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.