Reports are done (mostly), a long weekend and some TIME to catch up on a few things on my reading list! Really liked this article from idealog! http://idealog.co.nz/design/2015/05/study-shows-trendy-office-spaces-keep-employees-happierF Some really interesting findings, including that "three quarters of respondents said that they are more likely to stay at their current company if it has an inspiring office space and sixty percent said that the office interior layout has a substantial impact on their decision to work for the company." I wonder if new schools find it easier to attract staff than older schools and how much this is a factor for teachers seeking new positions? And wow - check out this blog post about Dr Cheryl Doig's upcoming book on collaboration. Some awesome stuff here and the infographic is great! http://www.thinkbeyond.co.nz/blog/collaboration-schools/ I am currently reading Carol Dweck's book about Growth Mindset and it is great to see it being used in context here. I love the idea how three types of mindset are needed for collaboration. Follow "Think Beyond" on facebook to stay up to date with this blog. https://www.facebook.com/thinkbeyondnz?fref=ts An interesting article on student lead learning and curriculum from our Education Gazette: http://www.edgazette.govt.nz/Articles/Article.aspx?ArticleId=9102&Title=Modern%20learning%20environments%20allow%20pedagogical%20shifts And I think this is the next book I shall be ordering - maybe in time for the school holidays when my feet might touch the ground again! Enjoy the rest of Term 2 everyone! http://www.nzcer.org.nz/nzcerpress/key-competencies-future Image credit: www.thinkbeyond.co.nz Dr Cheryl Doig Retrieved June 1, 2015.
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Another way I have used socrative, is to gather information about what students already know. I created a math test, using short answer questions and a few true/ false questions. This gave me so much instant information, that I could easily plan my math lessons for the week.
I also designed a short answer maths test with the answers already programmed in. The students took this at their own pace. I then printed them out their own individual worksheet, with the questions and answers, all marked. From this, they decided which workshops they needed to come to for further math teaching. They also worked collaboratively, to fix up any errors they had made in the test after the workshops. The exit ticket looks like a great way to gather information about how the learning has gone in the lesson also. Can't wait to try that out this week. I would totally recommend this app to everyone - limitless possibilities. Check out the socrative blog for more great ideas.
You can make and design your own tests, which are great, but the real power of socrative comes with the "quick question." Then socrative becomes like a mix of padlet and activ votes all in one and a brilliant collaborative tool.
Here's how we used it last week. Our students were working in learning partners, a strategy that we use all the time. Often they will have mini white boards to work on. This works well, but socrative took it to a whole new level. We are currently doing a narrative writing unit. We used a writing app to bring up different pictures - settings, characters etc. Then using the quick question setting, we asked the learning partners to write a descriptive sentence. Straight away, the sentences start coming up on the board. A buzz spread throughout the room. The incidental reading of each other's ideas was terrific. Then, by pushing "start vote", the students got to choose which descriptive sentence they thought was best. So now the competition was ON! My co-teacher and I were blown away. The quality of the writing improved with each activity. Students were trying to out do each other, hoping to be voted the best by their peers. The level of accountability was great. Instead of hoping that the students were discussing and completing an activity, we could tell by the online counter once everyone had contributed and read everyone's ideas. At the end of the activity, with one click I sent all the responses to my google drive. After school I printed them out and made them into mini-posters for our writing wall. Here's a snippet of some of the writing, where the students were describing a dragon.
I am gradually wading through my notes and ideas gained from this years GAFE Summit South. Once again, a brilliant professional learning opportunity. I always love it when you get a practical idea that is super easy to implement into the classroom and this year's one is LIFE CHANGING! It is the brilliant, wonderful socrative.com. Socrative is a classroom quiz tool, that provides instant information for teachers, depending how you use it.
Socrative kind of works in 2 ways. Firstly, you set up a teacher account. Make sure you go into the settings and set up an easy room log in. For example, mine is SPARK2. Students also log into socrative as a student using your room code. It works on every device. I'm sure socrative was designed to help American teachers prepare for standardised tests, but it can be used in so many cool ways. Here's a simple introductory video. The interface has now changed visually, but the options are still the same.
This is how the new interface looks.
I came across these two articles recently, which I've really enjoyed. Nothing like a bit of light reading for the holidays.....
