Digital Fluency Intensive - Enabling Access

Enabling Access was the theme for todays DFI session - in particular looking at visibility when using Google Sites.

Visibility is an important element of the Manaiakalani Kaupapa, effective online visible learning has the potential to be a game changer for students. In order for learning to be visible online it needs to be; accessible, available to the learner and be able to be given in advance.

Hapara has the potential to 'make teaching and learning visible'. It gives us a visibility lens, essentially we can 'look into each child's desk' through giving us access to all students work online.

Blogging is another fantastic way to make our teaching visible. Blogging enables teachers, other students and whānau access to students blogs. Furthermore, the skills taught with blogging teaches students to be responsible digital citizens. The visibility blogger allows for provides huge writing gains throughout the year for learners.

Google Sites provide the ideal platform in ensuring our learning for our students is visible. When our learners have their own devices and the teacher uses Google Sites, this is the ideal way to provide access to learning for students. But why Google Sites? Google Sites are; visible and accessible, enable learning available outside school hours, extend learning through collaboration, provides rewindable content, fostering higher motivation and engagement.

While digital technology and online learning provides many great opportunities for learning there are concerns that come with it, especially in regards to visibility for whānau. We need to ensure that we are not locking parents out of the learning process i.e. years ago parents had access to exercise books - we need to ensure that our online learning is accessible and visibility to parents. This is something we need to continually consider when working online. A takeaway I have taken away from this session is to continually reflect and reassess my class site to ensure that it is visible and accessible to not only my students but also to my colleagues and students whānau.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Devices

Today's session was all about using devices in the classroom and ensuring our learners are Cybersmart online. The phrase "Cybersmart" is a purposeful phrase, we are not teaching our students to be "Cybersafe" but instead "Cybersmart" and ensuring we are "empowering our learners as confident and connected decision makers". Devices and the digital footprint they leave needs to be taught in a positive light - students need to understand the wealth of opportunities online whilst also maintaining a positive digital presence online. 

It was great today learning about the different Cybersmart categories and the importance of teaching students about these categories i.e. Smart Learners, Smart Media, Smart Surfing. I will aim to make use of the teacher resources on the Manaiakalani Cybersmart site with my students. 

A take home message I took from today was the importance of ensuring that what the students are doing online is visible - nothing should be hidden. Hapara Dashboard is a fantastic tool to use in the classroom to ensure this. I learnt some great tips about how to use Hapara more effectively in the classroom, some of these include; 

• Sharing tab - allows access to all docs that are not in students specifically named folders
• Ability to access students blogs - both draft and saved posts
• Activity viewer - gives me the ability to record every URL - I can see what students are on and can take a 'snap' to record the time and date
• Guided browsing - I put in the web addresses that they can go to 
• Filter session - restrict students access to certain sites 

I intend to use these features with my learners in the future. 

A further element of todays session was using chromebooks and iPads. These are the devices our students use so we spent some time looking into their capabilities. I found it interesting using explain everything with the iPads. It was great to learn about the potential this app has across all curriculum areas and the benefits it will bring to the junior students. I can see how this has the power to transform their learning and give them more ownership over what they are doing.  

Digital Fluency Intensive - Computational Thinking

Today we unpacked the significance of the 'Share' within Learn, Create, Share. It was interesting learning about why sharing is such an important and significant part of the learning process. I enjoyed learning about how sharing has evolved over the years, 2005 was a turning point for online sharing with the introduction of social media sites such as Twitter and Youtube, these sites have brought speed and amplification to sharing. It is hard to believe how much sharing has evolved and become so much more global in the past 10 years and how it will continue to evolve in the future.

It is easy to see how important sharing is and how it will be for our learners in the future, sharing gives our learners an authentic audience which is important in regards to raising student outcomes. Furthermore, todays session highlighted to me how Learn, Create, Share is a spiral process - we need to ensure students "share to finish learning". Within this component of the learning process we also need to ensure that students are connected learners - they are confident and know how to share their opinions online - this can be in the form of commenting on others blog posts. This picture states how to be a connected learner online.

