Responses from my learners about their learning.

It was interesting to find out what my learners think about themselves as learners. I made the form about their learning as a whole and not just focussed in Writing. The reason for this is because, through my inquiry, I hope they will gain more confidence in other areas of their learning or use their strengths from other curriculum areas to accelerate their progress in writing. 

From reading their responses, I could also see some of them were not very confident in unpacking themselves as learners. This will be another aspect of my on going inquiry. Scaffolding my students to be self reflective in their learning. 

Below are the information from the students. Very rich data for myself for my inquiry.

My inquiry plan

Inquiry focus on Writing

My focus for my inquiry this year is on Writing. As mentioned in my previous post, Writing has been identified as an area of concern for our school. This was concluded after our senior management team analysed our data from last year and the previous year. We as a staff also analysed the data and agreed that Writing will be our focus area for our Teaching as Inquiry this year. 

Inquiry design

My inquiry design has many aspects which I have been thinking for quite some time. As I listened to my fellow COL teachers present at the 2019 Burst and Bubbles evening, I decided my inquiry this year will have a lot of focus on the Creating and Sharing aspect of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. I feel the Learn part was covered quite well but the Create and Sharing needed more focus. 

Another aspect for my inquiry design I have reflected upon was the integration of Reading and Writing. As a teacher I often hear the words integrated curriculum and I have been thinking about how well am I integrating curriculum areas? What specific learning activities am I designing to ensure the students are working across the curriculum and integrating their learning skills? 

I will put a lot of focus on planning learning activities where the students are learning content and sharing their learning by creating DLOs (digital learning objects) to teach their peers and their blog audiences about what they are learning. During the lockdown this year, I feel my students and I have gained so much more confidence in using digital tools to share our learning. I am also in the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency programme and this is empowering me to help my learners in using digital technologies for their learning.

This year, I have changed my groupings from having separate Reading and Writing groups to having Literacy groups. If I am to integrate Reading and Writing, then I feel the students staying in the same group for literacy will enable the students to work through their integrated activities. For example, reading materials which are linked to the writing genre we are focussing on as a group. 

I have been doing some readings online and I came across this from an educational facility in Australia called Arrendell Education. 

Research has found that when children read extensively they become better writers. Reading a variety of genres helps children learn text structures and language that they can then transfer to their own writing. In addition, reading provides young people with prior knowledge that they can use in their stories. One of the primary reasons that we read is to learn. Especially while we are still in school, a major portion of what we know comes from the texts we read. Since writing is the act of transmitting knowledge in print, we must have information to share before we can write it. Therefore reading plays a major role in writing.

Retrieved from https://www.arrendell.com.au/importance-integrating-reading-writing-learning-process/

The WFRC (Woolf Fisher Research Centre) will be a vital source of information and support for my inquiry. The practices in the image below are actions I worked on implementing last year in my inquiry. This year I will continue to focus on these practices with a more robust inquiry plan. 

I am quite eager to see the effects of integrating Reading and Writing in my classroom practice. Some might question if I have not been integrating Reading and Writing earlier. The answer is yes to some degree but the students were in one Writing group then they would be in another group for Reading with a different set of peers working on other tasks. Integration will look like reading together, discussing together and creating together. 

There is also the focus on specific skills in writing. Below are the key characteristics of the writing standard for Year 8 students. For the Year 7 students, it is very similar the only difference being the level of control the Year 8 students need to have on their writing. My planning will ensure the standards are incorporated into activities.

My inquiry question is: Will an integrated literacy programme with a focus on Learn, Create, Share accelerate the writing achievement of my target learners?

I have made this Google Drawing to map out my inquiry design. I know there will be changes along the way as I work my way through my inquiry. I am also eager to receive some feedback or ideas from my blog viewers. 

I will finish this blog post off with a quote I heard during one of our DFI sessions. It will be the essence of my teaching inquiry this year.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 4 - Data

As Dorothy said today, 'sharing has been happening since time began'. I totally agree. Thinking about the Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share, why create if we do not have the opportunity to share? We create so we are able to share what we have learnt or experienced. For myself, I post a lot on my social media because I want to share with my friends and family what is happening in my life. I share on my professional blog to show others what I am experiencing in my teaching practice. Therefore, I totally tautoko that importance of Tohatoha. 

