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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DFI Day six - enabling access - sites

From last time:

• Adding audio files that read the site out is helpful. Online voice recorder and a chrome extension specifically for slides - this is a work in progress and something I am implementing as my new normal
• Hapara parent portal - we have a lot of apps/mediums already. at this stage we want to know what it looks like as a parent and we are yet to see it, because we haven't had time to look! But it is certainly a part of our intention
• Challenging how visible we are as a kura, digitally - Wānanga teacher sites were not actually visible to our community. We have addressed this  however, the consistency between sites is very varies, even though there are really good guidelines and examples from our Wānanga leaders, Anna and Raewyn. 
• Promoting google class OnAir to staff as a resource - yet to happen beyond an email sent out. It is a start. A prompt to have our staff consider how visible our amazing aspects of our own practice are and what we can do about making them more so.
• 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). This one I have yet to consider HOW it happens.
  

Dorothy's session today and my thoughts going forward:

Connected - today's theme is connected from the Manaiakalani kaupapa. 

Today was more around how we enable access and inspire connection/connected practice to happen. Technical aspects as well as pedagogical aspects were discussed as well as more discussion around the origins of the Manaiakalani Trust and how that formation led to where we are right now.

Origins: Back in 2006 the network that was formed through Manaiakalani was diverse. This became, and is a strength. Most of us are at our best when we are connected with other people. We strengthen our own school by making connections outside of it as well as within it. Siloed practice just doesn't have a place in modern education. We know there are pockets of it remaining in our MLE school however. I wonder if there always will be or if there is still yet a way of pushing that out? Shared kaupapa is only possible when everyone has made the commitment to make our mahi visible. 

Technical: The Limit the links - document is a live document and has recently been updated. This is something we have discussed in staff. Sometimes it's really hard to keep it down to three clicks. However, if we are earnest about trying to, and it sometimes varies from that, it has to be better for our learners in the long run than not having made a statement about how many clicks teachers allow to evolve on their sites. 

Technical: RSS = real simple syndication. RSS grabs each blog post and puts it out there as a tweet to the rest of the world. Egalitarian in nature not popularity based - the most recent post is what is at the top. I have some questions about this as all of our rangatahi coming through are now on primary school based blogs, not HHS ones, so the feed is distorted and does not reflect High School blogging in Uru Mānuka particularly any more. Dave Winter then sent us the secondary RSS feed. It is all of the high schools across NZ involved in a cluster. 

Pedagogical: Connect - AKO - we connect when we use the ako/learn concept - we aim to make sure we know (or begin that process) prior knowledge of our students and we activate a shared vision to learn. At least our best practice versions of ourselves do this. I wonder if I know if that happens across our staff, or if I just presume that it does because I want it to? 

Pedagogical: Connected learners share. A connection needs both parties to share. Give and take. It cannot just be digital however, face to face opportunities are also a significant aspect. That is why a great deal of what we do is done in face to face meetings rather than solely relying on google meets and digital connections. 

Ways we as clusters have been working to connect lately:

- Tuhi mai tuhi atu. This is across cluster blogging connections. It is not something Hornby High School has put a lot into as of yet. I personally feel we are another year away from this with the changes in our curriculum (Wānanga time, Hurumanu across years 7 - 9, soon to be 7 - 11) and our new build previously. 

- Connections of high school teachers across clusters is being specifically addressed through Secondary Connects. Need to find the agenda for this one! Katie Tozer seems to have it somewhere. 

- Te reo Māori advisor - Mikaere, travels throughout NZ to visit our cluster schools to work on Te ao digitally.  I believe Mikaere has had some connection with our HoD Maori and Immersion Te reo Māori teacher, though the visibility of this is not clear. 

- There was a deliberate drive to forge connections from our end as teachers and as leaders with our audiences (staff and students) that was a necessity during lock down. 

Ways we can continue to push connecting:
Google plus has now become Currents. We need to investigate that. Using groups succinctly in school email so that we are more streamlined and knowing that LCS is a structure that we can apply to all processes of our school, including andragogically.

