2023 Goals Wishes and hopes

 Kia Ora, and welcome to 2023

I am excited to be back working in Manaiakalani as an Across Kahui Ako Teacher this year. As with 2022 my focus will be on the understanding of an the implementation of the Aotearoa Histories Curriculum. I do feel I come into the year with a greater focus and appreciation for not only the "lay of the land" but also more understanding of the opportunities that the new curriculum present both schools and learners.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet with teachers, with principals and with learners to grow historical understandings. A particular highlight of 2022 was partnering with Ngāti Paoa to deliver professional development for staff, students and local hikoi exploring the local area. I look forward to this continuing in 2023.

As we look forward to 2023 a particular focus will be growing understanding of the four strands of the curriculum. These are

1. Maori History is the foundational and continuous history of  New Zealand. This has been a focus in 2022. 
2. Colonisation is the central force of our history in the last 200 years. 
3. Power is at the centre of most that has happened in New Zealand History,
4.  New Zealand History does not occur in a vacuum. We are a connected country, and much of our history relates to how we have interacted with the rest of the world.

Also, in conjunction with this I want to enquire about how collaberation across NCEA subjects can reduce our workload of our students by using common learning themes and assessing them in multiple ways.

I look forward to working with colleagues and learners in 2023.

 

History Engagement

 In my time as a history teacher, and even reflecting on my time as a learner, students' experience of New Zealand History has resulted in boredom and a reluctance to learn or engage in local stories. There is a perception that “interesting” or “real” history didn’t happen locally

So as for my enquiry I decided to survey a year 9 class to determine their views on learning about local history.

Pre trip 61% felt local history was important. This rose to 87% post trip.

Pre trip 19% said NZ history was boring - 28% said maybe. This dropped to 6% and 6% maybe post trip.

There is evidence to suggest that an authentic engagement with local history via Mana Whenua lifts both student interest and engagement with the stories of the past. 

This is backed up by research overseas 

The merits of teaching local history: Increased place attachment enhances civic engagement and social trust

So now the challenge is to grow the learning beyond the trip itself into the classroom

Need to conduct some student interviews re their views on Local History in more depth

"Ka mua, ka muri" is a whakatauki that many will know means "walking backwards into the future" - the idea we should look to the past to inform the future.

There is emerging evidence that local historical understanding can build community pride as students become more aware of their local community.

Last day of the DFI

 Today was the last day of my journey attending the Manaiakalani Digital Fluency Intensive.

Our focus at the start of the day was on empowerment. Unfortunately many of the whanau of our learners exist with a lack of empowerment. This has been made worse by two years of Covid lockdowns and restrictions. Unfortunately that is reflected in many of the social statistics in modern Aotearoa. The challenge is to combat this and many of initatives that manaiakalani have are designed to combat these.

Our attention turned to the future of technology. In particular what does this mean for our young people. The world is shifting particually around the area of automation. Theere are break through technologies around the world such as Elon Musks' star link and even in New Zealand companies such as rocket lab are changing the dynamic as to what is possible. Increasingly, Robots are replacing humans and changing industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. The development of these technologies means that is crucial to have a conversation about whose world view is reflected in these platforms. Awareness is crucial of any biases that may exist in terms of Artificial Intelligence.

We were joined by some amazing year 6 students from Point England Primary who showed us real life examples of how the Manaiakalani Learn Create Share Kaupapa is embedded in their school on a daily basis. They were amazing ambassadors for their school.

An opportunity to explore coding software is always fun and I am going to challenge myself to find opportunities to use in my classroom.  The afternoon was spent exploring applications such as scratch to develop our coding skills. It was a lot of fun and I can see how students would enjoy engaging with this technology.

The DFI has been an amazing learning experiance and I feel more equipped as a teacher with my digital technology skills and look forward to embbedding this in my practice.  

Devices Day

 Day 7 of the DFI continued with a focus on Devices. Getting the opportunity to connect using the devices that our students use. 

Dorothy kicked things off remotely from Christchurch with a brief on ubiquitous learning. We have all become familiar with this as a result of the covid lockdowns and the need to learn remotely.  The idea of this is that students can have the barriers of time removed. The students can chose when to engage with their working. Students are empowered to extend learning at a time that works for them. It also enables students to live local and learn global. Students can learn at their on pace. Manaiakalani initatives such as the summer learning journey have shown that learning opportunities outside the traditional school day have shown to improve outcomes for students. 