Another important learning I gained from the Tohatoha deep dive is sharing as we learn and not sharing when we are finished. I will be putting more focus on this in my classroom practice. Students need to understand that sharing is in the process of learning. 

I use Hapara to manage student work, devices, log ins, activities but it was interesting to learn about other features I did not know about. One of the features was creating groups in Hapara. I am creating a group in Hapara for my target group with my Teaching as Inquiry. 

I have some confidence in using Google Forms. I use Google forms for surveys and also for quizzes. My students enjoy completing quizzes because it gives them their marks at the end of the test. I once created a quiz last year where I did not tick ONE RESPONSE ONLY. The result was me going through multiple entries from some students who wanted to get 100% for the test. Validity of data gone out the window! Learnt my lesson from that mistake. 

For our create activity in Google Forms today, I created a short quiz to refresh my students' memories about our class novel. We started the novel then stopped during Lockdown. 

Here is my Google Form:

The Google Sheets session was really helpful today. I totally agree that looking at data tells a story especially after my profiling mission last week with my target group with their writing results see blog Profiling by digging deeper blog post 

In completing my profiling last week, the content I learnt today about Google Sheets would have made my task so much more easier. I did not know about Conditional Formatting. That would have cut the time I spent formatting my sheets to a fraction. 

Our create task today was to analyse blog posts in student blogs. I first analysed one student from my class. I learnt last year, she did not make as many blog posts as she had the year before. This year, she has made more than double the amount of blog posts from last year by the middle of this year.

After working on Dwayne's blog, I decided it would be good for me to analyse how many blog posts all my students have made this year so far. First I gathered the data by finding out how many blog posts have been made in 2020. I then entered these data on a Google Sheet. I sorted the data from least number of blog posts to the most blog posts made. After that, I created a chart. Very easy to identify the students who have been doing a lot of blogging and the students I need to work with to give them more confidence and support with their blogging.

Here is the analysis for my whole class in a chart.

Great learning today and I am finishing off the day with a challenge to ensure the next time I analyse my class' blog posting, the chart will look much different to the one above. 

My profiling continues with collecting student voice

I created this Google Form to collect student voice from my target group about their strengths in their learning and also to gather information about their thoughts about writing.

I recall Aaron telling us to focus on what the students' strengths and use those to maximise their learning in our inquiries. 

I am really interested to learn about what the students view as their strengths in their learning and other information this form will collect from my target students. 

Here is the Google Form:

Profiling by digging deeper

Profiling

Aaron has emphasised time and time again the importance of profiling our students before beginning our inquiries. This year I have spent a lot more time and effort in profiling my learners. I have a group of 10 students who are in my target group. My curriculum area of focus this year is in Writing. 

What I wanted to know:

I wanted to know the story of the students and their writing progress for the last five years. I wanted to find out when they made progress, accelerated in their writing or even stalled in their progress. After all the data collection I wanted to analyse what has been happening and with which teacher and year level did major changes occur. 

Data collection:

I accessed through ETAP the writing results from the year 2014-2020. I wanted the beginning, middle and end of year assessment data in Writing. The data collection itself was not as challenging as I thought once I sought assistance from the ETAP helpdesk. 

Once I printed out each year's data, I collated the information on a spreadsheet starting from 2020-2014. After doing that, I realised, if I wanted to see a trend I was actually looking at the data backwards. I should start from 2014-2020. Therefore I made a copy of the first spreadsheet and started from the year 2014-2020. See table below and 2014-2020 Writing Levels Spreadsheet

Analysis

Looking at the above table, at first I thought well its is showing some progress and some dips in progress. I also thought, it is normal for students to start in the junior school at level one and progress to levels 2, 3 and so on as they move to the senior school. I also noticed that a few of the students in my target group did not have a lot of data on our database as they joined Glenbrae School later in their primary years. To me, that does not mean their achievement is not valid or unimportant. We will have to their first assessment entries as their baseline data.

