Hui Reflection Day 1

Today I was at the first day of a two-day hui for the "evolving pedagogies when teaching with digital technologies" project being funded by the University of Auckland.

The main discussion point for this morning is preparing our students for their future. What does that look like and sound like currently, and what does it hope for and assume?


Thoughts about knowledge valued by the school system:

• Is knowledge still power? We think so, but the nature of knowledge is constantly changing. 
• What is the power of having knowledge in your head v knowledge in your device, knowing something v knowing how to find out, knowing what you know v knowing when to Google. 
• The role of the teacher has changed from transmitting to facilitating knowledge building. 

Thoughts about curriculum, choice and learning:

• Students learn best when they're learning about something they see as interesting or relevant. 
• Following student interest and passions in learning v forcing students to experience new content (and form neural connections) that the education system has determined to be important.
• What age is appropriate for students to exclusively follow their existing curiosity and passion, so they are not limited learners later in life?
• Following on from that, is there a basic level of learning and knowledge that students NEED and would be lost without; for example, are times tables necessary any more? 

Thoughts about other things valued by the school system?

• Skills required in the workplace such as cooperation.
• Skills required to succeed in the current economy such as creativity.
• Dispositions such as curiosity, love of learning and resilience in the face of difficulty.
• Expanding students' options for their future (whatever that may look like).

Thoughts about teaching:

• We are in a new age of access; teaching is one of the only careers where professionals consistently work outside of working hours and teachers need to consider when they are available and when they aren't.
• In schools there seems to be a discord between innovation and mastery; moving always to the next next next idea/tool/programme before teachers can master the last, reducing consistency in their teaching.
• Collaboration and sharing between teachers/departments/schools could reduce workload.
• Universities do not model this and instead focus on competition to the detriment of all. 

Reflection on MIT Inquiry

My Problem: raising Year 13 University Entrance in Biology at Tamaki College.

Challenges: 

1. Students of 2016 are often not in biology class for many and varied reasons. Therefore, learning must be available for students online to access in their own time:

• to catch up
• to revise
• to move ahead

Further to that, students must be MOTIVATED to access their learning online.

2. Blogging during the learning of internal assessment content is like walking a tightrope.

This statement from me caused great debate within a few of the 2016 Spark MIT teachers. I said that during internal assessments students blogged during the 'learning' stage; sharing what we had done in class, different activities they completed, any practicals that we did, etc. The example I gave was having students diagnose whether an imaginary patient had Type I or Type II diabetes and share their 'Doctors Chart' online. 

See Fiu's blog post here

Students can't (on the other hand) share online any information they have analysed, synthesized, or extended from class learning or sources online. These understandings that each student has formed are their own. This distinction was made to minimize the risk of plagiarism, as well as meeting assessment conditions and authenticity requirements.  

Another teacher argued that her art class frequently post their emerging products online for peers to give each other feedback and help; and isn't this the nature of collaboration? I couldn't help but agree with her sentiment. 

However in Biology we assess the understanding of a concept that students are able to put into words and explain, analyse, or link, so to have access to another students' explanations would blur the lines of assessment as it currently stands. 

Term 1 Summary: 

1. I have been using Google Docs to create my visible planning that students can access. I had to explicitly show them that the column on the left is where their learning outcome is written, and the two columns on the right contain activities of different levels. I have used SOLO levels to differentiate the tasks.

Potential challenge: I am unsure whether my class actually understands SOLO levels, or that they are set out to gradually build understanding of a concept. 

2.   I could also be using Google Calendar, or Hapara's new Workspaces on Teacher Dashboard to format my visible planning. 

Potential challenge: I should survey my class as to which format would be the easiest for them to navigate, and which one they would be most likely to access and use to catch up or revise. 

3.   Halfway through learning the internal I surveyed students as to how they were using the visible planning document. I asked students:

• to describe where they could find my visible planning (all of them could).

Only 1/4 of the students who had accessed it outside of class time had used it to catch up, despite every student in the class missing more than one lesson throughout the term. 

• did they look at the learning outcomes for the unit?
• had they used it in another way?

4.  Challenge: due to the amount of time I have lost with this class, I have not asked students to reflect on whether the visible planning was helpful during their assessment, or what I could do better/more/differently to assist their learning. However, one student took the time to respond in their weekend to provide me some feedback (which was really nice of her!) She said:

What worked:

1. It worked for me because we have done an assessment similar to this one Yr 12.
2. Youtube videos were more helpful than website.
3. The topic was pretty interesting that I wanted to learn more about it.
4. I like that the teacher was always there when I needed feedback or when I think I’m going off topic.

