MIT 2022 - Moonshot Proposal

I am privileged to be participating in the 2022 Manaiakalaani Innovative Teachers programme. Our first task was to complete a Moonshot Proposal Slide. We typed up our thoughts and ideas (hunches). This is what I've observed in the last few years at school while mentoring and working alongside new teachers starting at our school.

Then I was buddied up with Pip and Anna. I had to ask Anna 5 WHY questions about her challenge, and Pip had to ask me the 5 WHY questions. (Thank you Pip for challenging me on this). 

Through this thinking process, I had to really think hard about what the WHY is. Why is this a challenge and why do I think this is important.  The 5 Why's process helped me to get to the root of the problem quickly. In order to get to a good solution, it's important that I had a strong idea of what the problem/challenge is. 

My challenge is about how new teachers starting at a school feel quite overwhelmed with understanding the curriculum, planning, assessment etc. 

My goal is to make it easier for new teachers to find their feet in schools in order for students to get the best teaching as soon as possible so that no time is wasted while teachers are trying to figure out how to group students, what levels they are, what to teach etc.

I am looking forward to this new journey. 

Returning to school with Chris Walker

A couple of days ago we started to prepare to return to school after 3 months of lockdown. I immediately felt my thoughts swishing through my brain. What are we going to do with the students for 3 weeks? Should we be doing formal work at some point? What will the students need? What did they miss? How can we make school inviting to them? Then I attended the Ti Rito Toi webinar with Chris Walker. 

What a great webinar to attend. The focus was on sharing the Ti Rito Toi resources. But the motivation that I received from the speakers, made me feel relaxed and excited about going back.

Carol Mutch highlighted how we should make our school/class inviting and inclusive. 

Lynda Stuart pointed out that students should feel safe, secure and loved. Take the time to sit alongside the students. Don't pepper them with questions. Just sit next to them, join in the activities. Have a casual chat. Students need will naturally have conversations with you and with their peers. And the best way to encourage those conversations is through art, drama and caring stories. Students should have the opportunity to laugh and sing. Some ideas are balloons, puppets, music etc.

He Tangata, He Tangata, He Tanagate = It's all about the people (As highlighted in a previous blog of mine)

Peter O'Conner emphasized it's about catching up with relationships. Getting back to patterns and the rhythms of life. The book Te Meke Tuatara (A little kindness goes a long way) is a great way to help with this. 

He posed the question: Do the things you do really matter? And in doing that, do they know it matters? 

To me, the only thing that matters is the well-being of our students. 

And last, Marie Gallichan, a teacher of a year 2-3 class gave some practical examples of fun activities. This includes lots of art activities, a name activity where students add emoji's around their name to show how they felt (this is a great conversation starter...tell me about this emoji, why did you feel like this?), having a bear in the class that students can talk to every time a new student starts attending school. Then the students that came from day 1 (the experts) explains to the bear (including the new students) how things work now. Also options of comic strips, animation and scratch. 

I love the Ti Rito Toi resources. They make it so easy for the teacher. Shalen and I planned on starting with one of the units in the second week. I am looking forward to that. 

Blended Learning with Read&Write for Google Chrome

Copy of the recording

Last night I attended the Blended Learning with Read&Write webinar. A great tool to help all our students. Not just students with learning needs but also gifted students. The tool seems easy enough for our students to use and has multitude possibilities. 

Read&Write Features include: 

Text to Speech

Simplify

Practice Reading Aloud

Vocabulary Builder

Voice Note

OrbitNote PDF Reader

Editing Tools

What stood out for me:

 Read&Write will assist students with reading different types of text and with Simplify you can reduce text to make it shorter or less daunting for the students. Also, students will be able to gain access to all learning without the help of a teacher. This made me think of T-Shape Literacy and how one of the barriers was that not all students can access written text. This would be a great tool to use in conjunction with that, especially as students will be able to listen to information on a PDF format read to them. 

Another cool feature was the highlighting and creating a word bank. I've always wanted to create a personal dictionary for my students, but to keep a handwritten dictionary is not sustainable in a busy class, it's something that slips through the cracks. WIth this tool, it would be so easy to have one and students can build their vocabulary bank. 

And the last feature that caught my eye was the editing tool that helps students with proofreading and editing before submitting. This will ensure that when we have our learning conversations with our students, we will spend more time on the deeper features of their text instead of focussing on surface features such as punctuation and capitalization. 

I'm hoping that we can provide this tool all our students so that students have more authority over their work in a blended learning environment. Moving towards independence and success.

Manaiakalani Toolkit- Google Earth with Steve Smith

 Yesterday I had the priviledge of attending a Google Earth Toolkit by Steve Smith. His enthusiasm defnitely made me excited about using Google Earth. 

Even though we learned about Google Earth during my DFI training, it was one of the tools that I have not yet used to it's full potential in my class. As we went through the many possibilities of using Google Earth, I reaslised how special this could be for our learners from all over the world. So today I used it during our Google Meet with our students. I introduced how to use Voyager. We went on a little tour to all the different places where Diwali is celebrated. (Celebrating Diwali). It was so good to see the different temples, we did a 360 degree turn and could see what it looked around the temple. We learned through noticing that they take their shoes off when they enter their temple, just like our Maori students when they enter a Marae. It's such a good tool to start conversations, compare things, look at people in different countries etc. The possibilities are invinite. 