Diving deeper into the data

However, as I sat at home that night, I kept looking at the data and thinking there is more to what I am seeing on the surface. I need to dig deeper. I was actually very eager to see what the data said and I knew I had to dig deeper. I had to investigate.  Therefore, I made yet another copy of the spreadsheet and started to identify the difference between each assessment point.

With that question in mind I started comparing assessment results by comparing if there was a shift from the last assessment entry of if there was a drop. 

After doing that analysis, this is what the spreadsheet looked like. I also wrote down my notes on what I was seeing from the analysis. Refer to table below and Profiling analysis and notes spreadsheet  

What did the data tell me?
The more I studied the spreadsheet, the more I was intrigued with what I was learning. I kept thinking as I was looking at the data, "What has been happening throughout these years for my students in writing?". Below are some of the findings I found analysing the data. I still feel there are some more trends I have yet to identify.

Now what?

With that I have learnt from analysing the data, one of my goals this year is to accelerate my students in writing and ensure they do not fall back on their writing skills and results. The how will be in another blog post but I am happy I took the time to look at what has been happening with my target group with writing in the past. I also plan to share my analysis with our teaching team so we are able to unpack and discuss what the data says and the trends. I always value the input of our teaching team and I look forward to what they can bring to the discussion. It will also be good for my colleagues to do an analysis of their own target student as I find there is so much value in profiling the students. 

Where to next?

I still have to gather student voice for my baseline data. I will do that early next week. After that, it is finalising my inquiry design by looking at student voice, professional development, staff discussions and whanau voice which I have to gather next week. 

Putting my DFI learning into practise

Yesterday the Create part of our DFI course was so motivating for me. To think of the many fun and exciting activities my class and I will work through is just wonderful.

Post lockdown, I want to capture the students' feelings as they come back to school. I wanted to them reflect on how lockdown was for them and share their experiences. 

I created a Google Drawing with prompt questions for them to answer. I deliberately made the Google Drawing A4 because I did not want too much room for writing. I wanted the students to explain their responses in detail using screencastify.

Richie and Dwyane were the first to finish their screencastify. I am very proud of my students for their Learn, Create and Share work.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 3 - Media (Post 2/2)

The Youtube session was quite interesting. I use Youtube on a daily basis and my Youtube channel consists of family movies I put together for family events. I have always been cautious of listing the materials I upload on Youtube as unlisted. That was a great reminder today about our settings and setting the sharing settings to unlisted. I really value the reinforcement Dorothy reminded us about regarding the danger of Youtube for our students. Cybersmart is so vital especially with Youtube. 

It was wonderful to explore so many other ways we can use Google Drawings. My students, especially the boys enjoy using Google Drawings to create digital art. We have to have a digital art exhibition soon to showcase their awesome artwork. Below is my About Me, Google Drawing using Vicki's template. 

Google slides is an application I use more than any other Google app. I have confidence in using Google Slides for presentations and for teaching materials but like always my world was expanded beyond my imagination today. I especially enjoyed creating my Pick a Path Quiz today with Venessa. I have always wanted to learn how to create a Pick a Path story or quiz and now I have. I am really keen for my students to do the same. 

Today for my create activity, I created this homophone quiz. There are many little steps in making a pick a path quiz or story and I plan to make many more to be more confident and efficient in making these fun activities. 

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 3 - Media (Post 1/2)

The presentation by Dorothy about the CREATE aspect of the Manaiakalani pedagogy was a very empowering session for me. As Dorothy was presenting, my mind was off in so many paths thinking about what I have been doing in my practice and how I can dive into more meaningful creativity activities with my students. 

The above quote is taken from a Pt England School poster. My interpretation of this statement is: our students are active participants in their learning to learn, challenge and create using the content they learn. Our students are not passive participants in their own learning. Like a waka, they are in the waka rowing with us. 

The above quote from Dr Jessen is very valuable. I have been thinking a lot about the Manaiakalani pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share and how I can better implement this pedagogy in my practice. I have also been planning my CoL inquiry in Writing around CREATING as it is the HOOK which hooks the learners. 

I will discuss my CoL inquiry around creating in Writing in a another blog post coming soon. Watch this space. 