When we talk about Connected; We cannot cherry pick from the kaupapa about what we are going to use, connected doesn't work without visibility.

Hapara hot tips.
Student dashboard. More recent mobile friendly but not an app, definitely aimed at college kids. I think it is possibly more useful to environments that use workspace in an integrated manner? Surely using drive in an organised manner is just as useful. However, the information presented was interesting.

Summing this session up:

As an elearning leader; there was a lot that challenged my current thinking as well as plenty that reinforced my current thinking about how we do things. I do take for granted that many aspects are happening in the classrooms, which is given really when one only has two hours per week to be an elearning leader in the timetable; one of those hours is a meeting about why/what/how to do e-learning leadership. There is some irony in that. I continue to be aware of how much to push onto teachers, while still retaining visibility and encouraging connectedness in that role. 

As an HoD Visual Arts/teacher: I have moments of 'spot-on' teaching that are not visible. I want them to be visible and will often go home and recreate these moments as rewindable learning. Sometimes I wish it would all just happen without the level of work I put in. 

As Year 12 Dean: I work to keep what we do visible pastorally as much as I do with my teaching. Our slide shows for each community time are well planned and up on my site for that purpose. Our form teachers are often given tasks to call home to encourage the collaboration and connection when I feel like it's not actually happening like it could be, usually due to the fact that we are all extremely busy, so that is not a criticism, but it is an active step I take. When we eventually have Wānanga time across our school this is something that will happen with much greater ease. 

Mahi for this week:

EVALUATING EACH OTHER'S SITES AND MAKING SOME GOALS MOVING FORWARDS:

This was good, as it meant that we connected professionally within the room kanohi ki te kanohi. When I saw that another professional went everywhere I didn't want a learner to go it occurred to me that there was a way I had visually prioritised my pages and layout that was getting in the way of people seeing the good stuff I was most proud of first. 

Streamlining my site - removing redundant pages and renaming ones that seem confusing. I have also changed how my menu's up the top work - instead of it being a stepped drop down to find the classes and all other random categories across the top, I have reversed that; prioritising my classes over the random stuff visually. I also enjoyed helping others on the course too and the fact that allowed for me to connect on a professional level as well, beyond HHS.

How do we make our Wānanga teacher sites visible? They are not right now, it's a gap to be filled. I can fix that (and did) 

The Wānanga leaders had already made the google drawing, so this was not an arduous task. Hopefully, it was something I have done that means they do not have to do it. I have transferred ownership to Raewyn and Anna is an editor so that it can be updated as required. 

I have procured two chromebooks form the loan pool for relievers and although had a scheduled date and time to work with a fusion technician, they were too busy for me last week. Never mind! It is still a work in progress and I can continue to place tickets for it a step at a time. at this point it is not about setting our relief digitally on a google calendar (though that is exactly where I want to head) just making sure our mainstay relievers have sites access to the teacher's they are covering for. 

Next steps for myself:

Multi-modal encouragement and support - I need to sit down with Katie and we need a better plan around this. 

Secondary twitter feed - It is worth having this embedded into everyone's sites as it means that blogging is at the forefront somewhat. If it is what every child sees when they open a teachers site and they then see someone they know, then it raises the importance of it. 

I would like to get four students to screen-castify four teacher's sites and explain how they work/critique them. They must be willing volunteers on both ends for this to work! I can see this working as extremely good promotional material up on facebook too! it makes our learning process really visible to our community and beyond too. 

Making sure the reliever chromebooks get implemented. 

Encouraging our staff to be more visible with good practice - by promoting google class onair, and putting something of a thought challenge out there for staff to consider how we can celebrate our own spot-on moments, I do feel this is something that has the potential to accelerate. 

