Equity: is it the Device or Teacher?

There has been an increasing focus on equitable access to education throughout the Covid19 event as it has highlighted the issues with access to education. The event has been challenging my thinking, along with being challenged by my colleague Sharon Spragg to deliver our Cybersmart curriculum differently.

Cybersmart Lesson Tahi - Exploring Blogs

I have a strong drive for equitable access and visibility for education hence why I continue to be involved in education.

Sharon and I are inspired by a number of our colleagues' work, particularly Cam Cameron from Kootuitui ki Papakura Cluster planning our Term 2 Cybersmart Lessons.

My colleague Linda Ojala also gave me some feedback on the site's layout and UDL principles.

If I genuinely believe in equity, then getting the devices into students hands is only the first step. We then need to ensure the content itself is accessible and equitable.

We have attempted to do this following Universal Design for Learning Principles and our own experiences in education. We have tried to take a lesson and differentiate the content into three parts.

The teacher, whether online or face to face, would then modify in response to individual students' needs. They would also emphasise critical thinking and strategic learning. I think we still have a way to go to create lessons that reflect a high competence of UDL however we need to start somewhere and this blog post is the beginning of my reflections into our planning efforts.

So what have we done?
As I stated in the previous paragraph, each lesson is in three parts, beginner, stepping up and confident and is aimed from Year 3 - 10. We are expecting in the classes we work with we will have students ranging from beginners to confident and want to support and stretch all the students. The lessons can be guided by a teacher or completed independently with some teacher or peer support.

Each lesson layout is the same and also colour coded, grey for beginner, blue for stepping up and white for confidence, with a button at the top of each page to take the student to the correct place. We will reflect on our layout once we have taught in some classes to get feedback on the amount of information on each page.

Any text on the web page or in the Google Slides has narration reading the text. We have done this as we find that the text to speech tools can be a bit hit and miss for the students, and we want to remove as many barriers as possible.

Each lesson has a screencast video on the left explaining the learning task and on the right side is the Google Slides of the learning resource. As you can see in the slideshow, there is a Learn Create Share overview, videos teaching, explaining or modelling the tasks as well as instructions to work through the learning.

Each lesson also has a "Pathway for Learning" to support students who like a pathway or list to support their learning. These may be added to the slides in the future; however, at the moment, they are separate as some students may like them printed out so they can tick off each task as they do it. I know personally, my son loves the format on the left, whereas my daughter prefers the one on the right. Maybe another future step is colour coding the list to Learn Create Share?

In my head, this sort of access to learning for the student should

• Free me up as a teacher to rove and support students with discussions and critical thinking.
• Allow time for students to choose and opt into workshops and conferencing to support their learning.
• Empower students to drive their learning and choose when they wish to complete the work.
• Spend longer on a lesson if it interests them and go deeper by moving onto the next stage for example beginner to stepping up
• Reduce time the students have to wait for the teacher to explain the learning

The planning of this content has been time-consuming and has added to our workload; however, we are getting faster as we develop our processes for recording sound etc.
How would I make this work if I was in a classroom?

• Just like learning at home, I would reduce the content I wanted to get through. LESS IS MORE!
• Collaborate with others to plan content and share the workload.
• Utilise Multi Text databases, and other teachers work off their sites.
• Use everyday authentic texts that are engaging and interest students, such as journals and books both online and offline. 
• Plan for one to two-week lessons allowing more time for discussion about the texts and learning. Separate discussion from collaboration. What is the quality of the conversation that these students are having?
• Go wider and deeper into texts about an area instead of more texts on lots of topics. Focus on the thinking about thinking, e.g. "Do I have evidence, have I justified myself, is this an opinion or a fact etc."
• Allow more time for the Learn. Encourage students having a role in the workshops, for example, questioner, summariser etc. Do students understand what is expected of them, and they have permission to speak and think?
• Allow more time to Create. All these lessons work on the assumption the teacher will encourage and empower students who are capable to utilise the best tool to present their learning depending on the task.
• Allow more time to share. Collaborating and making choices in the sharing. Encourage students to think "what is the purpose of sharing this artifact?". "Why did you choose to share in that particular way?  

If we believe in equity, then this is the next step in supporting students to ensure all our students discover success in their learning. It should work in all subject areas and right across the curriculum.

I think It is well worth the effort! Do you?

Please comment on any ideas or suggestions you have to make our teaching more accessible to our learners.

How to Create Half an Ironman!

Create is often seen as a product that you make, for example, art and craftwork, music, sculpture, photography, bridge building, boat making, weaving, screen printing to name but a few.

