DFI Day three

Reflections form the week gone:

Google groups:

Having set up a google group and talking my department through how to use it, I feel like we have a good process set up that will continue on, as long as we regularly use it and do not forget! Google keep is still something I am working through making a real thing for me, as it is going to be useful, I just haven't had the time yet to fully apply myself to it. We introduced remove.bg as a way of extending how and what we teach for photomontage and that is still probably my number one tool I have taken away. It is very cool and super fun.

Toby mini is great for collecting up my seven markbooks worth of blog tabs, soo that has been worth the effort, thought I am still torm as to whether I could be benefitting from OneTab.

I want to continue to keep in mind RATE -

R = Recognise - what you do that is plain good teaching no matter what - content that is meaningful.
A = Amplifying effective practice.
T = Turbo charging effective practice things that weren't possible in the analogue age. It's the new stuff that impacts our teaching.
E = Effective practice.

Google Keep, Google Groups and Toby Mini would come under Amplifying effective practice. Remove.bg would be turbo charging what we are able to do.

Dorothy's Session at 9am - My reflections

HHS mission statement is 'Centre of Creative Excellence'. Create is our focus today - hook.

During lockdown - we all had our moments of renewed creativity; mine was vegetable gardening and making pickled vegetables. Everyone took their passion and did something with it. When I did my training, it was not considered a 'good' lesson plan unless we had actively planned how to "catch'em, teach'em and learn'em", which was our tutor's colloquial framework for creating a meaningful lesson. As a specialist Art teacher, the one given we were taught to, was that we werent going to be relying on students being forced into our subject, as Art is not a 'core' subject. So how are you going to justify your job? Maths, Science and English - your school community is generally going to expect you to do those... Art, Music, Drama, not so much. "catch'em, Teach'em, Learn'em" is not particularly different to Learn create share. Our process was always to:

Catch'em: hook the learner and activate their prior knowledge (Learn)

Teach'em: provoke a 'wow' moment, demonstrating how, while talking about why - heavily reliant on exemplar teaching (Learn and create)

Learn'em: before giving them time to learn the techniques (Create)

Share what we were learning, before moving on to solidify the learning.

We did this because it worked. It engaged the learner and helped us key into their passion, see Art the way we did. yet for whatever reason, this was not a format applied across college, it was jus the Visual Arts teachers who were trained like this. 

Why have we left 'create' as learning to early childhood teaching for so long? High school should be embracing this, 'play-based' shouldn't need to be a thing, it should just be? HHS is on a journey.

Creativity was once our point of difference in education in NZ. It wasn't national standards that made creativity fall away, it was Tomorrows Schools.

Oruaiti school is worth knowing about and I will research some more information around this
https://www.oruaiti.school.nz/

Create is doing. Making connections. So we have activated prior knowledge with Learn/Ako, and then new connections form when we get to put things together.

From an e-learning leadership point; create document, relook at this and make it a stronger part of our e-learning process at HHS, we haven't embedded it enough yet.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FLqJiqIjQt-xzzbloW4hfboA09DG2o0-eC6czb1DXSs/edit

Media deep dive

Nike ad is a very good example of rich multi media juxtaposition with a purpose.

Off task students are likely to be on some form of engaging media - youtube, tiktok etc. That is how enticing it is, so how to we harness it for hooking our students?

SISOMO Sight, sound and motion. Screen/media is most powerful when all of these are present. I would prefer it to be tempered however, as high stimulation isn't necessarily engaging, but passively feeding, when it is used too often - and this doesn't allow the creativity we want. Time and place is important and it is a possibility that it can be overwhelming to some learners with high sensory needs. We have had a staff member embed moving, blinking, gifs on their google site at one point. We have two epileptic students, along with many others who are adverse to high stimulation, for whom this wasn't suitable. I can see the point, but I would prefer a good teacher were the sound and motion for the most part, with minimal reliance on incorporating SISOMO digitally. I read while I was looking this concept up that 'research says 70% of people push play when they go onto a website with a video on it'. I'm not one of the 70%, and I couldn't find any references on the website to justify the statistic, nor on a google search. I tend to push pause if a video automatically plays when I open a site and will often move onto a site where there is word and picture content over video. It is just more than I want. I recognise that I lose myself in the media and don't create if I am enticed by media that plays me with SISOMO. Is this a part of our critical literacy challenge with our learners too?

