Computational Thinking. DFI Week 8. Empowered

Today at DFI,the topic was Computational thinking. I learned about micro:bit. www.makecode.microbit.org. This was a fun coding app that had quite a few different activities to experiment with. It has a makey makey type of device that you connect your computer to, which Gerhard demonstrated to us. There were excellent training videos to work through. Below is my heads or tails flip code. You click on the A button to get  a couple of random throws and then it settles on the image for a head or a tail.  I also made a dice and had my name in lights on a loop. I think that the students will love this. We also had fun playing Mindcraft. I haven't tried that for years.

 The Manaiakalani kaupapa word for this session was 'empowered'. We have delved quite deeply into this concept at school. Our school ethos aligns well with Manaiakalani's vision of connected, visible and empowered. After a huge amount of consultation with board, staff and community we arrived at our vision; Choosing to be an innovative, Catholic community that inspires and empowers learners to succeed. Each word was carefully selected to contribute to the explanation of our ethos.  We choose to be innovative - we want to be overt in our intention about this, unapologetically looking for new ways of thinking and of delivering the curriculum; striving to be research driven and always looking for self improvement. We are distinct in that our special character is Catholic - that is who we are at our core. We want to inspire and empower our learners to be the best learners and the best people that they can be. What drives your vision?                                                                                                                                                                 

Collaboration - Sites DFI Week Five - Visible Learning.

The focus for today's Manaiakalani pedagogy talk was about their kaupapa of 'Visible Learning'. This is a multi layered concept. The idea that the children should be able to relate to material  presented in a way that they feel connected with the school resonated with me. How will they know that the work presented to them comes out of their school and is relevant to their context?

Leading Lights wellbeing site

 Not only should the children be engaged and learning (not the same thing) but also the online content should reflect our school's style and culture. The idea of our students feeling connected matters to their wellbeing. There are articles aplenty that talk about this. (Nathan Wallas, Hattie and many others). Leading Lights, our localised collaboration between the Ministries of Education and Health, has many great articles showing how important it is for students to connect with their school, teachers, friends, whanau. The same goes for us.

It was good to be reminded about 'cultural capital' - what it is that we learn as we navigate life and relationships that help us to 'fit in'? It strikes me as an example of social inequity; when some children learn very quickly the language of learning, the nuances of 'teaching and learning' and others don't. I like the idea that digital technologies even out some of the social inequities but understanding the hidden culture behind what the teacher is meaning is still relatively hit and miss for many of our tamariki.


(Boudiue&Gerwitz)

Visible learning in terms of children having access and clarity around their next step learning has been considered good practice for years. We laboriously pinned up our WALTS and LI's on the walls each week and tried to remember to point them out to children; the posters became background wallpaper in moments. We glued them into their books and had them copy them down. We glued curriculum progressions into the backs of students' books in an attempt to personalise them and highlighted or ticked as they mastered them. The introduction of 1:1 computers and progressions (goal) based information not only makes learning visible and personalised for students but also their parents. This is the age of relevant, timely, clear information and it is good. Each child should be able to see the planning and have a voice over the planning process. Children should be able to have conversations about whether or not they are meeting their goals and should expect to have conversations about how they can achieve these goals. The age of just do it because this is what I have planned are fortunately long gone. Transparency and accountability is part and parcel of authentic learning.

Visible learning on walls and tables emphasise and give evidence  of what is happening in learning for the children in the hub. They show and encourage student engagement and give a point of reference for our students. Word walls, interactive displays (can be taken away and put back, or manipulated in some way) have not lost their relevance and are just as important as the site, slide show, explain everything or video. Thankfully this is something that we do not want to lose sight of in my school.

As teachers we have historically thrown the baby out with bath water, what do you think?

Workflow. DFI Week Two

Today's session has been timely as our school prepares for the possibility of students staying home and accessing learning in a different way.

We have been planning for self isolation and school closure over the past couple of weeks; timetables, what teaching and learning will look like across the teams and how we will connect with our tamariki have been the questions that the staff has been focusing on.

We had already decided to use Google Meet in a variety of ways: scheduled workshops, giving feedback on work that students have shared, and generally checking in.

At today's DFI session, along with some useful tips such as tab control and gmail maintenance (!) we practised using Google Meet, which now includes a record function.  This practise was timely and the use of the record button will reduce some steps and will make it easier for our teachers to be able to provide rewind sessions for our students.  Knowing how to use the technology confidently will reduce a lot of stress for our teachers as they prepare to provide home learning for our students. I know that I feel a lot better about supporting our teachers to use Google Meet after today. Inviting, sharing, presenting between screens and leading and contributing to discussions will be necessary skills.