However, create can also be a do. I want to unpack this in terms of my training for the Challenge Wanaka Half Iron Man.

Learn
I already knew a fair bit about running and cycling, as I have done many half marathons and 100-kilometre road cycle races, a couple of marathons, some short duathlons, one short triathlon and one 500 metre ocean swim. However, my knowledge of endurance multisport events was limited.
So I was able to access my knowledge. However, there came the point where I needed to obtain intelligence from others through a variety of sources, modes and text types.

So to access my new knowledge I have a coach, I’m using Facebook to access swimming tutorials, and I am connected through communities like Strava, Garmin and my Coached coaching app to keep my motivation up. I also belong to the Ellesmere Road Runners and Christchurch Marathon Clinic running club to stay motivated, get more knowledge, hill work and variety in my training. I also belong to the Leeston Road Cycling Club for the same reasons.

All the components I have mentioned above enable me to access and engage with a variety and multitude of knowledge through face to face discussions, text, video, audio, and self-reflection. They allow me to access recognised effective practice from expert practitioners ensuring my training was best practise and minimised the risk of an injury.

Coaching became very important providing me with access to knowledge in the Learn phase and giving me a focus to analyse the Create phase.  Having a coach became a big part of my training. The coach helped build a training programme, examining my outputs and consistency and giving me access to a library of resources to support my plan.

Create
My most significant change to mindset and understanding as up until now I would have possibly put creating a training plan in as a Create, however, now I see a training programme fitting more into the Learn aspect of learning.

The Create is when I got to combine my existing knowledge with other original ideas in new and imaginative ways to create a new outcome. These Creates involved each training swim, cycle and run as this was where deep learning occurs and gives you more opportunities for self-reflection and understanding.

These Creates included many moments of looking very silly completing swimming, cycling and running drills to build up my strength and efficiency to improve my speed and endurance, running in the public parks with high knees or completing squats and lunges on the side of the road.

The most significant learning, however, came when I competed in races, these included sprint triathlons, Olympic triathlons, ocean swims and half marathons. These are the most critical Creates, as events stop you from lying to yourself or making excuses for your performance which is easy to do in training. The pressure of a race is hard to replicate in practice. I remember my first competitive ocean swim being one of the worst events I had ever done, and it was not until I was debriefing with a good friend that I realised I had not been breathing out underwater, meaning I could not take a full breath when swimming.

The competitive events also gave me an opportunity to put into to action my learnings about nutrition, pacing, cadence, transitioning, hydration and endurance. It also surrounds you with a multitude of like-minded people of all ranges that you can glean nuggets of gold from watching, listening or talking too.

Share
The digital technology I utilised during my training really amplified my ability to Share by connecting with others, it empowered me to be able to Share easily and look at my own and others performances, it gave myself, my connections and my coaches ubiquitous access to my data and visibility of all aspects of my training and events.

Without the use of my Garmin GPS watch and Garmin cycle computer, Coached app, Strava app, Garmin Connect App my experience and learning would not have been as turbocharged.  This turbocharging enabled me to rewind and review sessions; it allowed for me to collaborate with others quickly and efficiently online in real time, access and share knowledge with other athletes and my coaches and create connections online which then became face to face when at events. The ability to connect online with other athletes was quite comforting especially when I was competing at a new race and did not know anyone, having a connection with someone online and then meeting face to face at the event helped calm the nerves.

A safety aspect that the technology-enabled was the incident reporting on my cycle computer, as much training involves 3-hour rides I was often a long way from home on quiet country roads. My cycle computer can recognise if I have a crash and will text specific contacts with my GPS location, this is a sharing component that was unheard of only a few years ago at such a cheap cost.

I did much sharing with my coaches and colleagues through the Coached app however did not share a lot through social media such as Facebook. I felt my friends on this would find the sharing of nine specific training sessions a week as well as a multitude of events a bit much and possibly defriend me. It is essential when sharing that you connect with the right audience to get the most of the connections.

Overall my experience of Challenge Wanaka was really excellent and looking back and reflecting was amplified by the new learning, connections and access to technology. The only thing is now I want to take this new learning and have another crack in 2020. Bring it on!

Engagement – visibility = mischief

Check out my latest blog post on Mischief and Visibility

http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2018/07/engagement-visibility-mischief.html

Teaching Writing with the Tools

I have had an interesting experience recently working with teachers helping them make the transition from paper-based writing sessions to digital writing. All the teachers seem to struggle with the transition, seeing the use of a Chromebook as a completely new way of writing and unsure how to engage with it.