Tools: Screencastify, Adobe Spark, We-video are all free. You do not need to create an account in Adobe Spark.

iMovie, clips, quicktime are apple products.

You can get a qualification from We-video if you like. we have been given We-video tutorials to have a play around with - as I'm one of the few mac users, its probably useful for HHS.

Point England News Network (PNN) is something that is still running and is a successful example of using media to create with students. It is a model for what we could be doing with hurumanu in years 7, 8 and 9 or even Wānanga time.

Live streaming through Meet, live-streaming school assembly - we tend to use facebook so that its available to the whānau easily. Should we be live-streaming all assemblies? Using a drone to film and live stream? Film festivals. Could be a hurumanu; introduces Media Studies early! Have a strict limit on time - 3 minutes.

Podcasting; our students could be podcasting. its not a podcast until its feeding. pushing out updates. useful for literacy?

Are we 'hooking' the students, or using it as a teachable moment, that the enticement needs to be critically analysed? What is Nike's true purpose with the ad? Selling shoes or betterment of humanity?

Mark's session for youtube.

Google drive is our default for storage and access of videos.
Best not to store your videos on youtube, stick with the drive. Also check that video you play is actually allowed to be played to a class. Are they able to access it themselves when you aren't showing them it? if not, then they probably shouldn't be seeing it in class. I do notice that when I attempt to insert a video into my blog post however, I only have a choice of inserting it from youtube or uploading it from my computer, which adds to the time it takes to potentially finish this post!

Subscribe to playlist: this is in the google certified educator level one preparation

I like that you can stop recommended videos playing after one you embed on your site - slide 19 on marks presentation - add code to the end of your video code before embedding. That's also why we don't use youtube for our own content as it means that we would have to add that code every single time. Both using the code, or only sharing videos from your google drive are important in managing the control required for not slipping down the rabbit hole - b oth for students and adults alike! (I did when making the play list...)


Google draw is something we use extensively already. We apply it in Senior Art - our Photography and Design folios are created over the year on a google draw, as the work is generally digital. Students customise the size of the doc to be 62cm x 82 cm which is a folio panel. It also means they can tinker slightly with images on the board using the tools under format options. students then transpose their images from this document to print documents for folios to be sent away at the end of the year. its clean and means the rangatahi has to take control of their process in getting their work ready for NCEA assessment. Printing docs can be made PDF or printed from google directly onto our Epsom inkjet. The whole process mimicks the same systems a commercial printer uses in printing work for Artists, so it is a really useful set of steps to have the students work through.

We also use google draw in making digital photomontages with remove.bg now too. Again students are in control. we download as a JPEG rather than a PNG as it inserts onto students blogs, whereas PNG doesn't. PNG is great for a transparent background, but once the images are finished, the students don't need this on their blogs.

(Picture is a hyper link BTW)

In setting up Google keep more effectively, I wonder if I just need to do it? I'm not learning anything magically new with my research currently, I just have to get used to doing it.

Google slides learning:

I found I did learn something new with aligning a group of shapes neatly. I also found Peardeck completely by accident. The Peardeck add-on could be useful. Not covered by the DFI, but found accidentally. I have added it to my add-ons along with the powerup version so this week will see if I actually use it and if it is useful at all.

A lot happened on today's course, and I am still processing a lot of it. Again it was thought provoking and invigorating and ZI am thoroughly enjoying it. I would also recommend Michael's for coffee on Innes Road, the barista is lovely.

2017 for Visarts at HHS

More messing around with the limitations of google draw than real planning... 

ULEARN 2016

Thank you Spark and MIT for this opportunity.


 notes accompanying the slides:

Slide 1 - Tēnā Koutou Katoa Ko Kaiterau tōku Māunga Ko Waikōau tōku awa No Kaikoura ahau Ko Annette rāua ko Paul Bourke ōku mātua Ko Rowena Clemence tōku ingoa

Slide 2 - He Kaiako Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to my presentation as a Visual Arts teacher at Hornby High School in Christchurch. 

Slide 3 - We have new tools requiring new pedagogy that allows learning to happen ubiquitously, rewindably. Teachers dream of facilitating learning rather than ramming knowledge down throats to be regurgitated later. We have an opportunity for self-efficacy.

Slide 4 - ‘Why’? Woolf Fisher data from 2016 highlights the problem we knew we already had with writing. 72% of our new entrants into year 7 are below or well below the national standards in writing. The problem is not the ‘dumbness’ of our kids, as they are not.