This article featuring Jane Gilbert in Idealog is excellent: http://idealog.co.nz/etc/2015/03/educating-future-we-cant-imagine "Equipping kids with iPads in the classroom is nice, but Gilbert advocates a fundamental shift. She urges us to think beyond surface features such as technology in schools and to consider how our learning environments are structured to create inquiring minds. Without these skills, future generations can never hope to solve significant issues such as climate change, social inequality and the impact of globalisation. I love that phrase - " how our learning environments are structured to create inquiring minds." It made me wonder: How do we ensure that the environment is the third teacher? How do we as teachers who have been educated in a traditional way make a REAL shift to be future focused? How can we fight against the crowded curriculum, the traditional curriculum and let the kids drive the learning? Not just as Jane says: "We’re still working within the same twentieth-century framework. The thinking hasn’t changed. "It’s just couching what we’ve already done in much fancier production values. It looks cooler and more digitised, but the underlying educational objectives have not changed." If you don't follow idealog on facebook, make sure you do! Excellent articles on a range of cutting edge topics! Also, loving this blog post from Karen Boyes: http://www.karentuiboyes.com/2015/03/modern-learning-environments-the-underlying-philosophy-to-success/ Sensible, practical and on the money! Could be a great starting point for those beginning their MLP journey. Also, a great way for those of use implementing and developing MLP to check point how we're doing - successes, failures, things that have fallen by the wayside. Enjoy while you munch on those chocolate bunnies! So, we are making progress on our classroom set up for 2015!
We got a few of the furniture items on the kid's wishlist, though not their longed for bar height table and stools. We've been doing pretty well with a longer, lower table that the kids love. Bean bags, knee boards and mini couches are also being widely used in the zone. It is nice to have a mix of soft and hard furnishings. We now have an Interactive White Board in one zone and a portable tv on a height adjustable trolley has just arrived. We had much debate about creating a "focal point" in the classroom and whether we wanted to do this. So, we have kind of compromised with having the IWB create a focal point in one zone and having the portable tv which we can move anywhere to create different learning areas as required. Our stuff is still in boxes and we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of teacher storage. Bag storage is still to arrive. But we are DEFINITELY getting there! The kids overwhelmingly prefer this space to their old spaces and relievers coming in have commented how great it is. In terms of Collaborative Teaching, it is definitely a great space to work in. We are really enjoying it and loving the "rooms within rooms" feel that we have. Hoping by the end of term we are all unpacked and a little more organised, but definite progress!! It was great to pay a visit to Halswell School, Canterbury this week. They invited our staff to come by for a visit. It is looking amazing and soon all areas of the school will be ready for use. It was lovely to wander through and chat with their teachers. They too are experimenting, trialling and learning unique ways to use their new learning centres. Check out a few pics below! Thanks for having us, Halswell!! So, it's the start of another new year here in New Zealand. I wonder what most would think if greeted with this sight! Yes - we did it! We put every piece of furniture in our school into the school hall at the end of 2014!!! The reasons were twofold. We needed to do some maintenance- carpet cleaning and painting and we needed to redistribute our furniture. This is our 6th year of opening and already in that time, our use of our spaces has changed significantly. Also, as we have grown, new furniture has been purchased and maybe some spaces had more furniture than others, or it would have been better suited to a different year level. So, we are starting the year with the bare minimum and working with our students to decide what they really want in their learning zones. This year, I am team teaching in a cool new space! Old style prefabs that have been refurbished. There's going to be a lot to do to set them up. Here's a couple of pics from the last day of school last year. So it's still a bit of a mess, but these photos show you the evolving space! Sorry the pics aren't great - the rest had kids in them. Now, here we are two weeks in! You can see we have started to bring in some furniture! The kids have been busy planning what else we would like. Absolute top of the list is a tall whiteboard table with bar stools. It was interesting that they weren't interested in low white board tables at all. They also want bean bags and a few other tables that they know are over in the hall.