What didn’t:

1. The time wasn’t long enough for me to do it my research properly.
2. Didn’t have enough understanding for the topic and what the structure for the assessment will be.
3. Researching helps but not so much information about the homeostasis whole cycle.
4. The time of the assessment was not a great, a lot of distraction was on at the time.
5. Distracted from other assessment and other stuff.
6. I went off topic most of the time because the topic was quite interesting i guess.

So overall, the website and activities were not so useful (although, this is based off the small sample size of just one student) and perhaps I wasn't clear enough in explanations of content OR the assessment criteria. This is a rather large failing on my part; I thought we had spent plenty of time covering basic homeostasis and different homeostatic systems, but from this student's perspective perhaps I did not.  

I suspect that this student may have found youtube videos more useful during the writing of the assessment because the visible planning document provided links to class activities such as reading simple presentations and answering questions, completing interactive animations, making and placing SOLO hexagons to discuss links between concepts - rather than just providing information to use in the assessment.

The activities were usually completed in class with teacher explanations occurring before, discussions between friends occurring during, and plenty of time for questions to be asked. Perhaps as a stand-alone document this format of visible planning is not as useful for the single solo learner trying to catch up on missed class time? However, it also can't simply provide links to resources for the assessment, as students require understanding before they can begin to understand and process resources online.  

The student did also have some other feedback (to herself!) 

What I would do again if I could?

1. Definitely my time management because I thought it would be easy so I left it to the last minute to do it.
2. Search for a lot of information on the internet to get more understanding about the topic.
3. Take note when the teacher is explaining the topic.

Another point to note from her feedback is around the clarity of assessments. We discussed this at Spark MIT again; isn't that exactly what we wanted when we were time-pressed at university? WHAT do I need to know to succeed? What do I have to DO? So I understand where she is coming from. We are within our boundaries to provide NCEA students with generalized marking schedules, as long as no exemplar judgment statements are included. So I have done that for their current internal, just as University students are providing with marking schedules for their assessments!  

5. Random positive outcome: some students' blogs have been so clear and concise that they can act as resources for students who missed a lesson. Case in point - Sela quickly caught up on the idea of phototropism by reading Rita's blog, and was able to create her own within the same lesson! 

Where to Next: 

1. Find out what students need in the time that they're with me.
2. Find out what they need if they're away and need to catch up.
3. Find out what would motivate students to access the online tool - because success in NCEA may not be enough to overcome any barriers in formatting, clarity, lack of understandable resources etc! 
4. Will have to survey them after school so as not to remove them from more class time, and will probably provide food to tempt them to stay! 
5. Upgrade sites with marking schedules. 
6. Provide time in class to interact with assessment requirements; perhaps have time in class to make own schedules? 
7. Consider how to swap the format of online planning; back to websites with links and videos and explanations? But then I am explaining content and could potentially just be giving students answers on a plate! 

Kahoot - Fun for All (and Data for Teachers)

All of my classes (except Year 11, for some reason) LOVE Kahoot. Even the Year 13's love Kahoot and regularly ask for it. 9KLe plays it every Friday afternoon, as a reward for working well and also for me to collect data and see who has understood what and where I need to go next. 

In case you don't know, Kahoot is a revision tool where teachers can easily and quickly set up multi-choice questions. Then during class time the questions and options can be projected up onto the board for students to answer on their devices. This comes complete with music and a constantly updating leaderboard.  I like to just ask 10 questions, and a review can be done in under 5 minutes, but that's just me. 

An important note: If you want to use the data from the game, students must log in with a username you can recognise. Just their name, for instance. I concede to modifications of their name; for example Robin in KLe likes to be Echo Robin, while Pili in Y13 likes to cleverly merge his name with the topic being quizzed, e.g. Pilikinesis

Link for teachers: getkahoot.com

Link for students to log in and play during class: kahoot.it 

Once all the fun and games are over, you can log back in and look at the full data set from the game. This is how:

Step 1: Sign in

Step 2: Look on the bottom-right hand side of the next webpage that you're taken to, and click on the little blue, green and yellow Drive button for the quiz's data you want to download to Google Drive, or the purple one if you want to download another way.

Step 3: Click save.

Step 4: Choose where to save your results to. I have a folder for Year 9 Kahoot data in my drive. Hit change to choose your save destination.

Step 5: When happy with the destination, click save.

Step 6: Open it by clicking the Kahoot Results link and have a look.

Step 7:  Quickly see which student got the most correct, or scroll sideways across to see which question/s stumped students the most (in red). 

Research and Soapbox

This morning I am in at Epsom Campus at the Faculty of Education, observing Dawn Garbett teaching her 614 course to fledgling science teachers. My job this morning is to observe in the "video camera" style - recording what I see, hear, notice and think during her lesson. 

My particular focus is on pedagogical underpinnings, on and off task behaviour with devices, proficiency with devices, when students are most and least engaged, and anything that interests me. 

This is part of a research project aimed to help all of us in the research group reflect on and improve our practice, particularly around the use of devices in class. 