Slide 5 - It is the skill-set to break up language and reapply it. People with good writing skills are generally seen as more credible. Are our students equitably empowered when they are constantly playing catch-up with national standards in writing?

Slide 6 - There are no ministry exemplars in Art for the junior levels. Art teachers apparently ‘just know’. Equal emphasis and weighting is on all four strands. Two of these strands require written/vocabulary based understanding.

Slide 7 - So I’m look at Writing. Understanding key words so they can use them effectively. Compare their work to what they understand of the curriculum, assess, plan their next steps. How do we manage this ubiquitously? And in a way that supports learning beyond Art?

Slide 8 - If the students have the words, they control their learning. When they don’t have the words, it’s easier to talk one on one and watch you understand (there is a certain amount of reading your reactions going on) natural intuition and intelligence.

Slide 9 - Every child I surveyed returned a low self-rating of curriculum level. Most children surveyed demonstrated they didn’t understand that visual Arts had curriculum levels. We are doing everything as a school to address this stuff.

Slide 10 - So much we get confused, and it all comes from the one place of wanting to do our very best for our students, to undo the deficit theorising, social expectations, social issues that affect their daily lives.

Slide 11 - I had to move from how I have always done stuff to making it ubiquitously accessible. SAMR is clear measure for me to assess my own teaching methods against. This was not an overnight success. It was a gradual realisation based on the pedagogy driving it.

Slide 12 - I tried this. Over-complicated, too many words, I am an experienced teacher, but I still do not know much about teaching at year 7 and 8. Clearly. I had a whole class complete these and basically i told them the answers as they went.

Slide 13 - These are matching exercises. I broke those strands into keywords for level 3 of the NZC. Then it became obvious that I could use it more than just as a substitute for flash cards. A bank of learning cards could be created. With work on them.

Slide 14 - We have recently started to refer to these as ‘delete it’ exercises. In modifying the task, google draw was a pretty simple tool. I picked a year 7/8 class that I was only getting once a week, choosing to focus on understanding over doing.

Slide 15 - I figured I may as well see if I could extend their literacy over their practical skills in the time I had. Initially we used smart share on Hapara to send these out and a whiteboard to organise who had done what...but the whiteboard was always erased next time, and it was messy.

Slide 16 - More modification was required Drives were cluttered and students were not yet working on wholistic blogs. Hapara WORKSPACE allows for a cleaner interface and embeddable in the google site for Art. It changes this into something much more ubiquitous too.

Slide 17 - I can grade it and send the students feedback. Students who have arrived late to the class can be included in all prior learning. I can see when a student misunderstands their work, they can save their work as jpegs and upload them to their now functioning blogs.

Slide 18 - Beyond this, what is good and not so good, at each level? Using google sheets, I have made self-assessment sheets; rather than students guessing what ‘good’ looks like. I ‘know’ what it looks like without much ministry guidance, but still it needs to be carefully quantified.

Slide 19 - This is shared with all the students in their class. They can only edit their named row. Each row is locked down to only that student. They can see each other’s assessments for their work, but they cannot change it. It is coded to achieved, merit, excellence.

Slide 20 - So what can my students do now that they couldn’t do before? The students in this particular class can explain there are 4 strands, that they feel they are within level 3 because they can see it. An autistic boy does his work at home away from class, and that is fine. I can see it.

Slide 21 - This is where I want to take this next. In doing this, I will be working alongside our local primary school and another, to determine how Visual Arts is handled within a teaching programme, at the same time using this as an opportunity to refine project based learning skills for my own use.

 Christina Fortes, just for you.

Trouble Shooting

7BK - my main class for trialling SPARK - MIT initiatives are just lovely. They tolerate and buy into me trying new things out on a very regular basis. AND they tell me they love Art. What more can I hope for :-)

Going week to week, sending out mass copies of google drawings to be completed by the class is messy and confusing. Particularly when we are enrolling new students all the time who are not necessarily added to your Hapara class lists...

I lost my phone again. And my keys (not new). And my head doing this. I had messed around in workspace and then decided not to use it. Now it can be made public and now that I am steadily confusing myself with what is sent and what is not, I have come to the realisation, it is the cleanest and most effective way to get their literacy work out to the class.

Their Hapara drive looked like this:

 Which was my fault....

