Teaching as Inquiry/ Links to PD/ Reflections against teachers Criteria

 

Teaching As Inquiry Why do we inquire into our practice? We don't want to be complacent and rest on our laurels, nor do we want to stick our heads in the sand and ignore innovative ways to do things. Without further ado... Here was my 2021 hunch: I don't have a clue what I'm doing with computers. That had to change. What was I going to do about it? Putting my hand up for help was the first step. I signed up for Manaiakalani in class coaching with Herman Fourie. Yikes, I did NOT know what I was getting myself into. It has been an awesome ride.

Setting up a site:

After discussion with my co-teacher Amber prior to the school year, deciding upon our shared responsibilities for the year, and knowing that I learn best when I have space to just give it a go, I decided to take ownership over the Class Site.

Manaiakalani PD - Awapuni, holidays before term 1 2021

At this training day we set up our class sites and learnt some basic formatting skills and learnt to create an animation using Google Slides.

I started this site from scratch and have refined it over the course of the year with input from my co-teacher, beginning co-teacher, through discussion with Mr. Fourie, through feedback from DFI tutor and bubble group, through gleaning ideas from colleagues sites and inspiration sites. I also received feedback from my students through lockdown. This Links to the Teaching Standard: Professional learning - Use inquiry, collaborative problem solving and professional learning to improve professional capability to impact on the learning and achievement of all learners.

Myself and Alicia Lasenby took this learning and ran a workshop in term 2 for our colleagues teaching them how to make animations. 

This links to the Teaching Standard: Professional relationships - Establish and maintain professional relationships and behaviours focused on the learning and wellbeing of each learner. (Engage in reciprocal, collaborative learning-focused relationships with: – learners, families and whānau – teaching colleagues, support staff and other professionals)

Links to Tu Atamai ī te Ipurangi lessons - we moved away from using Manaiakalani to describe our lessons as my digital teaching and learning kaupapa began to grow. It was clear to me as I learnt that the value of working in the digital space, making learning rewindable and seeking to always innovate, didn't just belong in the Wednesday middle block 'box' of Manaiakalani but if it was to be meaningful and great powerful, life-long learning for my students - it needed to be integrated throughout all aspects of classroom life. As such, by term 2 my mindset had shifted and I had really taken the kaupapa and ran with it.

Tu Atamai ī Ipurangi is the way we refer to our specific lessons with Herman Fourie, which is inline with our referring to all of our subjects by their Te Reo Māori names. Not only written on the daily timetable but when we talk about them. Not to the side but front and centre. Both Amber and I have been on a Te Reo learning pathway this year, taking bite sized chunks at a time - kupu, kīwaha, kapa haka - and again making them integrated, integral parts of our class life. We are both conscious of wanting to be life-long learners - not just paying lip service or going hard and having the learning be superficial, only to be forgotten; but rather we are interested in taking something on and letting it become the new way of doing or saying and then taking on the next new learning. It's no longer Maths. It just is Pānagarau. Yes this is small, but to me, it is important that it is meaningful, real and lasting. 

PD link

This links to the teacher's standard: Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership - Understand and recognise the unique status of tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand. • Understand and acknowledge the histories, heritages, languages and cultures of partners to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. • Practise and develop the use of te reo and tikanga Māori. Demonstrate commitment to tangata whenuatanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I have found the rewindable aspect of using a class site to be an incredible tool to ensure students can work at their own pace, revisit information that they may have missed or not understood on the mat, for students with large absences out of their control to access the learning remotely and of course during remote learning in term 3 this year - the site proved invaluable. This fits with the the Teaching Standard: Teaching - Teach and respond to learners in a knowledgeable and adaptive way to progress their learning at an appropriate depth and pace.

In order to meet the needs of our different leaners - the class site and the use of devices, allowed all students to access their learning and to present it in the meaningful way that suited their needs. E.g. Screencastify to record learnings orally and Mote and videos to convey the teaching orally too.

My 2021 digital learning:

- Manaiakalani

- DFI - Google Certified Educator

- Gamefroot - Dan Milward and Gamefroot Dave: visits to class, training and development days, Game Development Club

- Tract.app - Ari Menemar: Google Meets with class, engaging in learning competitions and winning, Summer learning journey

- Tipu in Schools - Te Reo Māori learning on a digital platform in class

WTE

WTE PD

In Action

WTE observation by Kaytlin Walters Term 4 2021

This relates to the Teacher Standard: Professional Learning - Seek and respond to feedback from learners, colleagues and other education professionals, and engage in collaborative problem solving and learningfocused collegial discussions.

Digital Fluency - Week Waru

This is a short and unusual animation I've created using scratch. The session was useful in that we had a brief introduction, had a simple piece of coding from the tutor that we could use, not use or even take as a starting point and modify. I think this is a useful approach that I could take into the class. Make it short and snappy, leave all the students with something they can use to allow for success for all right away and then leave it mostly to trial and error.

Throughout my own recent learning journey being a student of coding (I'm learning so I can help start a Game Development club at our school), I've come to see the value in having some basic building blocks and then being left to figure it out. That's the beauty of coding, it encourages problem solving and logical thinking in our students. Game development is a highly motivating platform in which to teach coding, as students get instant, entertaining feedback on the code as their games take shape. I am a convert to teaching game development in the class and have seen my learners across all our curriculum levels excited to do it.

