T3 Online Toolkit Reflection: Empower Reluctant Writers

Empowering Reluctant Writers

Identify the road blocks (Barriers) 
- no ideas
- lack of vocab
- spelling gaps
- no motivation (engagement)

Engage Students - 'The Hook' (You need to be a charismatic teacher to motivate them to write).
Brainstorm the genre so the students know what's expected of them.
What does 'descriptive' mean?
How could you be descriptive in your writing?

Time the kids

Google docs
Use voice typing and model how to name and organise the doc including saving it to the correct folder. Get them to say the title they want and search for a picture for their description using the explore tool. Comment on the student's google doc to give them feedback/feedforward. 

Wall displays: have lots of descriptive words around the room e.g. look for other words instead of small, good etc... 

Link to slide presentation.

What does this mean for my practice?
I am currently trying different ways to motivate students to write with quick whole class activities to build mileage. We are working on quick writes which is going well. Students are given 10 minutes to write in response to an image from Pobble365. The students need to beat their words from the previous day which allows them to measure progress. Three students are chosen at random to share their piece of writing with the class and others are encouraged to praise them. We then carry on with writing lessons based on genre. 

I like the idea of using google docs and the quick brainstorm about a genre. So far I haven't made my quick writes genre based however this could be an effective next step to include in quick write sessions. 

Toolkit - Multi-Modal Literacy

On the 17th of June my colleague Tina and I presented a toolkit on multi-modal literacy at Kaitaia Intermediate School. We had a fairly good turn out of five participants. It was incredibly nerve-racking but also rewarding. It was my very first toolkit and I'm glad we had a positive response and lots of time for teachers to have a go at creating their own multimodal slides while we assisted them with tips and tricks.

Term 2 2019 Toolkit Reflection: Digital Footprint

Digital Footprint? What my learners need to know.

CyberSmart Curriculum is broken down into four main categories:
1. Smart Learner
2. Smart Footprint
3. Smart Relationships
4. Smart User

This needs to be covered every year especially public/private information as it is extremely important and students forget some of the information (they need lots of reminding).


Profile pictures: reflection of who you are. they show up as soon as your name is googled even if you have a private account. Think about what message your image is sending to the world? Your picture is a reflection of you. Ways to empower learners. John Parsons believes that students should have profile pictures with their family so they look supported and not isolated to viewers.
No photos should be taken in bathroom or bedroom. These are private rooms that others should not see. This sends a bad message to viewers. Don't share a profile picture where people can find you outside of school hours, licence plate numbers, street addresses... Use google draw to alter any images that have personal information in them.

Information: Private info where people can find you (future plans), birthdate - credit card/identity theft, student emails (everyone doesn't need to know this), online games that gather information (grandmothers name, pets names...)
The school is not such a worry as our students wear a uniform.
Think: do people really need to know this?

Relationships: Who you are online reflects the real you. If you are a troll online then people aren't going to like you. Practise positive, helpful, thoughtful comments with a question.

Not everything is real on the internet!
Spot the real or fake info/pictures: common sense lesson plan. Set a fake research project for students to investigate and see if they realise it's fake.

Thoughts/Reflection:
This toolkit was very informative and gave practical ideas for how to teacher the Cybersmart curriculum. I need to upgrade this area of my class site so students and parents have easy access to the modules, information and lessons around the Cybersmart curriculum.

Manaiakalani Staff Meeting Reflection T4/18

Do your learners know the process of learn, create, share?
My learners are totally immersed in the learn, create share process as they are 1:1 iPads, work from their class site, have begun posting to their own blogs. I need to use the language more with the students. 

Do your parents/community know the process of learn, create, share?
Yes our class site is open to the public and has been shared with parents. There was an issue with attendance to our school hui about Manaiakalani. We will be having another hui this term with Year 3 students and their parents to discuss chromebook purchases for next year.

Is this visible on your school site/class site/class blog?
Yes, students use our class site to access their WALTs and activities for each week. This is a work in progress and more is needed in terms of digital learning activity development on my site.

What are your ‘next steps’ for 2019 to improve visibility of LEARN CREATE SHARE in your class?
Make sure my class site is set up from week 1 in Term 1 and shared with parents. Use the learn, create, share language more with the students and explicitly teach these.