A reflective post I have posted to my class blog as a post lockdown reflection

The past six weeks have been an amazing journey of learning, reflecting and adjusting. When we first started the lockdown, my biggest fear was - how are my students going to cope with their learning from home? How can I support them when they are not in class? Will the parents be able to help with their learning activities?

However...I strongly believe we have made it work Room 7. We utilised the technology we are blessed to have today, we utilitised the cluster we are blessed to be in and we also utilised the kaupapa of our school and made it work.

Having the hangouts was a great way to see you all and learn together. There were days I felt like the hangout was just simply a hangout where we chatted then you would go off and enjoy your day not giving a second through to your work. A few motivational speeches from Mrs Tofa changed that (I still have to copyright my motivational speech guys).

The blogs have been my go to for the last six weeks. Looking at your blog posts provided a wealth of knowledge, insight and appreciation to your efforts in your learning. Your individuality really comes across in your blog posts. Some of you really are fabulous authors with the way you present your personal voice in your blog posts.

I tried to incorporate your home life in your learning activities. Your whanau recipes were great, our whanau challenges for ANZAC, our school assembly...just pure joy to see. I hope through this lockdown you have been able to see just how important your home learning is as well as your school learning. I also hope you and your whanau have built on your capacity to work together in your learning. Remember this is all for you and your future. The more effort you put in, the more you will be able to receive in success.

Lastly my thank yous. First I would like to thank myself for being Room 7's greatest teacher (lol) just kidding. I would firstly like to thank all of you who consistently tried your best in your learning during the lockdown. Thank you for persevering with your learning. I would also like to thank your parents and caregivers for their on going support. I hope they have been able to enjoy and learn from our learning activities throughout the lockdown weeks. Big thank you to the Manaiakalani team for their support in setting up our hangout links and being there for me to call upon when I needed help. A massive faafetai lava to our Glenbrae whanau Mrs Patea and our staff members for the great team work and communication and guidance during the lockdown.

A special thank you which deserves to be in its own paragraph would have to be for our government. Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the cabinet not forgetting Dr Bloomfield who is now almost as famous as Taika Waititi or maybe more famous? The support for education and our country has been phenomenal. I am truly grateful for how the government managed the Covid-19 pandemic and how they are still managing the effects of this pandemic on our nation.

Now, as we prepare to head back to school. I know some of you are excited and some might not be too excited about the early morning rises. Just be grateful we had experienced what we had with the lockdown. Covid-19 has changed the world in many ways. We are adaptive and resilient people and now we will go into school on Monday to make adjustments to our new norm.

With that, see you all on Monday. The photo is a preview of what our classroom will look like. I still have to fit in a few more tables in to cater for our class.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Day 2 - Workflow

Today, our first session was about connecting with the Manaiakalani Pedagogy of Learn, Create, Share. 

The photo above taken from Kerry's slides today talks about the Manaiakalani programme being evidence based and highlights the use of and move from the analogue world to the digital world. It also highlights the importance of teacher effectiveness in accelerating learning outcomes. 

Throughout Kerry's presentation we were reminded of how important the teacher is and teacher actions are to the digital learning world and in accelerating the learning of our students. 

'Teacher actions are vital in engaging students in positive learning experiences'

The acronym RATE was also discussed which encompasses how teachers can be effective in their practice in the digital world of our learners. 

The four recommendations from WFRC are very valuable in my teaching practice. I am glad it was discussed in Kerry's session today. I have implement these recommendations in my practice to a certain degree but I know I can do more to be more effective in my practice. 

Last year as a CoL teacher, my inquiry was in Reading. Authentic texts to me is more than about students reading about topics of interest to them. It is about enabling students to have access to texts which challenges their current knowledge and enables them to read beyond what they know and how they read. The texts can be multimodal. As Aaron has shared wide and deep focus. A wide variety of reading texts with a narrow focus by zoning in to texts through discussions. 

The value of discussions are so crucial to how students learn. However, I feel there is a lot of work to be done in building an environment of inclusiveness where children feel their opinions are safe to be voiced and are valued. 

Again, I absolutely value the recommendations from WFRC and the data they provide for our cluster. 