My way of thinking is that the process still remains the same as I have blog previously, and it is just that the tool is different. There are some setup and systems required before the lesson to ensure a smooth lesson, these include creating a document and template to write in and ensuring the learners have guidance around protocols and expectations of writing in a shared document.

Once the learners and teacher get the hang of this then the writing can really start to fly. Engagement increases and ideas being shared generate a lot of quality writing.

The writing can be read back, using headphones, by text to speech tools allowing learners to hear their mistakes and lack of punctuation as the computer will only stop at a full stop or comma etc.

I have created the template as seen below which helps guide teachers that are new to digital writing. I find for myself that having a document that is used with a group for a term helps manage workflow and provides a modelling book for future reference.

I was very proud of the work one teacher did with her class, working with me on the first day and then making the connection with the writing process and using an innovative approach to have the students self-reflect on their learning by highlighting the language features in their own writing on the second day.

The learners can peer-assess their classmates by commenting on the right-hand side of the table as can the teacher by the commenting feature in a google doc.

I would see the next step being the students posting to their blog as below - 

WALT - 

• understand the purpose for writing
• Use our senses
• use a range of  written features to engage the audience;  e.g. metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia
• Use basic punctuation that is mostly correct;

Gurgle, slip, slop. There was some thing lurking in the misty, shadows of the dark alley way. It had five rorange tentacles that were making the slipping noises. And purple, wet flippers were making the sloping noises. When he went over to it, I nearly fainted.A skunk lurked in the room. Then I saw it's face. It had 2 sets of jagged  teeth that were pointy as iron tips, It also had 3 triangle eyes, 4 square eyes and 1 giant, fat circle eye. It had a nightmare nose that wanted revenge. In its hands was something with eyeballs in it. It...is...a...horror...CUPCAKE!!! The thing was an alien.DA DA DAAAAAAAAA!

Success Indicators -

• My writing will paint a picture in the reader head
• Write each sense (taste, smell, hear, sight, fell) into its own paragraph.
• Has at least three language features, eg personification, simile, onomatopoeia, metaphor, alliteration

• Can re-read my writing to check my punctuation

This then means the learners get an authentic audience that will hopefully comment on their work and learning.

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you — Digital Convergences for happiness

Here is a blog post I wrote for Core Education, it started off looking at happiness and ended up heading off into a lot of new learnings.

Please check out the blog post at

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you — Digital Convergences for happiness

The writing process and a Year 9 Student - A Students Reflection

This is Megan's reflection of the Writing Process using digital tools.

What did you like about the tools for writing?

• I really liked using poppet it was really easy to use and it was easy to organise the way you wanted it to be and you could move the text boxes around wherever you wanted to. 
• Wordle was very useful just because it was a different and cool way to show what words you had used too much. 
• The speech selection was also good because it would speed up it's talking when there wasn't enough commas and full stops. 
• Book creator was a good app to use once you got the hang of it to set out your work. 
• Write about this was a good app to decide what to write about it had good pictures to use if you wanted to and it was just good in general because I'm pretty sure it had topics.

What barriers or problems did you find with the tools?

• With dictanote I found it very awkward to use because it did not fully understand my voice and I feel like if you were to use this in the classroom that the computer would go physco trying to understand what you were saying. 
• Book creator was a little bit fiddly at the start learning how to use it and putting the text in the right place was a bit annoying.

What did you like about Write About This?

It was a a good app to get an idea of what you were going to write about. I think I got one of my pictures in the book from there.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Write About This at home/school?

It looked like it was made for little kids, the app could be designed for older kids and teenagers.

What did you like about Popplet?

It was handy to show your ideas clearly and you could customise it sort of.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Popplet at home/school?

I don't know I thought it was a good app overall and I would use it and I'm sure that other kids would use it in class

What did you like about Googles Docs/Track Changes?

I already use it at school so I am used to it now, I like it because it has the search thing at the side of the screen that you can get images and just normal google search. It's good so you know what you have fixed and you can go back and and change it back again.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Google Docs/Track Changes at home/school?

Not having internet and having other apps and program's already like Word and Pages. You would have to know how to track changes in add ons and not many people know how to use it.

What did you like about Wordle?

I liked wordle because it all you have to do is copy and paste all your writing in and it makes the words you use most the boldest. It's quite a good tool because then you can compare your changes with the first time you did it.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Wordle at home/school?

No internet. On the iPad it doesn't like using it because I tried and it didn't work. Wordle is a Web Based Java program the equivalent on an iPad may be Word Collage  https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/word-collage/id527057508?mt=8 

What did you like about Speak Selection - iPad reading your text aloud?