I really enjoyed the OMGTech! part of todays session. OMGTech! is a charity that teaches kids how to be innovative with technology. It was really interesting thinking about what the future will ask of us in terms of education. It was good to unpack digital technologies and the components within digital technologies i.e. inquiry, construction, communication and expression and see how they fit into the classroom. I am looking forward to having a look on the OMGTech! website for classroom activities to try with my learners. My confidence has grown within using digital technologies in the classroom and this site will give me ideas and activities that I can use with my learners.

One aspect that I enjoyed today that I want to use with my learners was the practical sorting algorithm. I liked that this activity was a practical way to introduce students to algorithms. I can see the links this activity can help not only to the digital curriculum, but also to other curriculum areas such as maths.

A further element of todays workshop that I would like to take back to the classroom was the binary maths activity on the OMGTech! site. This seemed like a fun way to introduce my learners to binary and is something I definitely want to try.

The practical nature of todays workshop made the session really enjoyable. Today's session provided me with a good opportunity to really understand Scratch. Prior to todays session I had only had a little play with coding sites but I didn't fully understand how they worked and the capabilities behind them. It was great to have a play on these coding sites and develop my understanding of their relevance to education. Furthermore, I was able to gain some ideas of how they can be used in the classroom.

Digital Fluency Intensive - Collaborate

The importance of creativity was a dominant theme in todays session. It is evident that creativity is an essential skill that our learners need to possess for the future as these "creative skills help students become better problem solvers, communicators and collaborators" (Everyone can create, Apple, 2008). 

Kohl (2008) describes creativity in young people as "the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery", it is clear this is an important element of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy. Furthermore, the value of using modern technologies to stimulate this creativity and therefore drive student engagement is evident within the Manaiakalani pedagogy. 

Today's session highlighted to me the importance of Multi Modal Learning, an important take home message was the importance of having a 'hook' when creating tasks for my learners - this ensures engagement. 

In addition to a hook, I need to ensure my content looks engaging online - by ensuring I present my information using different modes i.e. poem, video, audiobook - I know this will appeal to all my learners. This will result in my lessons appearing much more engaging and will appeal to a wider range of students. I have found that google sites are an effective way to present this information. 

Another take home message was the importance of students being creators of information and not just consumers - through exposing students to meaningful creative tasks we can ensure that students are drivers of their own learning.
One trick that I learnt today that I will be using with my learners relates to documents I want them to copy. 

• By changing the end of a slide link from 'present' to 'copy' and sharing this link with my students - this ensures that when they click on this link it will ask them 'do you want to make a copy of this document' instead of just opening up the document.

Another component of the session today was working with google sites. Although I already use google sites with my students it was good to learn a few more tips around adding buttons and looking into some different design features. Attached is the link to our google site which I created alongside some other teachers. 

Resources

Kohl, M. A. (2008). Fostering creativity. Excelligence Learning Corporation.

Learning Journey

Osterman & Kottkamp (1993) state that reflective practice is important to lead behaviour changes and improve performance. This is done by identifying and focusing on problems, gathering and analysing information and then coming up with new ways to think and act in accordance. We then need to test these new re-conceptualised behaviours.

In the last 32 weeks within the Postgraduate DCL learning journey I have gained a lot of new knowledge and have been exposed to a new range of ideas and thinking surrounding education. The biggest learning I have taken away from this course is the idea that the world is drastically changing and as educators we need to be keeping up and ensuring that the skills we are teaching our students is appropriate to prepare them for the future.

I knew that I wanted to make a change in my practice to ensure that I was best preparing my students for their futures. When I made the decision to do this course I knew that I was moving from the Year 1/2 team and into the Year 7/8 team and I wanted to be digitally prepared for these learners so I could challenge them in their learning. I value future focused education and providing our students with the skills to thrive in the 21st century - I wanted to learn the skills to best get them there so that I knew I was doing my best job as a teacher. I wanted to gain more confidence and a better understanding for and why it is important to teach students 21st century skills, especially collaboration.

