Remember the days of the old school yard — moving into a new school yard

This is a reflective post I wrote after taking my daughter into the new Innovative Learning Space she will learn in this year

Walking out of my son and daughter’s school on the first day of the school year, a great song by Cat Stevens popped into my head. The song was “Remember the days of the old school yard” — you know, the one about imaginings, and all kinds of things, and laughing a lot.

Check out the rest of the post on the CORE Education Blog

Design Thinking in Education - slowing down to speed up

I am enjoying the opportunity to have a foot in both camps, so to speak, one foot as a teacher and one as a facilitator. I feel this gives me a great perspective when looking to extend my own knowledge.

Today I rocked up to a Design Thinking in Education seminar as a time poor teacher with a full day of commitments ahead of me. I quickly became disillusioned with the session as I was wanting the 101 ideas for Design Thinking to use back in the class. Luckily my growth mindset kicked in and enabled me to get over myself and engage in the learning opportunity provided.

A couple of statements from the presenter really reinforced this

• We need to slow down the process in order to speed up the thinking
• Urgency doesn't get us anywhere

These statements were very timely and made me reflect on my work with a cluster, where I am constantly pushing to get to the actions, to be able to see and do something tangible. Luckily in that cluster I have a very sensible colleague in the form of Rebbecca Sweeney who is staunch in slowing down the process to ensure deeper thinking. I now have more clarity around the value of this approach.

I may be time poor however, I also have to put some skin in the game if I wish to develop my own knowledge around Design Thinking and reflect on this which is the reason for this blog post.

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” 

― John Dewey

Another statement that resonated with me especially with my knowledge of the Golden Circles was 

• Have a purpose to your inquiry - my why

The purpose of attending the session today was to deepen my understanding of Design Thinking. I went in with the expectation of having some magic bullet shot into my head that would give me all the answers. This was never going to happen, however by changing my mindset about this during the session enabled me to develop a deeper understanding of Design Thinking. Reflecting now I think the 101 Design Tools for the class session I imagined would have lead to a shallow understanding of Design Thinking. 

I had already seen Design Thinking in action a couple of times and have a resource to read as well as connecting with another colleague to unpack Design Thinking some more. So in the big picture today was just another piece in the puzzle of developing my learning around Design Thinking. I would have loved to have attended the morning workshop after the seminar to continue to unpack Design Thinking.

Overall a very valuable session for me. 

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.

Creating personal knowledge from existing knowledge - Understanding the How

Agency, Collaboration, Connectedness and Ubiquity are all catch words in the New Zealand education sector.

But do we truly understand these terms as educators. Along with two of my colleagues we attempted to gain a greater understanding of Agency as we were about to present to a cluster of schools at a teacher only day.

Having mentioned these terms in workshops in the past we were quite surprised to discover that between the 3 of us our understanding of Agency was not very consistent or well formed in our heads.

So we looked to existing knowledge to help us clarify our understanding. After turning to Art Costa, Derek Wenmoth and numerous other papers and articles we started to form a greater understanding of agency especially when we had to think about teaching others about it. By collaborating together on the presentation and bouncing our ideas and thoughts about agency, a greater clarification occurred for ourselves. The ability to connect with others thinking at anytime ensured our learning could occur when we were ready, as we all needed to first process some aspects of the new knowledge before we could move on.

Keywords from Art Costa's Video

The personal knowledge of agency that I have gained through this collaborative approach of synthesising existing knowledge has enabled me to understand agency and also see a much bigger picture when it comes to Modern Learning Practise.

What we need to focus on as educators in this new and exiting time is not the Why or What aspects of technology in the classroom, as these are focussed on continuously and often lead to the digital tools being used as consumptive or as substitutes for traditional tools.

Instead we need to focus and unpack the How. Looking at Agency, Ubiquity, Collaboration and Connectedness. By focussing on the "How" we can use the digital tools to ensure personalised learning, creativity and sharing are embedded in our practise. 

So the next time you open a Google Doc for your learners, start to think "this is not a word processing tool", instead see Google Docs as an opportunity to increase collaboration, give learners agency, connect them outside the classroom and allow them to learn anywhere and anytime.

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.

Further reflection of Engaging Diverse Akonga

After removing some of the content from my last presentation and adding in Todd Roses Video I felt the session went much better. Removing the google form and just discussing some possible solutions enabled more time to actually play with Tellagami and Text selection. I still need to link to or create a step by step instuctions for tellagami.

As it was not a big staff I did not have to worry about talking over them and I did feel more comfortable with quiet time, however at times still tried to fill the void of silence, this will be an on going skill to develop.

Reflection of the Engaging Diverse Akonga

I came away from the session a bit flat as I felt I could have done better. I was already reflecting on the session as I was completing it.
It was great to get guidance and feedback from Emily during and after the session.
Why did I feel flat

1. Too much content next time I will drop the google form and also text typer as the staff where very involved in filling out the padlet and google doc and put a lot of thought into this. I might look at combing the form and doc together some how.
2. I did not cover Puppet Pals as I think that on the day text selection on the iPad and Tellagmi was enough.