We were all confused and only got about 20 minutes of practical art work done in a lesson...that is not fun. I persisted with this for a while before I decided I was making my life worse.








WORKSPACE - I think has saved my life


How tidy is this? I can set up the do nows as 'evidence' it is public and I am about to link it to my site so that they can enter through there too.

Life is better.

Language Accessibility Again

From this,

 

to this...

This does work, but, man, the language is hard in the CI and UC strands for them. A lot of repetition is needed. And some definitions still need tweaking.

Not all of the words are straight from the curriculum statements. In each strand I have included words I teach to, and have taught to. For example 'Tache' in PK.

Next steps; 
- Starting at a level below what I think they are
- Building up a cache of language google drawings that they 'get' quickly and can start to show some fluency in,
- Applying the words to their own and others pieces of Art pieces and building a communal bank.
- Making this accessible to other teachers to start using and add to.
- Measuring student's performance from starting to finishing and within curriculum work over the year. Using self-assessment as well as teacher based assessment.
- How does this link into SOLO and how I am re-structuring units of work around Learn, Create, Share.

Making the Language Real and Accessable

   

Talking myself around in circles. The plan here is to make something that students can use to create their own DLO's. This is why I haven't bothered with Quizlet or Kahoots. They are engaging, accessible, and relatively easy to use. However, I want the children to be able to make something that they can digitally keep and refer back to. Without the language. I have some hesitation is continuing to use google draw, I don't want to come out of this one trick pony. But I do see it suiting my needs here.

I envisage crating a bank of language that is specific to each curriculum level, each curriculum strand. Flash cards/definitions that can then be applied to one art image or piece of documentation in making art. Students can then have their image surrounded by 4 to 10 different card, different colours as strands never sit neatly as one task per strand.

google drawing card for analysis and why it didnt work

Language. If you don't have it, you can't apply it. Interestingly, as I explained the concepts, it clicked into place, but I still had to keep doing this and in the ned, I really just made  a bunch of kids "repeat after me..."

What I have I learned?
1) they are clever enough there is not deficit with their intellect.
2) It doesn't matter if you are clever, if no one has exposed you to the language to express it
3) All of this correlates to our data on writing.

Shikobi tells me it was alright, but why were my words so confusing?













Next steps:
Go back to language base, and develop it based on breaking down and analysing the curriculum levels. This will be an interesting exercise as I don't think it has been done. If so, there are no easily available resources on it. How would a general teacher expected to cover all subjects at junior levels be expected to manage this? Not cool, TKI!

I used to use flash card, which worked (i love organising things by colour) but were easily lost, not something they could take home and laborious to make a student copy for, let along keep up on maintaining full sets int eh right colours. How to do this digitally.

Also, I want to use a small group of kids that I can take out of a class and work with as opposed to relying on my own art time.

7 BK SPARK MIT trial with google drawing 'cards'

Learning outcome; Understanding the Visual Arts strands at Level 3 of the NZC

Objectives:
- To be able to recognise explicitly what is required in meeting each strand
- To be able to figure out what is potentially missing in a piece of work within each strand
- To be able to negotiate their own strengths and weaknesses in their own work based on this breakdown of understanding

What we want to achieve because of this:
- A bank of resources that demonstrate understanding of each strand, within potentially the same piece of work
- To be able to differentiate not only between curriculum levels, but also between a low, mid and high standard in each curriculum level
- To be have an open, accessible and collaborative bank of student work that can be used in self-assessing, comparison and idea gathering for other teachers and students beyond Hornby.

What I have so far:
Level 3 Practical Knowledge;

We used a piece of work from another class that was incomplete, but clearly demonstrated this strand, at this level and in the unit of work this particular class is just finishing up. Verbally, students could easily identify everything I wanted them to be able to see. However, translating my intentions and their answers from a verbal conversation to the google drawing 'card' I made was more challenging. I have not taught this age level before. I over-construct sentences at the best of times. For 10 and 11 year olds, it must be terrifying. Working on the chrome books is significantly different to my laptop, which meant that we had some technical challenges, however, 7 bk were remarkably prepared to continue trying out 'how' to do this right. Eventually, we go t a good number of cards completed and saved.

What I am doing differently next time:
- Working on defining the strands in clearer and more simplidied language than last time.
- Using a chrome book as my teacher's computer, so I am in the same place as the students.
- Simplifying the language used on the google drawing 'card'.
- Use CARR awards more regularly during the lesson - no one seemed to notice, but it is a school system and I should have used it.