A key change I have made to my practice is the increased use of digital technologies in the classroom. Prior to this course I hardly ever usd digital technology with my Year 1/2 students, when iPads were used it was for game based activities as opposed to transformational creative tasks. This year with my older students I now have more knowledge on how to use digital technologies with them, we use devices throughout the entire day, my tasks for students are digital and creative but also allow for collaboration and the ability to share with others. Prior to completing this course my understanding of digital technologies in the classroom was lacking, as was my understanding of 21st century skills, I knew I wanted an increased understanding of this as I knew the future of education is about to change rapidly.

ITL Research- 21st Century Learning Design has guided my practice in the classroom (ITL Research n.d). This also relates to Standard 5 of the Teacher Standards (Ministry of Education, nd). The students in my classroom are provided with digital tasks that are based on the curriculum content, 21st century pedagogy such as collaboration, creativity, communication and are created based on their learning progressions. Through my learning at The Mind Lab I have been exposed to appropriate resources and an understanding of how to implement these in the classroom i.e. introducing flipped learning to my maths sessions.

From this experience I have learnt that students are very willing to learn new ways of learning, I have also learnt that things may not go right the first time but it is important to keep trying because when they do go right it is amazing to see in the classroom and the benefits it is giving our students. In the future I would like to look into gamification in the classroom and how this can best be implemented for our learners.

References


ITL Research. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research

Ministry of Education (nd). Practising teacher Criteria and e-learning . Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/Registered-Teacher-Criteria-and-e-learning

Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R.(1993). Reflective Practice for Educators.California.Cornwin Press, Inc. Retrieved on 7th May, 2015 fromhttp://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files/RefPract/Osterman_Kottkamp_extract.pdf

Impact of Inquiry

I have come to the end of my inquiry and am now using evidence to form conclusions and evaluate the impact this inquiry has had on my current practice and the impact it will have in the future. I have followed the Spiral of Inquiry to guide my inquiry, this is broken up into six different phases and follows a very explicit process of developing professional agency (Educational leaders n.d).

At the end of the ‘learn’ phase of the Spiral of Inquiry one of the impacts I anticipated was that students would become more confident users of digital technology and they would have more autonomy over their learning that allows them to be creative. I collected evidence in the ‘take action’ phase of the Spiral of Inquiry. As discussed in my previous post this evidence has been identified from various forms of my qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. This evidence suggests that the students are much more confident using the iPad apps to help with their literacy, they enjoy using digital technology and they believed it helped them with their literacy tasks. Furthermore, the iPads were allowing for transformational learning as students were using the iPads to create their own videos and books collaboratively (Using the SAMR model, n.d). Evidence that supports these observations were noted in the students interview questions, the tally chart but also in the learning tasks they were creating.

A further anticipated outcome I identified was that teachers would have a better understanding of how to incorporate digital technologies into their practice and this would allow for changes in the classroom pedagogy. This impact is very different to the actual impact, I don’t believe that I gave teachers enough support to incorporate digital technologies into their practice. Support was given to the students and while they have an understanding of how the iPads can be used, more support is needed for the teachers so they understand what iPad apps will work best with their learning goals.

However, the evidence does suggest that parents were supportive of the use of iPads in the hub, as long as they were for educational use. Although, it was apparent they lacked understanding on how they can be used in transformational ways that would support creativity and collaborative learning. Evidence to support this was noted in the parent survey questions.

Learnings that I will take from these impacts is that many different impacts can come out of the inquiry process whether they were anticipated or not. It is important to continually reflect on the process and make modifications. In the next cycle of inquiry I would give more support to the teachers and look into ways that digital technologies can better integrated in as opposed to being separate from the learning programme. They need to be viewed as not just a tool we can bring out occasionally, but a fully integrated device to improve learning outcomes. I think this inquiry is well supported in the school I am at. Our school culture is very future focused and supportive of changes to practice to ensure we are providing students opportunities to be innovative, creative and competent digital citizens. I would like to continue building on this inquiry as i know the benefits it will bring to students learning.

References

The spiral of inquiry / Evidence-based leadership / Pedagogy and assessment / Home - Educational Leaders. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Pedagogy-and-assessment/Evidence-based-leadership/The-spiral-of-inquiry

Using the SAMR model. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/Teacher-inquiry/SAMR-model