. Over two years the class is 2/3rds different. However, if you intentionally teach young people how to have conversations, you can extend and begin to over come this. Hence why T shaped literacy is so important. This directly links with the four themes that are prevalent in our TAI sessions across cluster as well as the High Leverage Practices we have been presented with from the Wolf Fisher research.

Kerry Boyde-Preece's presentation worked the new digital technologies curriculum - This presentation builds on from empowering. The ideal that we produce creative directors rather than passive consumers of technology. 

Kerry pointed out that fluencies and technologies are different; one is making use of the tech, one of them is leading and evolving with tech. I think that is something we all know when we examine it but it's not up on the surface of our understanding.

The curriculum itself is divided into three strands; practice, knowledge, nature of.

Practice - user, knowledge - products, nature of - the why. In fact this works nicely with Simon Sinecks golden circles, which regular reader(s) of my blog would know that I'm all about that shizz (possibly one and a half of you).

Two distinct areas of the new curriculum - computational thinking (CT) and DDDO -  the three strands interweave to create; computer science and then design and develop digital outcomes. The aesthetics over the programming. DDDO is like our new area, CT is like a modernised version of ICT to reflect real computer science like we would see at university level and with programmers. There are 8 progress outcomes for each of these two areas. CT progress outcomes are very black and white and based on understanding how things work and what is right and wrong with them. can be taught in a completely unplugged manner.

You could look at a unit of work and consider how to include CT and DDDO into what you already do, rather than this being a stand alone subject. I think this is and interesting way to look at, as this stuff is actually pervasive in our social construct, so why would we teach it to be very separate when the very nature of it is what is going to help empower our learners in the bigger world. 

Marks session -- future of technology

So we always thought that humanity's greatest strength moving forward with AI is creativity. However, what if AI can learn creativity? I'm not going to lie, there is an element of fear here for me with this topic, as well as a moral challenge. Every time I am presented with what we have achieved with stuff like robots that look, sound and act real, my mind it taken to "How many starving children could you have chosen to feed instead? Why do you not have an ounce of ethical responsibility that you would spend billions on that instead?".  However, that is something I am unable to affect directly, though if enough smaller voices were heard, maybe that could be another story. I watched the star train of satellites overhead on Monday night with my own child and we marvelled at them all the same. "Sophia", skin vision, cora; these are all examples of the tech learning and creating its own solutions, which is effectively where the aforementioned creativity sits. We are looking for new solutions to problems, challenges and contexts.

Mark points out that ethics and morals are not well covered with this, including with the new digital technologies. why on earth do we not have an equivalent ethics and morals curriculum? we do somewhat with Health. but he very act of branding it as "health" and pigeon holing it, means its spread and capture is not wide enough. Health is essentially an ethics and philosophy course. It frustrates me that it is branded as something so superficial when it covers so many more depths and layers. 

When it came to coding, it left me cold. I see it as sequencing, on a crazy pedantic level. I also wonder if we cannot just teach sequencing or identify where pure sequencing occurs in our already existing work and note the skills we already teach as coding unplugged. 

Mahi for next week:

- Making sure I know what to do for the certification exam.

- Spending more time reworking how we post blogs with reference to the work Naomi Rosedale has done with MAPIC

- Hapara workspace - more of this. 

MAPIC Naomi Rosedale

Blogs and commenting are accelerating at HHS, teachers are making the effort and its nice to see - some of our part-time staff getting into it and being those quiet achievers. Even so there is still debate and room to extend what our understanding of and uses of a DLO within this. MAPIC is a systematic approach developed by Naomi Rosedale around how we can do this, based upon research, including the Wolf Fisher observations across 30 schools within 5 Manaiakalani outreach clusters. This has led Naomi to question why and how we design learning, and in  conjunction with the High Leverage Practices, whether we should not be working through a different lens - 

Naomi Rosedale spoke today about student created DLO's. Old words on new practices has us thinking about the new practices in old ways and not neceessarily making that pedagogical shift we would want to see as the why of those new practices. Howe we use DLO's needs to be carefully seen within this light. 
Naomi asked us to consider how we would define a DLO to a newbie to the school. Do we have a shared understanding of what this is? What is our Learning Theory about DLO's. a product at the end of learning which goes further in terms of impact on learning.