What I am happy about:
- It sorta worked
- The resilience of 7bk is awesome
- Their digital citizenship was on point - no off task behaviour on chrome books
- I can see this taking shape (just slowly) and a good positive direction.
- I can see how I could integrate the google self assessment sheet I have already worked on, with this; self-efficacy has to be an outcome of that approach in my opinion.
- I have found an educationally sound and useful way of working with google drawings - I initially just thought they were too basic to be of use with teaching something like Design and not relevant to anything else. I have changed my mindset, and solutions have presented themselves.

SOLO in Art

This is our take on SOLO with Visual Arts. It fits cleanly with our base assessment scale, with the expectations of NCEA in visual Arts at level 1 - 3 and as a way to enable good clear scaffolding for students to achieve at higher levels too.

What I Am Going To Try; Google Draw

Click on this link for the original Google Draw file

I think this is at the substitution level as it is. What happens to that information they create with these is how it becomes redefined and modified.

Breaking it down into low, mid and high of a curriculum level is really what is happening on the google sheet that I have already worked on with the students.



This as a do now - 1 - 2 curriculum strands from students work so far, or work done previously that I know they can manage. All the answers are ones that my current Year 7 and 8 students could provide based on the work we have completed this term. They know what Tache is, and they can identify all of those elements.

We teach the vocab using flash cards anyway, so just making sure they are available or even developing them into google drawings as well, would help.

Getting the students to 'bank' these in a file somewhere is the next step and relating it back to SOLO for Visual Arts.

What Is My Innovation?

Trying to get to the point where students can identify what they are doing and why they are doing it. But also being brave enough to share how they are doing, without fear

Have I explicitly taught the strands? No. Is this a mistake? Possibly.

I consistently address that fear of people seeing whether or not the students are 'good enough'. I am so caught up with my junior classes teaching in the limited time that we have, that unpacking the strands, can be something that gets put 'away'.

SOLO - we did this once! We had extensive PLD on it and then it fell away with the numerous other commitments we have. I am wondering how I explicitly re-introduce this and link to this as well as make those strands more obvious, student owned. When I took on SOLO in Art, I added in an extra step. When SOLO is related to NCEA 'achieved', 'merit' and 'excellence', multi-structural comes out as 'achieved'. I feel that is inaccurate at level one NCEA. So we added in another step. in order to get 'achieved' we rely on relational as the step that correlates. I will post separately on this to explain this further.

The term one focus for us with the outreach programme has been rewindable learning. The google site, with the teaching blogs has been a way of keeping learning available and rewindable. This has to aide in helping students develop their understanding of the work, but not necessarily the base strands that work applies to.

So the google sheet design collecting students self-assessment actually becomes less of an innovation and more of a data collection as to how well students manage putting their own thoughts about learning out there as data and whether or not they understand our teaching and how it all works. How do students feel about making their own thoughts on their grades visible? Do they understand what is expected of them?

Because the students have not designed the google sheet with me - i.e. they have to understand the criteria for each task, but I am using language they don't get, they do not yet own it. We have reworded lots of it already.


Challenges:
- Time in the classroom - we lose a lot of time in 7 and 8 for Kiwican, sports, teacher conferences, attitude talks, assemblies...
- Access to devices - this can be cumbersome when not all students have them. Locating spare ones takes time and energy and at times guess work.
- Is this relevant to actually making what I am trying to ultimately achieve?
- Have I extended myself too far?

Next steps:
- Focus on one class only. Not all.
- Take time out of the curriculum intentionally with this one class. 7 Bk - as they have already lost a lot of content time so maybe they are a class to work with. Because the content is lacking, then I can already safely afford to determine that understanding process is more important? They can make up for their lack of content by understanding the curriculum better and being able to articulate it and therefore progress almost as quickly upwards because of their more implicit understanding.
- Clarify SOLO for Visual Arts at Hornby.
- Create an exemplar of processing work into curriculum strands.
- Create basic definitions of each strand, set it up as a group exercise where students categorise and process an art assignment into the strands. This can be the work we have already done or work from other years.

Because I only have this class once a week, it could be that every lesson for 15 minutes we do this. I teach a refined programme to this class that could help back up the strand focussed on, or not.

Working using Google Draw, I have an idea of how to create a 'make a copy' file way of doing this.