I loved exploring the different tools for teaching computational thinking today. Relating back to the Manaiakalani kaupapa of learning being accessible to all, regardless of socio-economic status, I love that these rich learning tools are free and accessible online. If teachers see the value of it, then school wifi and devices are all that are needed to tap into some incredible learning and set kids on the course towards creativity and even digital careers.

Next I'd like to take 'Compute It' into my classroom as a intuitive, problem solving challenge that I know all of my learners are capable of doing and would get value from.

It's been an intense and truly worthwhile journey on DFI...next step: study for the exam!

Digital Fluency - Week Whitu

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Ubiquitous learning - rewindable, accessible - can help to bridge the gap in educational inequalities. Our lower socioeconomic learners, who often enter school with less oral language (and as a result, at a disadvantage in early literacy learning) than their higher socio- economic counterparts, can have the chance to catch up and revisit new learning with the help of personal devices. I like to think of access to devices in this way, a strategy for combating inequality.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I am steadily gaining confidence adding creativity and functionality to the learning I share with my students online. Today I shared next week's learning on the site, embedding slides and sharing the slides directly into their folders via Hapara and adding Mote voice notes to go alongside written instructions. Feeling stoked.

With the added confidence, I am gaining efficiency in my work as I am less hesitant to give new things a go.

I have shared with my student the Digital Dive lesson that we completed - I learnt a lot about Chromebook shortcuts and I am going to use it as an assessment of my student's capabilities.

Check out this page on my site for a little of what I have done today:

Site link

Digital Fluency - Week Ono

Before:

After:

Site mahi above

Today reinforced the fun, creativity and learning value of sites. I really found the process of going through the exemplars and giving each other feedback on our own sites useful. I realise I still reserved some feelings that my sites was another box to tick. I am reinspired to get stuck in and revamp my site... it's not as user friendly (especially for students with dyslexia) as I would like it to be.

I have bookmarked some exemplars that I feel are achievable layouts to work towards, I feel confident in. my ability to improve my site and make my learning more accessible.

Next step: collect student feedback (Google form), in order to decide upon what I should change or consider.

Feeling inspired to improve the site and make it a place my students want to dive into.

Digital Fluency - Week Rima

A short screencastify of some of my mahi today (no sound)

I like the learning today that our class sites are like a store-front. I've got to advertise to my students, they need to be enticed by the window display to want to step into the learning. If I'm the same, why would they be any different?

That being said, I am now on a mission to make my site as appealing and intuitive as possible. Next steps - get some student feedback, set aside some site building time once a week, think of it as a creative outlet for myself!

I didn't realise that google sites can be configured into all sorts of layouts - I had thught it was somewhat limited and generic. I have picked up some awesome ideas from the high school examples, which I look forward to using in my own site.
I already knew what a time suck playing around on the site can be and I need to be careful to set a timer when I am working on it!

I feel that time spent adding to the site, however, is a meaningful and powerful part of my teaching practice. There is no double dipping, what I share on there is available to the students rather than creating separate documents that I then translate into kids speak and share with the class. I love the rewindable nature of sites, it encourages our students to jump on and catch up on what they missed. Love it.

Bit of a ramble here today, but long story short, I am seeing more of the value of sites and am inspired to improve mine even more.

Digital Fluency - Week Wha

 It's human nature to want to share - food, dreams, thoughts - and kids are no different. In reflection on this, I realised I wasn't giving my students enough time to share. I'm on a journey to creating with them a more dynamic space, but what use is create, create, creat, without allowing others to enjoy and input into it? I have made a decision to give more time and place more value on the practice of blogging in my class. Not an afterthought, but as an integral part of the day. I realise even through my own blogging here, it is a valuable way to reflect, seek feedback and celebrate our creativity.

I have learnt that sheets - understood and used well - is a great way to improve my workflow. The quicker I become with sheets, the less reluctant I'll be to use it. With my students I have realised that I can imbed sheets onto our site, which the students use to track their own mahi and I can easily display learning data e.g. Mathletics leaderboards with the students without having to create a whole other document, I simply download the data and insert in a sheet that I can share on the class site.

Digital Fluency - Week Toru

He aha aku akoranga hei āwhina i taku mārama atu ki te ariā ako me te kaupapa o Manaiakalani?

He aha aku akoranga hei whakawhanake i te ngaiotanga,  i taku māia, i taku kakama, i te rere rānei a te mahi?

He aha aku akoranga kia tukua, kia tohaina atu ki āku ākonga?

  

He aha aku akoranga hei whakawhanake i taku māia, i taku kakama, i te rere rānei a te mahi ki taku ao whaiaro?

Learning is meant to be creative - fun, hands on, authentic. What went wrong in Aotearoa? It shouldn't look the same across all kura and kids should be loving school. Manaiakalani embraces this kaupapa, what am doing to keep creativity front and centre of everything I do as a teacher?

I can see how getting better at using Slides and Draw will improve my work flow, I would save so much time and produce more professional content if I just keep practicing.

I will have a go creating Youtube playlists with my students and putting it up on the class site. We have recently received student feedback that they would like to be listening to music, but my co teacher and I had taken away that option at the start of the year due to concerns over appropriate content and time spent scrolling through channels. I think this would be a cool alternative, especially if the students can co-construct to create the playlists.

Today I learnt to use Slides to create a Pick a Path (Work in progress above). I've started to make a pick a path to engage my class in the Youtube playlist idea and as a discussion point around Youtube boundaries. I look forward to teaching my students to get super creative and make a pick a path, perhaps even as a really fun writing tool.