We were asked to define it in 20 words or less in pairs and Naomi came up with some common themes around this; sharing, showing learning progress. We did have a discussion that was not reflected in the Jam board around the difference between a DLO and a DLA.

DLO = a finished cycle of learning represeented in a way that is published and shared online

DLA = a progression point of a learning journey shared online. 

DLA = blog post itself under this definition? So, most of what we do in Art is DLA based, which is how I like it to be honest, as it doesn't interfere in the art making process (which can in fact be very digital, so it is not a case of ignoring one for the other). The DLO is a finish point and is the starting point for others to begin their own learning if they wish to. I do wonder if arguing the toss over the difference between the two is even useful, when a journey based blog post can do that as well. Some of this is pedantic. 

Something we didn't capture was affordance and digital modality; different modes. Different ways of communicating meaning. Writing often dominates this. What can our students do that is "...designed to afford educational reuse..."? Writing is one semiotic system of information sharing, but it is not the most common, easily accessed form in the 21st century particularly when one considers how the internet and social media completely dominate a developed world lifestyle. 

Historically DLO's are not there to capture learning only to instruct others. There are libraries of DLO's created for teachers. Manaiakalani practices move  it from that to the learner being the designer of the DLO which changes the process of learning as well as the outcome.

Naomi would like us to consider what we would do to use something other than Slides as they represent 85% of the DLO's created across the five clusters. There are transactional affordances, efficiencies to using slides. You can do MORE with slides than just a plain slide, and these were accounted for in her stats, which still left plain uninteractive slides winning 85%.

When we Verbalise/teach what the point of a DLO is rather than just requesting them to do it we may have more buy in to how we do DLO's more creatively and our 'what' ends up being of a higher quality. Blogs are a forum to spark up conversation in their original form. the DLO should assist in that. The idea that the slideshow is the blog post possibly needs to be addressed too - the child who writes here is my link to my slides, from which they have just copied a teacher template and inserted their own 'fill the gaps' scenario is not in fact helpful, it may be a hinderance to authentic texts being developed. Wolf fisher is aware that there is a cut and paste proforma approach to blogging going on too. Does this just reduce our learners to receivers of information?


Wolf fisher wants us to nudge the DLO aspect over DLA a nudge in their use and application in our classrooms.

STUDENT DESIGN FOR LEARNING
social semiotics - sign systems. Making meaning on line using different modalitites.

FEATURES THAT HAVE MORE POTENTIAL TO INSTRUCT OTHERS.

Building our students awareness of mode choices could assist in this. None of us teach in just one way in a monotoned voice. We use tone, gesture, space, pause, visual, etc. We never do things in just one way. its choices we make based upon what we think is needed and at times what we know we can do successfully.

M = mapping ideas to modes. If someone was going to gain learning from this, what mode is best? value judgements that the students need to make are really important to their learning growth too. if you are restricted to one channel of communication then is your learning limited? say a text book that becomes a class bible... they have no opportunity to authentically create their own text. they are recalling and reading back to you.

How could some DLO work improve literacy? it is not the only way but it is an opportunity.

Learning then becomes a process of designing learning for others - what the child does in the classroom becomes a reusable resource for other learners. so we teach our children to teach. we do it online and using all the affordances that we can that map out well for it. We must be mindful about the constraints on DLO's for what students produce.

Another question posed is how we could nudge using screencastify in our classrooms? 
There is nothing wrong with a template to start with so long as we allow things to move beyond it. A checklist is recommended over a template.

