Certified - DFI

 

DFI Week 9

 So I sat the exam today, and...

I am pleased to have passed. This exam has been at the back of my mind for a long time, as I started working towards it when I was back in the UK in 2016. I really wanted to become Google Certified before I started applying for jobs here in NZ but the process of getting here became far more complicated and challenging than we had anticipated, and I needed to switch my efforts to completing the Teacher Education Refresh Programme at the University of Waikato instead. It's nice to know that it is done now, and I am confident that with a little more work on sheets and pivot tables I will be at the standard to complete the Level 2 Certification too. 

However, there was a moment of panic when my password didn't work, and it was really difficult to figure out why. I mean, there's no difference between these right?

Well, this was a quick lesson in the importance of font and how sometimes letters and digits appear the same. Look what happens when I turn the two into Comic Sans:

If that isn't an important lesson in how fonts need to make letters distinctive between the upper and lower cases, then I don't know what else would be!

I've filled out my response survey, so I'm going to put a copy of the answers here [with any extra reflections added in comments in italics]:

Let us know how this opportunity to attend the Digital Fluency Intensive has impacted you positively. * We are thinking of the whole package here - the digital, the group, Manaiakalani, learning using the LCS pedagogy etc etc

I have been able to engage with a lot of tools which I would not have had the time to develop independently: 

• Google Sites - building, constructing, embedding, linking, designing, 
• using Blogging (I haven't used blogger since 2002 so this was a useful refresher 19 years later) 
• Google Drive - effective link sharing 
• Google Mail - filing 
• Google Slides - creating animations

[I did like the session on Sheets, but I need to go back and review that again to make it make sense. Especially the section on Pivot tables.]

Are there any highlights that have impacted your life, your practice, your workflow... 
Google Keep. I don't know how I would get along without this app now. For taking notes, recording digitally, voice recordings, extracting text from documents, turning handwriting into text, this is an app which will make me work far smarter rather than harder and I am delighted to have it in my life. I would not have encountered it anywhere else.

Let us know how you think we could improve or do this better to support the next cohort. 

I did feel like a huge amount of the emphasis and expertise was directed towards primary education. Often the focus was in student engagement and while that is admirable, and I recognise that increased engagement does have an impact on the learning of students, at secondary school we need to focus on the NCEA standards and their requirements, and in particular how to prepare them for those assessments, design assessments which tap into our students' creativity and ensure that what we do would be acceptable to NCEA moderators and assessors.

[I recognise that this would not be of use to any of the primary teachers attending the DFI, which is why I am suggesting that a separate DFI with a secondary focus should be run, rather than incorporating this into the 'main' DFI]

Is there anything else you would like to say or let us know?
Further to my previous answer about needing a secondary focused DFI... I would have liked to see more examples of how these tools can help students to meet the requirements of the standards in new and innovative ways. How can we use these suites and tools for teaching AND ASSESSING Bivariate Data, Multivariate Data, Right Angled Triangles, Number skills, the numeracy portfolio... and that's just the maths side. Our moderators are so used to marking pen/paper workings, and many of our students struggle with that in maths [but we end up reverting back to it because we know the moderators understand it, and we understand it]. But we are nervous of using these new technological innovations for assessment because if WE get the design wrong, it's our STUDENTS who suffer when it comes to their grades. For true digital fluency in a secondary school environment, these are my primary concerns. How can we make sure that our technological innovation does not damage the authenticity and independence of a student's work and undermine their chances of success? [They get one, or at most two, chances of getting this right, so there isn't the room available to experiment and 'see if it works' without gambling on their pathways to future courses] I feel like this would have been far more useful guidance for me as a teacher in terms of my classroom practice and my professional practice, and would recommend that a Secondary Focused DFI be considered in the future.

DFI Week 8

Sadly I didn't get to do a blog in week 7 as I was pulled out of the course back to school for relief (big issue on the West Coast right now, we're struggling desperately for teacher numbers). So let's dive into week 8.  

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The 'Empower' section gave me things to think about, some of which I hadn't thought about since I was teaching adults. I kinda want to go back and watch Dorothy's section again, as my brain was still feeling like it was soaked in treacle during the first part of the day, and I felt like there was valuable stuff in there that I just couldn't access. 

Empowering people from 'working poor' backgrounds is a major point of interest for me, because I worked with so many 'working poor' adults in the UK. People on zero hours contract; with 10 hours on contract and 15 hours regular 'overtime' which could be snatched away if they didn't sing the company song; people working for minimum wage trying to raise three kids alone, who didn't get paid for their PPE or travel time. Empowering people is such a big thing for a teachers, more than some of my colleagues realise, I think. 