The main digital tool utilised in Dawn's very practical, excellent, investigatory (which chips are the crunchiest, which are the oiliest, design an investigation, GO!) lesson was gosoapbox.com; a site that I will investigate further later today as it has the fascinating feature of a confusion-meter for people to anonymously confess their confusion online!

Gosoapbox.com also has quiz, poll and discussion features, although the thread on the discussion board doesn't appear to allow people to respond to others' comments, unlike a blog or Google+, or numerous other tools. 

As I sit here and make "critical friend" comments on my notes of Dawn's lesson I wonder how I can be more purposeful in my selection and use of tools, and the benefits they provide for my students.

SPARK Innovative Teacher Day #1

This morning instead of heading to Tamaki College I caught the train to SPARK headquarters in Auckland's Central Business District for my first Spark Innovative Teacher day.

Our first activity 

The first order of business was for each of us to speak about the problem leading us to apply for the programme. However; we were banned from innovating! No solutions were to be spoken of! We could only try to identify the specific problem that learners in our class face.

It was difficult at first. Our instinct as teachers was to go straight from identifying a problem to hypothesizing a possible solution. We found the problems identified were often broad, such as "second language learners in my class are not performing as well as they should be," or "students in my class cannot communicate their learning needs."

Each of us faced five minutes of polite but relentless questioning, and eventually each of us managed to identify a specific problem we want to address this year. The problem second-language learners face became (more specifically) "Samoan-speaking English-as-second-language learners in my Year 5 and 6 class are not completing a year's worth of learning within a year, and are therefore continuing to fall further behind the New Zealand national mean for reading."

My reflection 

When I applied for this role last year my problem was more of a question; "how can I improve achievement in Year 13 Biology learners at a decile 1 secondary school?" and I came up with one possible solution; having all of my planning and activities on-line for learners to access any pace, any time, any place, to allow them to catch up on missed lessons or accelerate ahead of the class.

However, after a bit of prompting at today's meeting I identified the biggest problem my class is facing; most learners who take Biology at Year 13 at Tamaki College are hoping to have a career in the Health industry and require entrance to University the following year, and historically very few learners have managed to pass a) all internals and b) at least one external that they need to gain University Entrance (UE) in Biology.

Unlike the Primary School teachers in this group I couldn't hone in further on just one aspect that is specifically contributing to this problem. Primary teachers focussing on a writing problem could focus on (for example) learners' depth of narrative, punctuation, vocabulary, and could do so based on their classes e-asttle data, PAT scores, etc that differentiate the skills required for learners' achievement.

In Year 13 I can only hypothesize about the underlying causes of the problem with UE results. There are many possibilities, and they are varied. For example:

• Attendance in class.
• Direct access to the teacher. 
• Quality of teaching.
• Intrinsic motivation. 
• Whanau/school connections. 
• Context or relevance of the curriculum to students' lives, culture, or identities. 
• Learning styles. 
• Assessment style. 
• Fear, nerves or lack of practice around exams. 
• Self-efficacy, self-belief, or self-fulfilling prophecies.

The underlying cause of the historic Year 13 achievement problem could be any or (far more likely) a combination of these factors. For pragmatic reasons my inquiry will have to address just one of these possible factors, and I am slightly nervous about selecting the wrong one and effecting no major change for the precious futures of  the Year 13's I'm responsible for in 2016!

I am also aware of the possibility that at the end of the year the results of my inquiry will be "having visible planning and learning on-line appears to make no significant difference to the University Entrance of Year 13 biology students."

However; even a result of no significant change is still a result, and future innovative teachers could inquire into a different potential solution to the Year 13 UE challenge. That is the worst-case scenario though.

Hope for the year

I am hoping that whichever hypothesis I choose to test helps solve the historic problem facing my class, and  help them on their pathway into University and beyond!

What Teachers Do In Their Holidays

Day 1 of holidays (Saturday): in at uni to work on my honours dissertation.

Day 2 of holidays (Sunday): Nice early start to head down to Wellington for the BioLiveChemEd 2015 conference that begins this evening. 

Day 3 of holidays (Monday): 9am keynote lecture at the conference at Victoria University.

Day 3 of holidays, mid morning (Monday): a seminar on the post-tea-house model of teaching. Couldn't get internet access AGAIN so posted all my notes through my phone onto twitter (see below):

Day 3 of holidays, afternoon (Monday): in the lab to learn how to get the most out of a heart dissection. I was reminded of what it feels like to be a student - I couldn't hold the names of the parts of the heart in my head, so had to take a picture on my phone and then went about labelling them using a photo editing app in my phone. It helped to clarify what was what, and also reminded me that students probably also need to do, use or create something with new information.