We have a interactive white board and large screen tv on a trolley coming, but I have to say it is challenging teaching without a projector and all we have at the moment is our little teaching station. (First world problems I know!!) But we are getting there. Discoveries: The students have an excellent knowledge now of how to use spaces and firm ideas about the design of this new space. It was great on the first day, when the students were asked to find somewhere to work, they immediately spread out throughout the whole area. They had lots of ideas for our furniture choices. About myself - I have struggled not having "my stuff" close by. We still have most of our things in boxes until we get storage and it's a pain!! Wonderings: I still don't like the way tote trays and bag storage take up SO much of the learning space. At the moment we have bags stacked all over the floor. Eventually we will have cubes for them. We had hoped to maybe have bags outside, but too costly as we would have to weather proof. It seems such a waste! Would love to have some better ideas than tote trays. I have seen some schools use containers, but even they take up a lot of room. Will keep thinking! Stay tuned for Part 2, when the kids choices arrive. As the school year draws to a close, my co-teacher for 2014 and I sat down and talked through the highlights and next steps of a year teaching collaboratively.
Positives:
Minus:
Interesting: The unique and different ways that every teacher works. Being a teacher team is a little bit like a marriage - you have to listen to each other, compromise and learn from each other. The students on the whole saw us both as their teachers. However, they still gravitated towards their homebase teacher with any pastoral care issues. Relationships with parents developed well throughout the year and parents would come and see either of us. So, now after a great 2014, we are getting divorced! Our teaching partnership is dissolved due to class makeup for 2015 and both of us are headed into new co-teaching arrangements with awesome people.But I know we will both take ideas from each other to our new partnerships! Which leads to this: Wondering: How long should teachers be in collaborative partnerships? If we were staying together, there are many things we would refine and improve, but how long is too long? What are the best ways of grouping teachers into teaching teams? Still these twice yearly written reports are limiting innovative teaching practice. Check out this blog post for ideas that would work out WAY better! http://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/instant-communication-and-twice-yearly-report-cards/#comment-19122 One of the biggest challenges with collaborative teaching, is maintaining your teacher knowledge of the students you are responsible for, but might not necessarily be teaching. This term, our team began experimenting with Google Docs to see if this might help us. We had used Google Docs many times, especially for planning and in our power of 2's, but not assessment in our power of 6. We chose one subject area to begin with - Maths. For this term, there were two maths topics to be taught - Time and Fractions, Proportions and Ratios. We had decided to trial teaching the Time topic for two days per week and the Fractions topic for three days per week. In the past, we have tended to teach in blocks, eg. Time for two weeks, then Fractions for eight weeks. After some initial assessement, we sorted the students into 6 groups for Time instruction and 6 groups for Fraction instruction. This set up meant smaller classes for students working below the Maths standards and also the allocation of teacher aide resources to those classes. It took a week for the students to remember which was their Mon/ Tue class and which was their Wed/ Thu/ Fri class, but after Week 2, we were ok. In some cases, the students had two different teachers throughout the week. So, we taught the classes! Then we began thinking about how we could collate the assessment information so that it would be able to be used by homebase teachers to write reports. We created a google doc with tabs for each homebase. Student lists were copied from the LMS straight into the doc. We used the following headings for each topic: Can Do,Next Steps and Comment. The fractions part also had a column for a " working at" stage, as this data needed to be entered into our LMS. So this meant that once each teacher had looked at their formative and summative assessment, instead of compiling on the old "class list", they just had to jump on the google doc and fill out. So, how did it go? The whole idea was that when homebase teachers were writing reports, they would be able to use this information to complete what the students were able to do and their next steps. On the whole, it worked quite well. When we reflected as a team we found:
Some of the comments were WAY too long. Needed to be refined. Teachers needed to make sure they followed the prompt. Eg Student is able to......, so that their comment made sense in the report. Bullet point type needed to be consistent. Teachers did not include enough information in the comment section. Our school font is Calibri, and this is not a font in google. Annoying!! We will definitely continue to use google docs and try out some different ideas. Overall, not too bad for our first time as a power of 6. Our assessment data certainly indicated some excellent progress and the teachers felt like the quality of lessons was improved. We also felt that individual needs were well catered for. This month I was lucky enough to attend this awesome conference, along with other members of our Clearview staff and Board of Trustees. There were some excellent keynote speakers and workshops held over the three days. I would say, that as a kiwi teacher, what was missing for me was a focus on Modern Learning Practices. The Australian curriculum is quite different to ours and the focus for many of the workshops was on their national testing programme. Still, you always learn something! Discoveries: I very much enjoyed Christine Haynes presentation about Coaching Teachers as Lead Learners. An excellent model for developing e-learning practices throughout a school and one that I am hoping to use parts of in my school in 2015. Alec Couros is an inspiring speaker. His keynote discussed how we participate in the world using technology. That aquaintances can often be our biggest source of new ideas. He encouraged the audience to embrace and model connected communities and asked, "How are you contributing to the learning of others?" Greg Butler asked, "How might we transform learning?" He urged the audience to "get comfortable with situations where you don't know the answer." Check out the excellent website http://newpedagogies.org for some excellent downloads from Michael Fullan and Maria Langworthy. Simon Breakspear was one of the best keynote speakers I have seen. A real entertainer. He discussed learning agility as the key skill for the future, to cope with the agile career pathways that will develop. He asked, "How can we sustainably redesign learning behaviours?" He believes that learners need agency, relevance and connection. You can see some of his past EdTalks and his presentations. There were of course a lot of cool workshops. I went to Augmented Reality, Itunes U, 3d printing, Cybersafety and a few other good ones.