When the going gets tough, especially in high schools, the final option is 'opting out' from education.

And that's exactly what so many of my adult learners did.

I used to ask all my new sign ups (because they had ALL failed maths/English at school, or they weren't eligible for my courses) the reason for their lack of achievement at school and it fell into one of about four categories:

1) I didn't understand the work

2) I had other things to think about that felt more important than work (love life, self expression, socialising...)

3) I had other things to think about that WERE more important than school work (issues at home, poverty, earning money, health concerns...)

4) I didn't think I needed it so I stopped trying

The students in group 1 were often hard workers, because this was the second chance to be able to understand the work after a lifetime of struggle, but they were often the first ones to quit if the going got tough. But the ones who came from groups 2/3/4 ... they knew, because they had learned the hard way, that they needed this knowledge and these skills to get by. They were often aged in their 20s, adolescence was finally over and they were ready to get on with real life, which needed qualifications and pathways and options to earn more money. 

I look at some of my students now and my heart breaks to think that they are headed that way.

There will always be some that we can't help no matter how hard they and we try. Bless them all. They are the true minority. But there's a large chunk who could, and would, and will realise eventually that they should, but it might take another 10 years to get to the right headspace.

If we don't work hard to push the relevance of education and empower our students to achieve, they won't fail, they will leave. The number of Y11 students who leave at the age of 16 without making any progress towards NCEA Level 1, never mind Level 2, is something that fills me with dread. These tamariki have so much potential and they're not fulfilling it, and we're not giving them a route forward that empowers them to achieve in education. 

How to we tackle that? That's a huge question. One that I don't even have the first word of an answer to yet. 

...That felt like a big head splurge and I'm not sure how much of that was relevant, but I'm leaving it all there anyway. Those were the thoughts swirling in my head after today's session. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I felt like today addressed more of the things I can do as a teacher, as in actually being in the classroom with my students, rather than the behind-the-scenes management side of my job. I feel like that's taken up too much of my time and attention over the last year or so, so it was good to get back to focusing on the kids again. 

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Oh wow, I loved learning about Binary. 

For the first time I feel like I could actually use that to teach a lesson on it now, which would be awesome for logic skills. 

Makaore gave us some awesome and useful visual tools which I will definitely be putting to use.

I also had no idea that Binary dates back to the 1600s! We think of it as being something intrinsically bound up in computers, but the idea is actually a lot older and lends itself to tech-free/practical lessons as much as it does to theory lessons. 

I wrote my name in Binary...

The Binary Alphabet will be super useful - this is something I will try using with my classes to make some posters that can go up on the wall of my classroom.

Makaore also gave us an idea of how you can use visual tools (via a whiteboard or spreadsheet) to demonstrate how numbers are written in binary form. 

I made a little spreadsheet resource to go through this, as a reminder for me and a tool for my students.

But now what I want is to have jugs of different sizes to fill up with water, and which ones do you need to completely fill to have X litres of water?

Or draw squares on the classroom floor for people to stand in, and decide which ones need to be filled in order to generate the correct numbers. With red/green flip cards of 'yes/no' or 'full/empty' to use for each one, which we can then translate to '0/1' to write in binary code. 

I feel like this could be genuinely engaging in a maths lesson for teaching about logic, patterns and strategy. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Honestly, learning about Binary code and how it works, how it's written, has given me such a big boost. In the past when my students have mentioned it, I've glossed over it with 'well it's a language made of 0s and 1s, and computers use it for programming, so you learn about it in computer science classes' and I've always felt like that was a bit of a cop out and a clue that I am 'not a proper maths teacher'. My lack of degree in maths has never felt like more of an issue than when I encounter stuff like this. And now I have some tools to begin to address that. Which feels AMAZING. 

DFI Week 7

 Picture the scene. It's 8.10am. Karakia has been done. We're in the bubbles. It's going great. And then my phone rings...

(Rule #1, never answer the phone)

"Hi Kate, we need you to come into school there's no relief teacher available for your classes..."

I was so gutted about missing this session. I had borrowed a chromebook and ipad from the school library and wanted to put them through their paces in this session in real time. 

I had a bit of a sneaky plan actually. I had deliberately asked out school librarian if I could borrow the oldest, crabbiest, out of date, most battered, battery depleted and unreliable chromebook she had in the school collection. 

I wish you could have seen it. It was sky blue, cracked casing, half the keyboard had been replaced so it looked a bit like Frankenstein's keyboard, it was literally held together with sellotape, with no charger, and it took more than the 10 minutes I had in order to boot up and switch on. 