Still day 3 of holidays (Monday): Conference dinner and scientists version of dinner fun - making a fantasy molecule from marshmallows and toothpicks. Behold: a hypervalent butterflyne!

Day 4 of holidays (Tuesday): More workshops and tutorials, managed to win a 'mystery prize' from guessing the answer to a question. 

 

Day 4 of holidays, mid morning (Tuesday): keynote lecture from Dr Siouxsie Wiles. I was a bit of a fan-girl and went to get a picture with her afterwards. I learned that antibiotic resistance is spreading and 'superbugs' are found in every country of the world now, including New Zealand. The World Health Organisation predicts that within 10 years routine surgery or even cutting your finger could become life-threatening again because of a lack of effective antibiotics, as the bacteria evolve to resist them. Dr Wiles wants to start a 'Shroom Club, where citizens collect fungi from around NZ and send them to her lab to be tested for their potential use as new antibiotics or vaccines, using bioluminescent transgenic bacteria (like tuberculosis, skin infections or food poisoning) to screen them.

 

Day 4 of holidays (Tuesday): biochemical keynote on molecules that mimic other molecules and bind to the chemicals receptor, making your body think there's a higher concentration of those molecules. What I took away from this is that touching receipts causes oestrogen-mimicking molecules to be absorbed straight through the skin on our fingers (not great), and that these can also pass easily through the placenta of a pregnant woman to her unborn child. And this might be one of the factors affecting early onset puberty in girls.

Day 5 of holidays (Wednesday): Workshop run by Benjamin Himme on some cool new digital tools and teachery tricks, like Kaizena (a google docs add-on that lets you record verbal feedback snippets rather than typing) and using Planboard rather than google calendar because you can shift whole lines of lessons that run overtime, or if something unexpected pops up.

Day 5 of holidays (Wednesday): end of conference, once again couldn't get internet access in the main hall, forgot how difficult I find concentrating while handwriting notes. These ARE actually notes. The main thing I took away from this was about the Information Processing Model, which says that students (and people in general) can't hold more than 7 (plus or minus 2) bits of information in their working memory for long, so practice or exam questions or activities with more than 7 steps causes a huge drop in achievement...

 

Day 6 of holidays (Thursday): straight into designing a website for Y13's final external and trying to wrap my head around millions of years of human evolution before I teach it. Being a first year Biology teacher means I have to re-learn a lot of content from 8 years ago!

Day 7 of holidays (Friday): When your flatmate has her day off from work and gets to chill but you're still working. At least there's someone to talk to.

Day 8 and 9 of holidays: NOT WORKING. Having weekend. Very good.

Day 10 of holidays (Monday): In at school for a day of work, providing students a quiet place to work on whatever they felt like. I didn't help them or push them too much because I was still trying to sort out human evolution, but I was there when they asked questions so that was good.

Day 11 of holidays (Tuesday): working on year 12 external. Forgot photo.

Day 12 of holidays (Wednesday): working on year 12 internal. Forgot photo.

Day 13 of holidays (Thursday): Spent the morning at home working on the last year 13 internal, and then back in to uni in the afternoon to meet with my supervisor and fix up my ethics proposal. My brain was pretty tired by the time I took this pic.

Day 14 of holidays (Friday): While I have been working on overall unit plans, coming to terms with assessment standards and studying content, I realised I don't have anything concrete actually planned for Monday. Hence this face.

Day 15 and 16 of holidays: NOT WORKING!

How to Create Stop Motions by Phoenix

Stop Motion Animations - How to create Stop Motion Animations 

(This guide was created for Miss wells upon request)

Requirements:

• A chromebook
• Play-doh or whatever you are using to create,
• Patience,
• Listen to the teacher, Use your ears, that's why they exist
• Use your eyes, use your brain. Common sense.
• Google Presentation

What you have to do:

1)	Get your laptop out and everything you need.	This shouldn’t take long
2)	Open the ‘Camera’ App (It’s bundled on every chromebook) ...Something like this:
3)	Adjust your laptop so your play-doh creation is going to be in the middle of the picture
4)	Keep hitting spacebar to take pictures and move your playdoh around just a little, make sure it’s different each frame.	Or hit this button
5)	When you’ve finished click here, on the bottom left
6)	Click on one picture you took
7)	Click this button, Save to disk
8)	Hit save (It’s easier to also just create a folder depending on how many shots you take)
9)	Repeat Step 7 and 8 for the rest of your shots	You can’t multi select, I tried that already many times...Unless you know how to do so then go ahead.
10)	Get it ready to insert into your Google Presentation by clicking Insert then Image and choosing it from the folder you made.

FAQ:

- No, you can’t multi-select to save Photos, I tried that already, unless you know how then go ahead…

+Phoenix Lemalu 

Tamaki College

9PEm (Migrated)

(C) Phoenix L (phoenix2dcr9sz@tamaki.ac.nz)