Some aspects of today's 'Learn' focus resonated with me:
How do we know what effective practice looks like?
Would we be able to recognise it? This does not mean throw out the old for the new, but know what effective practice looks like. If we accept that the whole point of the digital world is to be able to do things in a way that we could not do before - what does effective practise look like in a digital world? How can we use digital technologies to accelerate learning for our students?

These are the questions that we ask ourselves constantly in our Senior Leadership Team:
Do you know what Learn looks like in your school?
How do you know?
Do you have a model or shared understandings about Learn in your school?
What is happening in your school in terms of your local context?

Week 27. Mind Lab. Activity 3: Contemporary issues or trends in New Zealand or internationally.

Identify and evaluate two contemporary issues or trends that are influencing or shaping NZ or international education, which you find most relevant to your practice.

Globalisation is here. More and more people are becoming connected. This is not a phase but the way our world has evolved. Our technologies allow us to contribute to the worldwide research and conversations about the changing needs of our local and global societies. Global partnerships where people in the workplace, teachers and students can collaborate on projects with unknown people around the world are game changers for education.

The National Intelligence Council 2012 Report states "We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among mega trends, game-changers and, above all, human agency. Our effort is to encourage decision makers—whether in government or outside—to think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding." (NIC 2012)

CORE education and the Kahukura cluster in Christchurch are working on a 'New Pedagogies' project in collaboration with Michael Fullan, author of educational publications such as A Rich Seam (2014), Freedom to Change(2015) and many other publications on the theme of Change Leadership. An important component of this global partnership including 1000 schools in 100 countries, is a project to which student participants from all of the contributing countries contribute. As well as shared projects, individual schools share their school based projects with the global community. This partnership is a blueprint for changing paradigms.

Ken Robinson shares an excellent animated video that clearly paints a picture of how and why our  education paradigms need to change.

This is an exciting time for educators. As we prepare our children for an elusive shapeshifting future we see some common trends emerging in NewZealand and around the world. One of these trends is the increasing use of collaborative learning approaches. This is the answer to addressing the changing needs of our children. With the accessibility of information, our role is not so much about providing facts but ensuring that we teach the competencies which the students will need in order to transfer knowledge across the curriculum and to filter the facts into information that they can work with, rather than regurgitate. These competencies are becoming more and more accepted as the skills that children will need to use in order to be able to access their future most productively.  They pose challenges for traditional educational systems as these competencies are not so easily measured as traditional methods such as tests of content knowledge.  These competencies are presented slightly differently by different educationalists.  Fullan (2014) calls these competencies the six C's: Communication, Collaboration, Citizenship, Critical thinking, Creativity and Character.

In my school context, (Start up school this year, as a result of a merger of two schools), we have begun work on what we want our student profile to look like. We are developing, through our professional development sessions and classroom experiences,  shared understandings and language about what collaborative learning approaches look like. We have had professional development on models of collaboration and what they look like in our learning hubs. Three of our four teams have brand new flexible learning spaces. The fourth team is working out of single cell classes, that are awaiting refurbishment. We are looking at what engagement of our learners looks like in our staff PD as well.  All of this contributes to our emerging vision and values.
Technology is allowing teachers to plan collaboratively and share their planning on google docs and this in turn allows teachers to easily see how they can work together and provide opportunities for students to work together on tasks that promote new learning, deeper thinking and the competencies for successful interactions. The 2015 horizon report states that research is showing how collaboration "can be used to promote achievement in reading, writing, conceptual development in science, problem solving in mathematics,and higher level thinking and reasoning" (Horizon Report 2015). Our school is on the journey.
A longer term impact that we are working towards in our school and a current trend in education globally, is the shift to deeper learning approaches. The next level in collaborative learning for our school is to make this shift. In our school, the children have made huge gains this year in terms of working collaboratively in flexible learning spaces and learning the skills of self management. The first step towards deeper learning approaches is the introduction of deep learning tasks. This is currently happening in some areas of the school. These are sets of tasks that involve the children working in small groups to research a teacher directed topic that is contextualised to: their lives, the school, local community, or world events. The tasks cross the curriculum and the children need to gain new knowledge and use this knowledge to think more deeply about issues, which they present in their chosen way. This is the first step towards our goal of project based learning. The difference between deep learning tasks and PBL for us is that the children will be working on a provocation that is given to them and they will work together to solve a problem. This will involve multi curriculum areas and will be extended over time. Rather than a set of tasks, PBL will be one all encompassing project for a particular group. The students will seek the knowledge from the teacher or other sources that is required to complete the project or solve the problem.


References:

Fullan, M & Lanworthy, M. (2014). A Rich Seam How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf:
National Intelligence Council.(2012). Global trends: Alternative Worlds.National Intelligence Council: US. Retrieved fromhttps://globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf:  
Robinson, K retrieved from Mindlab: The RSA.(2010, Oct 14). RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.