Aside from all of this we are also re-emphasising how our staff keep themselves safe online which goes beyond school and into our personal arenas. We are in the unenviable position of again having to reaffirm that we don't connect with students via social media and we do make sure any profiles we have on social media (not just facebook either!) are locked down. This aspect is possibly where we have to be aware that the practice and learning we do with colleagues needs to be more than pedagogical; its andragogical - steeped in adult learning theory which means the 'telling' you to do it aspect needs to be the buying into it by staff in the first place so they aren't needing to be told, they are self-reflecting enough that they do the  right thing. 

The end. 

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). 

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. 

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.

DFI day two

What I took and used from last week day one:

Something I took and used straight away was google docs in making a poster. I applied this to year 9 Art and taught them through it slowly a step at a time, which gave me a chance to see their comfort level with docs in the first place too. All but three students got a poster that begins their Hannah Hoch Research off to use as a DLO on their blogs, hopefully today... at least that was the relief instruction. Using it to quickly whip up an infographic/more visual list of instructions/expectations in general, has also been a useful 

Lovely Chris in my Year 9 class completed this example:

I also began a google group for the Art department. We have one teacher as an editor and the other as a contributor along with myself as owner. I do wonder if I should change this to both being editors so that anyone can start up a discussion. We will see how this works over the next few weeks. 

The Mindmeister app should be a useful one to work from for our upcoming Next Steps Camp at Year 12, so this possibility is being explored, now that we have come to an agreement that students should and must bring their chromebooks with them (rather than using derelict ancient iPads we have still yet to trade in or recycle, as has previously been the case). 

AKO - Learn 

What does learn look like in our school? I feel like I know what it is; Ako - activate - to know. what do we already know? I personally feel like it is well thought out and works in SOLO really well. Interesting quote - if any teacher can be replaced by a computer then they should be because it is cheaper. Some of our colleagues may have made this point by relying on logins for commercial products rather than actual teaching. It feels like I consistently talk about ako in the way I see it to staff from a professional and informal point, but then at times, it feels like its not something that is reflected back to me from staff at something close to 100% and I am consistently wondering how to improve this. 

RATE - acronym. Can you see your teaching through this lens? 

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. top two elements of SAMR - modify and redefine. Harnessing the power of the technology. 

E = effective practice. 

Google Keep 

- is probably a revolutionary product in that it can replace any form of organiser and/or diary. Probably it is better to use Keep over the Tasks function and use Calendar to keep track of overall stuff. I would like to explore this more. The chrome extension for google keep seems to have functionality that could be useful in linking URLS to a particular note. Checklists, collaboration, reminders etc all mean that you could almost use Google Keep in place of a department management system, and I wonder if that is worth experimenting with. 

The interchangeability of keep to docs is very exciting. I like that it can do more than any kind of organiser I have used on paper or online (though the 'Buy me a pie' shopping list app will be staying!). 

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive Day One

Digital Fluency Intensive (DFI) is a one day a week for nine weeks, a course intended to deepen understanding and application of a digital learning environment for practitioners. As an e-Learning leader already I wasn't sure what I would be getting out of this and did wonder if I was taking up a place that someone else could have used.  Fortunately, there is differentiation and depth within the basic skills that mean it is easily accessible for beginners and experienced practitioners.

Ako - Learn - to know

What did I already know that helped my understanding moving forwards today? What made it possible for me to gain momentum today?

My interpretation of LCS is as activation (to know), developing and refining (to act), followed by valuing the learning experience (to value) (Heick, T. 2017)  based on foundational, meta and humanistic knowledge bases. 

The first part of our day has been based upon what we know and if not, what we ought to know about the kaupapa of Manaiakalani. Making connections with those around us provides a relational base for what we will continue to do over the following eight weeks. 

Fluency in how tools work for learners is as important as fluency in how to use them in delivery, which is as important as evidence that they work and likewise leads back to how the Manaiakalani pedagogy is intended to gain positive momentum in a changing and now digital world. 

Foundational, meta and humanistic knowledge bases should not necessarily be an 'order' to learn in, rather they are interlinked and cyclical, not often strictly linear. That is how I see Learn, Create Share. It will be digital when it needs to be, and can and was analogue long before that. My classes are often inter-relating and back and forth combinations of LCS, which is like the balanced diet version of a good education as I see it. 