High expectations scaffold - a NUDGE.
Don't shy away from the big words and concepts with the students. Give procedural content. A checklist of what you want here should actually be enough.

Naomi has asked us to define what student design for learning means. student multimodal even, https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1WPrtS_o1Xk2LHTJPrFt1vYHIKUAtsMhlLuXexf3insM/edit

Voice has a much more political cultural connection to it, using voice recording is a really seriously good way of amplifying our students understanding a self-design for learning. Voice can be more powerful than written words and could be something simply added into over a slide show to amplify our learners understanding and ability to teach from their own work. 

Overall, we only covered M and A with a little bit of a reference to P today, as time ran out. However, this is a session that needs to continue so that we get that clarified understanding of the why behind MAPIC. It also gives me a grounding for how to move forward with it, for staff.  

DFI seven

Devices. Fiona Grant.
Cybersmart learning and being cybersmart - focussed on empowering everyone.

Kua tangata whenua ki te ao matihiko- at home in a digital world. 

Cybersmart was a term used as a proactive term instead of cyber'safe' which is a reactive term. It needs to be consistently and persistently modelling how we use language, and position ourselves positively on line. smart and secure. One doesn't exist without the other. Today we are working on how we show that sharing online is not just a negative experience; less about scaremongering more about positive use.

10 cybersmart categories exist in the curriculum presented by Manaiakalani.

Implementation is a whole school focus, not part of school. A common language and the same process for introducing LCS to school - term one learn smart learners, create term two smart footprint, share term three smart relationships.

By the time our young people get to high school we should be able to continue on with the learning.

Kawa of care is considered a really important document as it is an agreement between whānau and kura about how we are all going to behave online and physically manage personal devices as learner devices. Ours is a part of our enrolment form rather than being a separate component. 

"Positive, thoughtful, helpful"  has  been our way of doing things with commenting on student blogs and is something I believe the teachers at HHS who regularly comment are very good at. It again aligns with LCS - Positive - runs parallel to Learn/Ako - stating what you already know and determining something of a direction forwards. Thoughtful - Create/Waihanga - creating connections of learning. Helpful - Share/Tohatoha - sharing your ideas on what has been presented as a way of helping the writer initiate another cycle of inquiry. 

The blog again is the training wheels. As their time at school increases, they can reflect back on their digital footprint. just like anything in life, elevate the positive and not the negative.

Hapara session with Lenva Shearing

Hapara was built for the Manaiakalanai trust to provide visibility, not technological affordance. Never ask students to create folders, as they do not own them. They just work within them.

Hapara work spaces: hapara's answer to classroom, workspace is visible. The benefit is that you can personalise it over a site. Lenva does workshops online and is bookable on her calendar. There are public workspaces are available to have a look at and you can take up the opportunity to do one of our free badged courses. The student dashboard is a desktop interface. I don't know that we will go with this if we are looking at mymahi interface as well. Hapara also has analytics, which I would be interested in exploring better  and highlights the schools activity inside gsuite since they first joined google.

My own exploration of workspaces started a wee while ago (2016), but I have always struggled to maintain my own momentum with it. However, the more we discuss our lack of differentiation at HHS the more inclined I am to want to be able to use it proficiently. I struggle with the visual look of it, which is a bit churlish admittedly, but as a professional who places a high degree of weight on how things look, it's a hard one to overcome. The real brilliance with workspaces is that it allows you to group your learners and their view of the workspace is limited to the work they are set, not the work set for other groups. 

From a pedagogical point we do not direct our HoD's at the start of the year to sit and work out PAT data and learn to read it. There is no directive to know who your high fliers, low liers and anomoly data sits within your class groupings and there is no expectation that HOD's lead their department staff in catering for these groupings. If there were, then attaining buy in for workspace would probably fall into place. This should be done in relation to HLP's and everything else that Woolf Fisher provides for us. 