Further,  I showed my students how to find our school  Google Earth. How to move the person so that you can go into streetview and how to move up or down the street. Some students immediately searched up their homes. 

This is what one of my students did: 

She counted the steps from her home to the school, found her home country, found her favourite holiday destination, identified the place where she wants to live one day, and identified where her favourite animal lives. In just this little casual activity, I gained so much information about her. How great will this activity be at the start of the year when we learn to know our students. Google Earth will defnitely move to the top of my go to applications list. 

Screencastify by Vicki Archer

A great toolkit with Vicki. She highlighted the basic tools while recording. I've seen all the buttons but never took the time to investigate what they can do. It's like a whole new world opened up for me today. What stood out on the basic tools were that you can adjust your countdown timer, annotate your screen, turn your webcam on and of while recording, highlight parts of your screen while you are recording, change your cursor to a flashlight highlighting what you are talking about, and add and remove stickers.

There are also a few cool new features. The one I am most excited about is that you can edit your video. You can blur out students faces, add text, cut or crop out unwanted bits and change where the sounds start or stop. A bit like iMovie.You can add questions in specific spots during the recording which pops up for the students in a box and they choose the correct answer.  How good would that be for during a reading lesson? 

A good tip is for when you want to record tutorials for students, you can create them on screencastify. Each step will be a new screencastify recording, but students will know exactly what to do. 

I am excited to use Screencastify more in my class and for creating tutorials for staff and students. I can recommend this toolkit. 

 

Hapara

 I have been digging a little deeper into Hapara during this lockdown time. 

What are the 3 biggest advantages of using Hapara? 

Teachers can give formative feedback immediately. 

Students can be assisted through Guided Browsing. 

The lesson plan can be created in Workspace

I was particularly interested in Workspace.  I've had a play on it a year or so ago but didn't have the opportunity to use it yet as the time was not right. 

Here are a few reasons why I really like Hapara Workspace: 

You can create lesson plans that are unique and cater to individual learners' needs, therefore easy to differentiate. 

It also allows for collaboration between students. 

Parents are able to follow their children's progress. 

You can embed all the applications you use such as Seesaw, Studyladder, StepsWeb, etc into the Workspace and therefore limiting the number of usernames and passwords that need to be memorized. A bit of an all your eggs in one basket feel.

There is a public curriculum-aligned lessons library where you can draw lesson ideas from. 

It's paperless - but does not exclude the use of paper/books. 

Lessons created on Woskpace stay with the teacher who owns it so can be used in different years. 

If future lockdowns happen, students will be able to continue with their learning as they will already be working online. 

Workspace can be synced with e.g. Google Classroom, even though we don't use it, it is a cool feature. 

Workspace creates opportunities for students to learn in a cohesive way through visible learning. 

If we did use Workspace, students would log into it in the morning and be able to get straight into their work. There would be no need to tell them what to do as they will continue where they stopped the day before. Students will know exactly where to find their work and can work at their own pace.

Lesson Layout on Workspace include: 

Goals: Clear objectives for each lesson. 

Resources: You can provide as many online resources as you want to, to help students understand the new concepts. It could be video clips, articles websites, images, etc. (LEARN)

Evidence: Students get the opportunity to share their learning and understanding. (CREATE) (Informative assessment) These can have a scheduled start and end date.

Rubrics: This is the opportunity for students to self-evaluate whether they have achieved the performance criteria. 

Comparing Seesaw to Workspace

Similarities: 

Life Reporting to Parents

Immediate Feedback

Individual lessons or activities can be created to each student's needs

Seesaw: 

Does not allow for online collaborative work. Posts can only be worked on by one child at a time.

Has a Blog Page

Students can create directly on Seesaw when creating a post. 

Students can leave comments on each other's work.

Teachers can be creative when creating an activity.

American-owned - so activities are not always in line with the NZ curriculum.

It's easy to add voice recordings on the activities for students struggling to read.

Workspace:

A little harder to add recorded instructions but not impossible.

Lessons can be created easily with a clear structure for learning opportunities. (Learn, Create, Share)

Teachers can set assignments or tasks for assessment including due dates.

It's really easy to link resources and create lesson plans.

Lessons from the library are linked with the NZ curriculum and LI's are in kids' speak.

Keeping track of the student's progress is a little easier than on Seesaw. There is an activity summary page where students and teachers can clearly see how they are tracking on with their work. 

These are just a few of the pros and cons I can think of. Am I excited about the possibility to use Workspace in the future? yes, very much so. Because I think it even cuts out a class site. The only class site that might be used for is general announcements or extracurricular activities. Students will then most probably use more Google platforms such as Google Docs/Slides. Seesaw could still be used to collect students' voices.

Teachers can have workshops with mixed groups or with all students that need help in a specific area while the rest of the class continues with the work on Workspace.

Any thoughts or comments will be appreciated.

SharpReading Stage 3 ONLiNE Course

 Yay! I managed to complete my Stage 3 Online Course

I am so happy that I had the opportunity to learn how to use unpacking sentences as a strategy to develop comprehension. The online course is easy to follow. I enjoyed that I could do the course at my own pace and revisit units if needed. It was helpful that I could practice with colleagues either face to face or online.