Waihanga - Create - to act

What specifically did I learn and create? 
How did I best retain the information? How can I use it in my practice forwards?

Here is a good example of where those delineations between Learn and Create cease to be, or at least are flicking back and forth consistently; time is given for exploring content, levelling up on what we may not have known, while others did, diving deeper into a tool, and gaining resources and skills that are adaptable to a range of subjects and levels with a bit of thought. 

Having prior knowledge whether it was provided today for the first time, or from where I already was at, was key to not becoming lost in the 'tips and tricks'. PLD provided as a bunch of how-to's without this would be difficult to retain and even harder to apply in my practice. It would lack the context. 

Aspects that I would want to extend on with peers and learners

Systematic understanding of the affordances of Google docs

Most of us in teaching now started out using products such as Microsoft word. Docs is the 'online' version. So when I approached it, I just looked for how it did what word had done. Possibly if I had begun using it as a product quite separate from word, I would have learned to use it very systematically and picked up some of this already. What I liked about this part of today was that I came into it thinking I wouldn't learn much and finished up with 'wow, I didn't know I could do that!'. 

Being coached through making a document that explores the tools specific to the product while acknowledging to us that 'yes you likely do know lots of this stuff' was aa good technique and meant that we finished up with a concrete piece of evidence as a reminder of how and what it does.  This translates well into other adult learning scenarios as well as in my classroom. I can see many applications for how I would approach teaching peers and students alike from this and emulating the approach at the beginning of a unit/topic/year would be a preferable way of managing digital assessments for me in the future, as it would allow more time for students to practice their skills with a purpose. 

Google groups

I am a part of a group through leaders of Learning, however, I just saw it as an email chain.

I also didn't really see any benefits to using groups as an end-user in this way as I didn't understand the affordances it provided. There are significant benefits; its something of a cross between google plus and email - to work from groups means that all of your topics and correspondence in regards to the one particular set of colleagues, such as a department are rewindable and stored on the one location online. when you go back to them it looks like a list of blog posts. when you are interacting with them it is no more difficult than responding to emails. It eliminates the fuss of having to search your emails for specific topics and/or contacts, if you are organised in the first place. Understanding this concept is far easier with prior knowledge of how email works, and how google+ aspired to work. I do wonder how easy this concept is to pick up and run with for someone new to a digital learning environment. I am possibly overthinking that. 

A Google-based scavenger hunt 

Such a simple concept, yet when presented like this, so hard to argue not to do this when you want that immersion into these digital tools for students, and so easily adaptable to a different subject or level. In order for me to adapt this, I would have to have a reason to use it fairly soon or it will be one of those things I never look at again as it fades from my poor memory.

A broad-brush look at a range of add-ons and extensions that improve workflow on google.

This is stuff I loved, but again, unless I actively figure out how to employ them within the week, I fear they will fade from memory. 

The tools I will be attempting to work into my own practice this coming week are:

TLDR (Too long, didnt read!) 

doc to form

eZnotifications

Docutube 

MindMeister

Tohatoha - Share - to value

Why does it work? Why should I? What do I envisage happening with learners in my class if I apply specific elements? 

The value of completing a course like this is that I am constantly reflecting on how I could use this information in my classroom and practice. I enjoyed taking a day out of classroom practice to focus on this, rather than troping over to a staff meeting following a day in the classroom to try and absorb some information, knowing that all the while I was forcing my eyelids open, and deliberating over whether I would eat the last of the lollies/slice/nibbles on the table there to share.  

My fear still remains that I may not apply what I have learnt due to time, good intentions and all. 

The two I am confident I will apply are google groups, which may be because we used that tool for the delving deeper section, so I know more about it and stronger structure in how I set up using google drive and docs with my two new junior classes this term. I will be integrating the scavenger hunt into this. 

Our weekly department meeting for Visual Arts would be a great place to pick out apps and extensions and teach to the department, challenging them to use these tools meaningfully over the next week.