Wonderings: Probably my key wonderings focused on the New Zealand education system and where we are in our journey towards MLP as a country. Obviously every school is different, but I came back from Australia feeling proud of where we are. It was great to get an international perspective and to chat with Australian teachers who were amazed to hear about our collaborative teaching and elearning opportunities. I felt like their use of technology in the class seemed more focused on creating content and the purpose was often to help with the NAPLAN. Yet another reason to keep standardised testing out of our education system! Next year's conference will also be in Melbourne. Definitely worth a look when planning your 2015 professional development. Libraries have been coming up a lot for me lately! Firstly, at school I spent a couple of afternoons moving our library into a room off our hall, to make way for our rapid student growth. I'm actually a little jealous, as now our library is home to two of our new entrant classes and it makes a wonderful collaborative space. In the short term, our library will be housed in our drama room. Meanwhile, we are looking at creative ways of keeping our library as a hub in our school. Stay tuned! Then in the holidays, I visited the new library that has been built in Lincoln, a community about ten minutes away and part of our Selwyn Council network of libraries. I loved the space and creative use of furniture. The day I visited, the library was buzzing with members of the community involved in various activities. ( See slideshow below.) My mother is now a primary school librarian, having spent the majority of her career as a high school librarian. She passed on to me the latest issue of " Collected" magazine, the magazine of the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa. This issue focuses on modern learning environments, the role and place of the library and librarian. So I felt that the universe was sending me a sign that it is about time for a library post! After reading through the " Collected" issue it became apparent that librarians and libraries are facing major challenges. They are looking at a major redefinition of their role and place within education. I thought I would summarise the main messages, though recommend reading the whole magazine here if you wish. Discoveries: Lisa Salter, Communications Leader had this to say; "I can be a librarian wherever I am, I don't need a library to identify myself. A traditional librarian was connected to a place, librarian = library. Now a library is a state of mind; physical, digital, social, communal. Adapting has become one of our specialties." As many schools ponder the need for a traditional library space, Salter points out that schools without libraries are in even more need of an experienced librarian. " An MLE must enable itself to provide modern approaches to inquiry learning and in doing so must rely on advice from information professionals in planning and practice." Bridget Schaumann, SLANZA President urges schools to make their libraries spaces for literacy, discovery and inquiry. Paula Eskett and Janet McFadden of National Library encourage rethinking restrictive practices, what has been "always done" and putting user's needs first. They urge schools to develop MLLE's ( Modern Learning Library Environments) where "print and digital resources meet…..creating user driven, proactive, constantly evolving participatory spaces that support and reflect the education world all educators are now part of." Quoting the fabulous Christian Long - "The focus of innovative learning spaces is never about the building. It's what the building enables users to do." Mark Osborne of Core Education outlines ways in which libraries are evolving - service centres for digital citizenship and information literacy, gallery spaces, community hubs and storehouses for valuable resources. He challenges schools to ask, "How might the library act as a 'third place' to provide unique, compelling and engaging experiences for staff, students and community that aren't offered elsewhere." Wonderings: How is your school using their library? How do we ensure that we maintain all the tradtional "good" things that libraries brought to education, while developing them into vibrant, vital, flexible hubs of learning? |
AuthorMy name is Ngaire Shepherd-Wills. This website is a record of my TeachNZ sabbatical, Term 2, 2013 and then I have continued to share my wonderings and discoveries about Innovative Learning Practices. I now work for CORE Education. Views are my own. Tags
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