I have my own chromebook at home which would have been the backup participation plan if this monster from the deep had failed me, but I felt it was important to do this. 

Why? 

Because this is the reality for many of my students who don't have their own chromebooks available to use in class.

But they should have their own? 

Yes they should, but they don't for a plethora of reasons: due to damage, insurance issues, loss, awaiting repairs, living between two (or more) houses, being removed from home, being new to the school, their own being battery flat by period 2, the list of reasons goes on and on before we even get to the innate disorganisation and unreliability of teenagers.

For the past few years, I have taught some of the most challenging students in the Grey High repertoire. And what I learned is that you can't depend on them to do anything. Because for some of them, it's too much to handle. They don't have pens. They don't keep books. They don't have paper. They don't bring chromebooks. They don't know their passwords. And the combination of these factors become one of the most sophisticated avoidance tactics known to man. By the time you rattle through that list, 15 minutes of the lesson have gone and they've made zero progress (or attempts at progess) and it's easier to just say 'Here use this one' and have some on standby. 

And when we ask the library for spares to have on hand, this is what we get.  

I wanted to see how the bottom of the school chromebook barrel held up against all of the shiny tasks and ideas and apps on offer during this session. I will go back and look at them again, but now it might have to wait until after the seniors have left us in term 4, as we're heading into exam prep time with MAXIMUM STRESS once we hit term 3 (our first Maths exam is in September, not November). 

I will borrow an iPad and have a look at Explain Everything as several of my students have talked about using this in primary school. If we can utilise that in class, we might be on to a winner in terms of continuity of experience and expectations. 

DFI Week 6

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today really made me think about what's coming NEXT week in terms of getting to know the devices that our learners use. 

Connectedness is something that we are striving for down here on the West Coast. Greymouth High School is the largest school on the West Coast. We have some kind of intake from almost every primary school in Greymouth, so we really need to be familiar with what the schools are doing with their learners, in terms of using blogs, using class sites, using different devices and apps. 

I'm really looking forward to seeing 'Explain Everything' in action next week, as this is an app that a lot of my learners are familiar with. Particularly my stronger achieving learners, who frequently used it for extension of learning in primary school. 

It does seem to be a shame that we don't always have that continuity for the learners, so that we can use the apps and programmes that they are familiar with. It would be great to see them teaching their peers and us about this rather than us having to run and catch up all the time, but part of the issue with digital teaching is that you don't know what you don't know, and the students also don't know what you don't know - they assume that you have all the knowledge that they do, and then some, about things to do with school. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Oh my word I love Google Sites...

It has taken two days for me to get to grips with it properly (rather than feeling like I'm just tipping a lot of stuff into the screen at random) but I am now confident that I can make a slick, consistent and useful website for my work as a teacher. 

I've started by creating a landing site, which can remain in place indefinitely. 

MRS HALLS LANDING SITE

Useful things I learned:

• How to put headings in and make links to sections of websites
• How to insert images and videos in standardised sizes
• How to put external links into the side bar (and make them open into the same tab)

I also learned how to make Screencastify videos! So have a look at my screencastify to show you around my blog

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

I would now feel more confident teaching my students how to make a website with links, multiple pages and images. This gives me enormous scope for getting learners to share their work digitally when working collaboratively.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Having used wordpress for years, it has taken some time for me to make friends with google sites, but now that I'm getting the hang of it I can see me using this a lot personally as well as professionally. 

Learn Create Share - Reflection 3

Learn Create Share  - Visibility

SIGH

I would love to believe that ANY of the parents of my students are accessing the learning being done by students at home, but the truth is this has been minimal so far. During my first year I set up a lovely website with links to all the work being done by my learners, links to blogs, links to workspace, with all the enthusiasm of a PCT new to a digital school.

As part of my inquiry, I added a tracker to the site to see how many people came to visit it.

Do you know how many did?

Zero. A big far zero. The wind in my sails was thoroughly stilled. 

How do I get parents to take an interest in what my students are doing in maths at high school? I'm all for visibility, but it's hard to find the will to put the energy into that when the engagement is lacking on the other side of the partnership. 

Using the shop window analogy - I could make them look as beautiful and engaging as possible, but if nobody's walking down the street (or, in the case of maths, they're scurrying past trying not to look in case what's in the window scares them) it's hard to feel like it's actually worthwhile sometimes. 

So many of the parents I speak to start their parent-teacher conversations with me by saying 'Well, I was crap at maths at school...' and instantly I can see where those students pick up their negativity and disengagement with maths from as a starting point.