Why I should not have felt flat

1. The staff were really engaged and enjoyed the diversity simulator really getting into the role play.
2. New content for most of the staff.
3. Positive feedback both verbal and written.

Engaging Diverse Akonga

After having many discussions around creating a presentation of engaging reluctant akonga I have come up with  a series of modifications to my presentation to enable me to engage more with the staff.

• I do not want to be the expert model and give them a bunch of apps and then leave. So I have looked at using another facilitator's idea of disability simulators which I renamed Diversity Simulators so not to get teachers thinking about the extreme students. 
• This simulation gets teachers hopefully thinking about the barriers that a lot of children have to learning.
• I have tried to put a positive message with changing the title from Reluctant Akonga to Diverse Akonga
• I have used padlets , a shared doc and google form to get staff involved in discussion and have created and shared links to the presentation, research and resources for allowing follow up down the track as well as linking all this to the schools VLN page
• I test ran the presentation at my old school and got some positive feedback to continue to develop the session.

Bring on the session next Thursday!

UDL in the staff room - engagement beyond lollies?

My challenge today is to create a staff meeting on Engaging Reluctant Akonga using the UDL Principles and try to create a more interactive presentation that connects with weary teachers at the end of a day.

This is my process for the day.

UDL in the staff room - engagement beyond lollies?

http://www.vln.school.nz/discussion/view/809458

In the previous post I spoke about my own disengagement in PD. Why was I disengaged?
Purpose of PD / How could I use it?
Delivery of content
Connection back to the learners
reflection / revisiting and a chance to chat with others to build my practise.

I am going to model the staff meeting around the Golden Circle Why/How/What.

To quote a famous not your average - Forrest Gump " I'm not a smart man but I do know what love is"  so I am going to take pieces / ideas that I love from different people to create my presentation.

Html for the VLN page I created around this presentation. Feel free to use just add your own doc, form and padlet.

<p><iframe style="padding: 0; margin: 0; border: none;" src="http://padlet.com/embed/wikqeuqoby" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="480px"></iframe></p>

<div style="border-top: 2px solid #a7d23a; padding: 8px; margin: 0; font-size: 12px; text-align: right;"><a href="http://padlet.com">Created with Padlet<img src="http://padlet.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="image" style="margin: 0 0 0 10px; padding: 0; border: none; width: 16px; height: 16px;" /></a></div>

<h4><a href="http://padlet.com/wall/wikqeuqoby" target="_blank">http://padlet.com/wall/wikqeuqoby</a></h4>

<p><img src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&amp;chs=128x128&amp;chl=http%3A%2F%2Fpadlet.com%2Fwall%2Fwikqeuqoby" border="0" alt="image" width="128" height="128" /></p>

<table style="background-color: #99ff66; width: 100%;" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3">

<tbody>

<tr>

<td style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="YOUR OWN GOOGLE DOC URL" frameborder="0" width="700" height="900"></iframe></td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

<p>http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1527279&nbsp;</p>

<p><iframe src="YOUR OWN GOOGLE FORM URL" frameborder="0" width="760" height="500"></iframe></p>

<p>http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/</p>

<p>Links to Resources</p>

<p><a href="http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/Multimedia+and+digital+storytelling">Digital Storytelling and Multimedia</a></p>

<p><a href="http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/Free+text+to+speech">Text to Speech</a>&nbsp;- great for kids to reread work or present to the class&nbsp;</p>

<p><a href="http://talktyper.com/">Speech to Text</a>&nbsp;- great for poor spellers. For use on a laptop / PC</p>

<p>Tellagami</p>

<table style="background-color: #00ff00; width: 100%;" border="1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3">

<tbody>

<tr>

<td><img src="https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000083557406/0d28c791289ac730bc63a143bfaae3eb.png" border="0" alt="image" width="75" height="75" /></td>

<td>

<table border="1" cellspacing="0">

<tbody>

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<td>

<p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />&nbsp;<span>&nbsp;</span><strong>Tellagami&nbsp;</strong><br /><br /><span>Construct an avatar, upload a background or use one of theirs. Record your voice or type text. Export to Camera Roll or get the embed code.</span></p>

<p><span><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/tellagami/id572737805?mt=8" target="_blank">https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/tellagami/id572737805?mt=8</a><br /><br /><span>iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad</span>&nbsp;</span></p>

</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLZdmypkSaI">Speak Selection on the iPad</a>&nbsp;- Allanah King goes through a tutorial on Speak Selection<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/initialipadsetup/home">Allanah King's Initial iPad Setup Site</a>- Allanah has spent a great deal of money on apps. Only the best apps make it onto this site. Well worth a look.</p>

Google Presentation of Engaging Diverse Akonga

Adults compared to Children as Learners

Adults verse Children Learners

How does this relate to me?

http://ed.fnal.gov/lincon/staff_adult.shtml