How can I, as a facilitator support you to enable visible Learn, Create, Share in your class?

Continue with teaching myself and students to blog and comment in others' blogs. Lessons on how to specifically teach the learn, create, share pedagogy - Demonstrating what these mean? How do you explain them to a junior/middle class? Overall lesson ideas etc...

Digital Fluency Week 9

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

Ubiquitous learning is one of the four Manaiakalani kaupapa words - rewindable learning has been scaffolded in my classroom through my class site. I have a student who was overseas and access to the class site helped her and her parents to keep up with what the class was doing - however I have received feedback where some of the areas of the site were not accessible so this is something I have fixed.  

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

I am excited to be able to go back to school after completing this course and confidently use the google apps with my class and integrate them into my learning programmes. We are about to begin blogging next week and I feel equipped to teach this aspect after completing this course. We will discuss the Digital Citizenship aspect of begin respectful and behaving properly online. I am excited that my students will now be able to 'share' their learning and creation through their blogs and look forward to embedding the 'learn, create, share' philosophy within my classroom. 

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

I feel a lot more confident to share my learning and thoughts publicly with fellow colleagues who may be interested in what I post. Also building a network with teachers from other schools in the Te Hiku Cluster has been very rewarding. 

Digital Fluency Week 4 (Catch Up Session)

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

The introduction to Google Forms and Spreadsheets was excellent! Thanks very much to Kerry, Dave and Dorothy for making the recording of this session accessible to those of us who were unable to participate in this session. I feel a lot more confident with the basics of creating different types of questions in forms and dealing with the data through sheets. It was also great to see how impressive the predictive AI technology google has and I can definitely see this saving lots of time. My previous experiences with forms and sheets was literally filling them out - which is not much help in the classroom. Learning how to find the average and freeze rows and cells is also very handy to know and I am excited to use these features when collecting and analysing in my students' assessment data for the end of the year.

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

I am keen to use forms to gather student feedback on their attitudes towards learning and how I can improve classroom learning programmes. I am also interested in using forms to question students as part of the teaching inquiry I am about to start through Mindlab which is focused on 'using blended learning approaches to accelerate student achievement levels in writing.' 

Once I become more confident with using forms I would like to encourage my students to try making forms to quiz each other in either literacy or numeracy.

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

I look forward to converting the data entered onto sheets into graphs to show a more visual picture as I think this will make data a lot easier to interpret rather than just a whole heap of number on a page which I often find to be overwhelming. 

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 8

Improved your understanding for the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Empowerment involves students, teachers and whanau. Manaiakalani aims to empower and educate all stakeholders in our learner's lives with/through the use of digital technologies.  The aim is to not just see digital technologies as a tool, but a way to transform the way we all learn and use technology to empower our lives.  We need to think about our sites as though students are going home to discuss their learning with their parents and whanau with our sites being used to enhance these discussions and partnerships. Therefore our sites being access capable for all with no locked access in essential. 

Empowered you professionally with your teaching practice?

Computational Thinking 
Today we had the opportunity to work on computational thinking, breaking down the new digital technologies curriculum and have a play with programming some robots and making stop animations. It was great to finally have the chance to experiment with these tools with the assistance of some very knowledgable experts to help troubleshoot issues I came across. I can definitely see amazing potential to integrate these into my classroom programme. 

Below is a video of me using Dash Robots and another where Blake Masters and I created an animation using Clapmotion and Green Screen:

Given you new skills that you can use with your learners?  

I have taught a bit of computational thinking using things such as The Foos app (digital),  plastic cups and mazes (hands on non-digital). My students really enjoy it and I'd like to continue this with the use of digital technologies such as Dash Robots. My students have a good understanding about the 3 three roles they can adopt when programming being coder, debugger and robot. I feel a lot more confident with introducing robots into the classroom now that I have had some practise using them myself. 

Improved your confidence with digital fluency, capability or workflow in your personal life?

I can see a clearer pathway for how I can integrate the new digital technologies curriculum with my students and have realised we are doing a lot of it already! I can't wait to begin the Raranga Matihiko PLD next term with my learners and am keen to empower them by offering a wider context and resources to be creative and digital experts within our school.  