I WANT those parents to engage. I want them to look at what they're doing, learn along side my learners, to see that the maths we are covering is a part of the world that they live in. I spent 8 years teaching maths to disengaged adults in the UK, I know that this can be done, but lordy it feels like an uphill struggle at times.

I envy primary schools their levels of parent engagement. By the time the students hit high school, we don't get any questions about blogs or creativity or projects - all our conversations with parents are focused on 'will she/he/they get enough credits to pass?'. We're not supposed to teach 'to the assessement' but it really does feel like this is what's expected of us sometimes, and that does squash the urge to be creative out of me somedays. 

DFI Week 5

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? 

Visiblity. So many thoughts. All in the Reflections post. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life? 

The MultiText Database looks like it could be a really interesting tool, but it was disappointing to see that there was nothing in here relating to high school maths - either at junior level (Y9-10) or any senior level (NCEA 1, 2, 3).

How many maths specialists are there in the Manaaiakalani clusters? Are there any lead Maths Specialists? Surely somebody must be doing something useful with Google Sites specifically for teaching maths... This feels like a huge hole for a core subject. 

I had a bit of a rant in my bubble about how maths teachers are feeling like they have to reinvent the wheel constantly, and we need to be working smarter in sharing what we're doing. Not just in the special one off project sites, but in the actually nuts and bolts everyday learning side of things. We don't always want an example of a super-dooper special lesson, but we do need something that is just reliable, consistent, something that works that can be easily applied to another class of students. 

Does that make sense? I don't know if it does. 

I don't just want to see the one off A+ lessons. I want to know what people do in their classrooms to teach maths for 90% of the time. Sometimes it feels like that is a closed shop in terms of getting people to share what they're doing.  

Well, the only way to precipitate the change you want to see in the world is to BE the change you want to see in the world, so please see below for my current project with my learners which is now going to be embedded in a google site, courtesy of today's Digital Learning session. 

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

I really want to move from using Hapara to using Google Sites as a 'landing zone' for my students. This is something that would make my teaching more accessible. My Hapara workspaces are good and details, but they are also really overwhelming after a few weeks and students find them difficult to navigate, especially if they have been absent from school. 

I've been working making my own sites, and this was a good chance to have a go with a practice one

Truth be told though I spent more time developing a site I've had in progress for most of this year. 

Digital Learning has been a huge rewindable focus for me this year. I finally invested in a small tablet for creating maths videos, so that I can record written step by step examples and post them online for my students to access. This will be useful for:

* Revision

* Catching up after absence

* Repeated learning

* Independent study

* Study from home

* Students on personal programmes (Work Experience, Gateway, Trades Academy, Health Camp, residential programmes etc)

I've been creating videos and uploading them to my youtube channel, and as this year has gone on I've been adding the created videos to a Maths Video Library website

While people were saying in today's session that our google sites need to be updated and refreshed every year, I am hoping that this one will become a more static site that people can use to link into videos on different topics. 

I've had good feedback on the youtube channel videos, which have also been embedded into my Hapara workspaces, from:

• students
• TAs
• Parents
• Colleagues

I really think this project has massive potential to share and develop rewindable maths teaching resources at Greymouth High School and possibly wider across the teaching community. 

Like me, many maths teachers are not specialists, and teachers are often called upon to teach maths as a second subject, which becomes a primary subject due to demand. But we're all running to catch up with the subject material, trying to develop our professional cabability alongside our subject knowledge. The aim for this site is to provide a library of subject knowledge just as would be written up on a whiteboard, so that teachers can use them as planning/delivery tools as students use them for learning tools.

I know that the web is full of these, but I have yet to find a set that I like. For several reasons:

• So many of them have cheesy introductions 'Hey guys, welcome back, today we're going to.... and don't forget  to like share and subscribe...' and these are just mind-bendingly dull and corny when you have to listen to them on every video. Classroom teachers already do this, we don't need videos to do this.
• So many of them have American accents, which are not always to most accessible in the world. I've been making my videos silent, so that teachers can add their own voiceovers using screencastify, and students can use them during quiet/silent study periods without feeling like they are missing out
• Often they go too fast and assume a lot of background knowledge. EG a video aimed at Y10 will assume someone has Y9 knowledge. For my students that's not always true. Videos need to address topics from scratch to be truly accessible, or at least provide pointers and links to places where prior knowledge can also be found. 

This might be a work in progress for the rest of the year, possibly even for two years, but I hope that it becomes the valuable source it has the potential to be.