I liked it because it would speed up speaking when there wasn't enough commas and full stops.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Speak Selection at home/school?

It had a Horrible voice which made it a bit frustrating but you could have it set to your voice maybe.

What did you like about Book Creator?

It was a good way to set out your work. Once you knew how to use it, it was quite good.

What barriers/issues/problems can you see with using Book Creator?

Not knowing how to use it. It took a while to figure out to change the font and change the size of the words. It was just quite fiddly in general.

What other tools or digital opportunities would you like to see at school?

Getting to use more apps in school to help our learning. I think that the teachers need some training about new apps to help kids in the classroom.

Anything else you would like to share about the day?

It was a good use of my work day.

The writing process and a Year 9 Student - My reflection

Last Friday I had the opportunity to work with a student from the local college who was on work day and I employed her to play with some of the apps I had found and to give me feedback from a students points of view. I was thinking as part of the writing process she could use digital technologies to enable her to express her creativity.Megan is a Year 9 who does not particularly enjoy writing however she is a very creative person.

Megan started by using Popplet to create a brainstorm of what she wanted to write about. After a few moments it was apparent that she needed more guidance around the topic and what to write about. Using Write About app gave her some ideas to create her story. Once Megan had chosen a topic she asked if she could brainstorm her ideas using pen and paper.

Once Megan completed the brainstorm I asked to her to create a copy using Popplet so she had an experience of using Popplet as a brainstorming tool.

Reflection of Popplet

On reflection some students would not choose Popplet as their first choice as a brainstorming tool and neither would I. To brainstorm I like to get my ideas on paper as it gives me more freedom to quickly build a mental image of my thinking.

In hindsight I tend to use an electronic brainstorm when I need to publish the output and would generally still choose paper over digital for my own personal use. In a class situation with a group brainstorm I can see the power of collaborative brainstorms that are digital and would lean towards Popplet or similar.

Drafting was done using Dictanote as was this reflection. Dictanote was not an easy tool to use on the Megan’s Acer Laptop as the microphone did not pick up the words well. We tried to calibrate the microphone and used the train the computer to Megan’s voice with little success. We also tried my Macbook however I think it was tuned into my voice and this did not work well either.

Reflection of Dictanote

• Works best on an individuals own device
• need to set spoken i to capitalise to I
• Takes awhile to learn the tool but worth the effort (device also takes awhile to learn your voice)
• Speak naturally and pause to allow dictanote to catch up
• realise there will be mistakes that need to be fixed later (try not to fix as you go)
• Really need a good brainstorm with good sequence to help prompt speaker what to say next
• Stop mic recording to enable think time
• Text will need cut and pasted into a word doc or equivalent to edit

Using google docs Megan drafted her writing using her handwritten brainstorm as a guide.  On completion of drafting we cut and pasted her text into Wordle keeping the common words boxed ticked to enable repeated words to be shown larger on the wordle.

We used Wordle to see which words were most commonly used, in the case above we focussed on cutting back the use of and. From the Wordle Megan focussed on what words can be changed in her writing to make it more interesting.

Reflection of Wordle

• Needs flash plugin on a Mac
• Fantastic to focus students into words they have used too much. The above Wordle shows how Megan used and to join sentences together.
• Visual easy to see or screenshot

Finally we turned track changes on in Google Docs and Megan went about the process of editing her writing.

I emailed the text of the document to myself and opened the email on my iPad. This enabled me to use speak selection on the iPad and get Megan's text read aloud so she could hear her mistakes. The less punctuation the faster the iPad speaks the text, so easier to hear where punctuation needs to go.

Reflection of Speak Selection

• Easy to use
• Makes mistakes very obvious
• Student can hear and fix the mistakes as they go
• The less punctuation the faster the iPad reads, inserting punctuation correctly, slows down the speaker.

Finally we used Book Creator to publish Megan’s writing by cutting and pasting the text from the google doc into Book Creator. Some images were added to the book and then it was published to iBooks and as a PDF.

On reflection the day was a great success for me as I gained a lot of in sights in how to use the apps in a class situation. I also feel it was successful for Megan as she produced a good piece of writing and hopefully will use some of the tools she used with me in her own work. Even though it looks like a long process it was very quick to flick between apps and digital tools to complete the writing.

Dictanote or an equivalent app really would allow a reluctant writer much greater opportunities to get text onto a page as long as you are willing to give some time to learn the skill of dictating text.

Thank you very much Megan for allowing me the opportunity to work with you.