Digital Fluency Intensive Week 6

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

Being Cybersmart - we want our students to be confident using digital devices in a safe manner (behaving appropriately online). Manaiakalani's Cybersmart Curriculum is based in an NZ context. It's great to see the range of resources developed to support both teachers and students with implementing the Cybersmart Curriculum. There are three main categories from the Cybersmart Curriculum that relate to everyday life including:
-Smart Learners (Term 1)-Smart Footprint (Term 2)-Smart Relationships (Term 3)

Link to the Manaiakalani Cybersmart Curriculum.

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

Today I learnt how to use Explain Everything. I have been waiting for this opportunity all year and I finally have this app on my classroom iPads. There's a mountain of resources out there and they are really easy to make. I'll be checking out a few other teacher's classroom sites to get some ideas for what to make. Uploading the resources and linking them to the class site is something I'll have to practise a few times as I wasn't logged into my own account because I borrowed an iPad. Khismira's iPad presentation is very helpful and a good introduction to using iPads a Year 1 class (I think this will work just as well with my Year 2/3 students). I have also just found out that Sunshine books are available to Manaiakalani Schools for free! 

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

Last week I made a resource using google drawings and linked it to my site. I soon discovered that google drawing is not available on iPads so thank goodness Explain Everything is available to our school now as this seems to be the one stop shop for making iPad friendly activities. 

Week 5 working on making a resource for my students in google draw.

I am going to begin introducing Explain Everything in a very structured way and make sure my students have a lot of time to practise using the tool and be creative with it. I need to make sure they press record before they begin any activity so they can show me how they completed an activity. 

Kawa of care is something we have focused on since Term 1 so I need to move onto the other aspects the Cyber Smart Curriculum offers. This will be a lot easier now that I've been shown the resources that are available. I am very keen for my students to become digitally fluent. 

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

Overall having access to shared resources will save me a lot of time and not having to create resources from scratch all the time will be a nice change. I feel if we work together at a school and cluster level, we can build our own bank of resources that are relevant to the children in the Far North area and this will make life easier for everyone.  

Connected Learners Share Workshop

Activity 1 - Blogging! Has It made a difference?

What is the new strategy?

After reading Simon Scott's blog post, I have gained new insight into how blogging can really motivate, engage and support student learning in writing. He has experienced great success in terms of students motivation, thoughtfulness and raising student's punctuation levels in writing (eliminating the need for a worksheet).

I have gained a lot of ideas for how to scaffold my students to' make meaningful comments on their peer's blogs. I like how basic his 3 step blog commenting prompt is and I can see this working in my year 2/3 class.Check out his Blog Commenting Prompt below:

What are you thinking about trialling in your learning space?

For a start I need to set blogger up on my students iPads as they are currently using Seesaw which is quite limited in regards to making learning visible with the world - as only parents have access. I need to focus on scaffolding students to make quality blog posts and highlight the fact that these will be open to the world. I's love to find or develop a '3 Step Quality Blog Post' model to guide my students so they have something to refer to when struggling to make a blog post. If anyone out there is reading this and has something similar to the commenting prompt above but for making blog posts I'd love it if you could share it!

What new learning, resources or support could your Manaiakalani Outreach Facilitator provide?

I would definitely love some more support with setting up blogger on the iPads, making quality blog posts and having a go at commenting on each others blogs. My students love to share on Seesaw so I know they will be excited with the prospect of broadening their audience.

Activity 2 - The Acceleration of Sharing

How has sharing changed in your lifetime?

Sharing has changed hugely over the my lifetime. I was born in 1990 (wow!). Checkout the timeline below:

In your role in your learning area how has the increased sharing opportunities enhanced your teaching practise?

I feel like the amount of content online has revolutionised teaching! I can't imagine a world without the internet and I can't imagine what it would have been like not having content and knowledge at my fingertips. I have to admit sharing my professional reflections has been a tricky aspect to get my head around but I am slowly gaining confidence in this area (especially with the the expectation of my students sharing their learning and knowledge with the world).