Here are my learnings about the Google Apps we learnt about today:

Our last session today was about Taming our Tabs

I learnt today that you can delete the text when you are saving a tab to your Bookmarks and it leaves the icon to show on your Bookmarks bar. Great for saving space. I downloaded the One Tab extension and it is great. So much better to have a tidy work station/screen. I have yet to explore the other extensions Gerhard was presenting to us. 

For our create activity today, we had to create an invitation to a buddy from our discussion bubbles. My buddy was Elizabeth from Rawhiti school. We also had to choose a blog post from a selection of blog posts to share with our buddy during our Google Meet. I chose to share a blog post from Benjamin H at St Mary's in Gisborne. 

Here is a recording from my Google Meet with Elizabeth

In conclusion, it was another empowering day with the DFI team. Looking forward to our next session. For now, it is the putting what I have learnt in action.

Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive Day 1 - Core Business

Digital Fluency INTENSIVE. The world intensive often makes me feel uneasy because it brings about a sense of urgency and a need to be competent to work at a certain speed to keep up. When I first signed up for DFI, I was very excited because I have wanted to do this course for a long time. However, when Dorothy starting sending through the correspondence I started to question if I was really up for this course.

Today's first session wiped those fears and anxiety away. The 8 am - 3 pm day programme was not daunting at all. The day was very enjoyable and I felt very empowered. Considering this is the first day, I am so eager to see what else the DFI team have to offer me for my teaching, practical and personal life.

Dorothy, retold the story of how Manaiakalani came about and I felt a sense of gratitude for these principals who met in Novemer 2006 and decided to do something for this area of Decile 1 learners. I have been in the Manaiakalani cluster since I started my teaching career 11 years ago. I know and have met a lot of the names which were mentioned today which adds to my gratitude for being in this digital learning whanau. From the story of how Manaiakalani came about, one word strongly comes to mind, EMPOWERING. The Manaiakalani pedagogy empowers not only the students but also the teachers and our community.

I can see myself using Google Groups at school for our school sports teams, clubs, cultural groups and my class leaders. It will save me a lot of time in corresponding with the students. I tried to find voice typing when I was writing my reports earlier year but couldn't. Now that I have learnt how to access voice typing, I know my report writing will be much more manageable and enjoyable. I can also envision many of my students using voice typing for their learning activities. I am so eager to put the use of voice typing into action in my practice.

The session which I really found fascinating today was the Google Docs session. I have used Google Docs for a long time and have just learnt about some features today. For example the table of contents and using the different headings. I will implement the use of these features with my students when they are writing information reports and explanations. I will also use the Explore tool more in my teaching as I found it was very useful and practical to use today.

For our create activity today, we had to create a tool using Google Docs. I created a resource which my students can use next week in our Inquiry learning. First I changed the page layout to landscape and the page colour. I then created a table with three columns and three rows. I then merged the first row for the title. I also hid some of the lines for the table by changing the line colour to the page colour. I changed the remaining table lines to white. To insert the Youtube clip into my doc, I took a screenshot of the clip and pasted it to my document. I then linked the Youtube link for the clip to the image. I did an image search for an Iphone and a Chromebook then took away the background using Remove.bg. The rest of the resource, I just added more images and text. Mark our group leader suggested I put all the images into one row of the table which was a good tip for visual presentation.

Blog commenting by Room 7

When we signed up for Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu this year, I thought a lot about how we could make it work for our class. I then came up with an idea for the students to put the links of the blogs they comment on in a spreadsheet. 

At a glance, the spreadsheets gives me a quick indication of who has been commenting on blogs. The link also takes me directly to the blog post and the comment which was left my by student. Very handy to check if the students are leaving positive, kind and helpful comments. 

Since starting this, we have been able to make so many blog comments but I think the more important aspect of this initiative is the exposure to rich blog posts my students have received from visiting the blogs of our school, cluster and our Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu buddy classes. 

For many of my students, blogging is more meaningful now because they know their peers are looking at their blog posts and learning from what they are posting. We have also encouraged teachers in our school to post comments on the blogs of students which is wonderful. We now have to work on getting our whanau to comment on our blogs. 

At the end of each week, I add up all the blog comments made and make a giphy to announce how many we achieved. Each week's total is different and looking into why it is different each week is an inquiry on its own. For now we will just celebrate what we are able to achieve each week. 

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