Mark's session Intro into devices

Affirming we are 1:1 not BYOD - BYOD allows free reign of device choice. There are issues with this as very cheap laptops are now on the market and a whānau who does not have regular income would be hard-pressed to pass up that opportunity over the more expensive chromebook the cluster offers, even though it haas insurance and warranty built into the cost. We know it is a better deal, but we also don't have to deal (as teachers in general) with the financial constraints of not knowing if money will be even available in a few weeks. I have noticed also that new enrolments during the year, students will often come from other schools with laptops, macbooks even, as this was their previous kura's expectation; it's pretty hard to say no you have to get rid of that fancy macbook and use this chromebook. I know I wouldnt want to as a senior student... 

1: 1 is based upon the three p's of the treaty - partnership participation and protection. I hadn't thought of this before. I liked the summary we were provided around this as it was clear. It is something I would like to rejig for whānau and put up on our facebook page every now and then as a way of reaffirming our direction for equity.

We did a digital dig into how to use a chromebook - shortcut keys are very similar to a mac, so it isn't a struggle for a mac user to switch over to a chromebook, thought he mousepads are not as smooth and i would struggle to move to a chromebook over this lovely macbook. In saying that, Our Japanese teacher Nick was very early on using a chromebook as his own work device so that he knew the limitations his learners would face, which I thought was a very clever move personally. The chromebook simulator Mark introduced us to thought I found it frustrating as a user, was a little moment of inspiration for our visual arts meeting when we were trying to figure out how to introduce 30 students at once in a  year 9 class to the difference between a cell phone for photography and a proper DSLR camera. I figured if there was a chromebook simulator surely someone had thought of a DSLR camera simulator and guess what! They had; about 12 iterations of such a thing came up which has meant that we had something really cool to move our year 9's to doing online in learning WHY we love DSLR's over iphones for Art photography. Little things like this happening in the DFI make it a worthwhile experience even when you think nyou already know it all (I don't think that BTW).

Cheryl talked through us using ipads for juniors. Samsung, Apple, and no brand tablets were piloted first to ensure they knew what they were getting. Ipads came out best. I do personally wonder if this would still be the case, as Samsung certainly produce a very large range of products here at every price-point which Apple do not.  Styluses are used, so hand writing is still learnt. I loved the weight of the stylus and it certainly made using the pad a much more enjoyable experience, so much so that I have purchased one for our home use. 

You're welcome Noel Leemings for the free advertising. 

EXPLAIN EVERYTHING
I love the idea of this, but I have to admit I struggled with applying it. I spent my time consistently second guessing if there was a way of just using screencastify and voice recordings on slides etc instead... Part of that was because you have to pay for it, even though we get a good subsidy through the cluster, it still bugged me. I would like another day on this one so I can determine if i can or how I can use it effectively. This might be a summer holiday task. 

My mahi for the week going forwards:

1) Missionising how we get a directive in place to have our HoD's working together at the start of each academic year to actively use PAT data alongside Woolf Fisher research for differentiation. 

2) Getting to grips with workspace so that can become an affordance to making the first point work

3) What I have already done, but I will count it on my check list anyway (Always feels better if you have things on the checklist that are actually done!) spreading the love around Toby Mini and how it can make opening a class set of blogs very easy and therefore commenting on those blogs much easier; screencastify, their promo video and a link to the extension sent out to staff. One of the things this helps overcome - with a bit of work admittedly - is that we have many classes that are a mix of classes now and kamar/hapara cannot seem to accomodate this for us. My senior art classes are made up of seven markbooks in kamar for example, which translates into seven classes on Hapara, and seven folders to go into to retrieve my students blogs. This is now much quicker and smarter for me. 

Having read Terry's blog I'm now wondering if we need to be directive about insisting our staff are 'trained' in using Hapara effectively at the start of each year too. I wonder what others reading this would think of that? It would be super fun to be able to get in a plan how our first week would look like professionally with the distinct intention of not making it look like it normally does, but is andragogically responsive to our current pedagogy.

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