Reflection on First Science Experience in Room 2

Bridges

Today I would like to reflect on my first science experience in Room 2 (year 3 and 4)

First, I did not manage to get the experience done in week 1 as I intended to. The practical (create) part took much longer than anticipated. Most students were really engaged in it, but there were 3 students that did not want to participate, despite my best efforts to get them involved. (That would be a separate reflection on behaviour).

Secondly, applying Talanoa was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I assumed the students would know what participation and speaking clearly would mean. When we unpacked it, I realised that they had no idea, so I spent some time trying to explain it, but it will need lots of practice and reminding.

Then, I focussed on the wrong aspect of Talanoa first. I chose to focus on questions, and although they understood what that meant, they really struggled to understand how to use the sentence starters, and they really struggle with listening to each other. There is a lot of talking over me as the teacher and their peers.

And lastly, I focussed more on the lesson progression than on the dialogue.

Next steps:
Choose a new focus - listening to each other. Think really carefully about what that looks like.
Create a norm for listening to each other. Display this where everybody can see it.
Work with my focus group first - rather than trying to work with the whole class.
Plan for a shorter lesson.
Look at Colleague's lesson plan examples to ensure I am planning correctly, then share with TLIF team and ask for feedback on my lesson.
Refer back to the textbook on examples of how to introduce the dialogue.

Photos
Just for interest - here are some photos of what the students created. We wrote in our books the criteria of the bridges which was: it had to be 30cm long, had to be strong and had to have one of the structured we learned about.
Then they drew a diagram in the books with labels. After we built the bridge, we took a photo and pasted it in our books to compare what we planned and what we actually did. And then they completed a little reflection sheet to determine if they kept to the criteria and what they would do differently next time.

DFI Session 6 Diving into data

Diving into data

Today we focus on Visible    The Game of School 

Steve Hargadon website for The Game of School

What are the things that can make the biggest difference in making shifts in students learning?
- Having learning Visible
- Feedback and feedforward (very powerful). Not only in writing but verbally.
- Opening it up to parents.
- Giving students the opportunity to track their learning.
- Learning intentions. Students will not know what is important and what they need to do well if we don't deliberately tell them. You can not over display what is coming. 

School is like a game, and if you know how to play it, you will be successful.

Also, see SUMMARY OF JOHN HATTIES BOOK VISIBLE LEARNING FOR TEACHERS

Google Forms 

Something new I learned is that you can use Forms for assessment by shuffling the question order.

Something amazing to do at the start of the year is to complete a Google Form, including a photo of each child and where they are from. Then pull that form through to Google Maps and it can jot down on the world map where we are from.

Google Sheets:  (One of my favourite Google Apps)

What's new:
Importing names from your master sheet instead of retyping or copying every time.
What an easy way to graph your reading recovery data. Very easy to keep track of students' progress with a sparkline.

Conditional Formatting can highlight areas that are incomplete or above or below.

Also, see my blogpost on Analysing Charli-Rose's Blogs

Collating Data using Spreadsheets

Collating Data using Spreadsheets

Today we had to use what we learned about Sheets to analyse a blog. I chose Charli-Rose's blog as she is from our school. I collated the data of how many times she has blogged per month over the last three years.

From this spreadsheet, I could pull up a graph to clearly show whether there was an increase or decrease in her posts. I decided to use the bar graph to indicate how many posts she has posted. There was a slight decrease in her blogging tempo in 2018 but a huge increase in 2019.

My hypothesis of why there is an increase in her blogging is because she attended the Summer Learning Journey and earned her first badge at the end of 2018 going into 2019. Or possibly, her teacher has blogging as part of their must do's each week. It will be interesting to have a conversation with her around this and hear what she thinks the reasons are for the decrease and increase of blogging.

I enjoy working on Google Spreadsheets especially for analysing data or keeping track of things and see myself using it more and more next year where I will be teaching older students. They could track their own learning and set personal goals for themselves. Looking forward to that. 

Online Toolkit Term 4

Today I had the opportunity to attend an online toolkit by Kerry Boyde-Preece: Gathering student voice with
google forms and sheets.

I think this is an application that we underestimate. It's the perfect way to
collect student voice and to act on it in order to develop a better
class/school culture.

Something that was new to me was how you could look at the data collected
in graph format.

Also, Kerry asked the students in her class, to give feedback on her site
which I never thought of. She learned through that, that her students did not
enjoy watching videos made by her and would much rather learn
through their peers or in teacher contact time (Groupwork).

Slide Show

Something new on Forms is the draft questions that you can import instead of coming up with them by yourself.

A good toolkit Thank you! Will definitely be using it more. 

 

DFI Session 5 Google Sites

Today we had the opportunity to look at examples of sites. We looked at what works well and what does not work so great.

I loved this opportunity to look at examples as I got some lovely ideas for next year ( and even this year). I would like to explore all these possibilities:
- Typing Club
- Pixel Portraits
- Number of the day challenge
- Padlet
- Blogs (photos of kids with link to their blog)
- Kiwi Kids News
- Skoolbo
- Khan Academy
- Whizz
- Teacher Tools
- Studyladder
- Dance Mat Typing
- Teaching Tables
- Scratch
- Sunshine Classis
-Matific

Examples
Slide on Sites

When creating a blog keep the following in mind:
We should have a photo of the teacher and name on the landing page.
Plan your site - Think of your learners, their needs, your theme, how are the students going to access it, why are you using the site. Planning your site with your whole team is very important. (Whiteboard moment).

 Plan forward as to how you will archive or change your site so that the previous terms work is not lost but the latest work is visible first. Think of a colour theme. Avoid unicorn spews (All the colours of the rainbow). Avoid that the header is taking up too much space. 3 CLick rule NB!

We evaluated each others sites and got ideas on how to improve our sites. Mine was pretty weak compared to some of the others, but I got some great ideas for next year. We had some time to work on our sites. This is what our Room 2 site looks like at the moment.

All in all a great session today and it was really good that we had the opportunity to work on our sites and ask questions if we got stuck.