We were then given an opportunity to use Chromebooks to explore their functionality. It was great to experiance how they operate and the various keyboard shortcuts. It is similiar (but different!) to the macbook that I am familiar with. We also got to experiance using a whiteboard style app on an Ipad which I can imagine is particually engaging for younger learners.

In the afternoon session we build a workspace - and learned how to make it engaging for learners. You can view it here

Getting comfortable building sites

 Day 6 of the DFI was all about google sites. 

The underpinning idea of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is the concept of Rangitamiro - being connected. The Manaiakalani Kahui Ako is a connection of different schools, primary, secondary, catholic, Kura Kaupapa and special schools. Since 2015 Manaiakalanai has expanded to involve schools from all around New Zealand. This collaberation allows for streamlineing of things like PLD. Manaiakalani runs a number of PLD connecting schools together - an example of which is the Secondary Connects that run once a term. 

Sites allow for Visible teaching. Dr Rebecca Jesson notes that if learning is visible, learning can be enhanced. There are 5 affordances of the Learn Create Share pedagogy in a digital learning environment. 1) Engagement. 2) Teaching conversations 3) Cognitive challenge. 4) Visibility and 5) Scaffolding.

There are a number of purposes of the learning site. It is a one stop hub for learning. It makes learning ubiquitous. It allows for rewindable learning. It personalises learning. It provides for visible planning and teaching. It allows parents and whanau to engage with the learning of students. It provides an overview of the learning ahead and it also, obviously, allows for distance learning while needed. Google sites allow for consistency across learning levels in schools. It is important that the sites being created have visual appeal and functionality to both engage and make it simple for students to engage with their learning tasks. 

We were given the time to explore a number of learning sites. It was good to experiance sites as a visitor and think about what works and what doesnt. This is useful for planning my site with a view to the user experiance. Following this, we shared our sites and got feedback.

We were then given the rest of the day to work on our own subject sites   

Collaboration

 Day 5 of the DFI begun with a focus on visibility. Can the learning been seen or not? Visibility for the learners is crucial, particularly in a post-Covid environment. Visibility for whanau is crucial. But also visibility to other teachers to allow for collaboration and the sharing of ideas. Teachers should consider the default setting of their learning to be "visible to anyone with the link"

We then turned our focus to Multi Modal modes of learning. The purpose of this is to engage learners in a variety of different ways, harnessing technology. Our class sites needs to be both differentiated and inclusive for our learners. This can help with diversification. A useful site can help with the engagement of our learners. Our sites need to be created in such a way so as to entise learners into their learning. It should reflect the current learning in the classroom. It is, essentially, the shop front window to the learning. 

A multi modal site should have personalised learning using the UDL framework. What engages one learner may not necessarily engage another learner. This will help with cognitive engagement of students. Designing Learning with the end in mind to get accerlated achievement. Site design needs to be framed from a pedagogical perspective.

We were given the opportunity to browse some learning sites that are examples of best practice. For me I like sites where the learning is clear and there is more than one way of the information being displayed. Following this we started to create our own site, and learnt how to create links and use the button feature on google sites.

For the afternoon session we spend the afternoon creating a multi modal site based on critical reading skills. Click here to view the result   

Dealing with Data

 Day four of the Digital Fluency Intensive kicked off with reflections on what is working well and what people need more help with. It does seem as though people are embracing the learning into their classroom practice and their daily lives.

From that we focused on the third element of the Manaiakalani pedagogy - Share. Share has become an integral part of our lives and sites such as youtube have allowed Share to occur on a wide scale. Social Media apps such as Facebook and Twitter have enabled (and commercialised) the human compulsion to share. Share is not constrained to online however, students will always look for opportunities for the human connection and using the ability to share.

Underpinning the idea of share is the concept of Audience. Students can share with each other, the school, the local community of even globally. Authentic audiences are audiences who make the choice to actively chose to view the content that is being created. Blogging is a great way for students to share their content with the globe. John Hattie notes that the feedback ability of blogging is a powerful enabler of learning for students.

Moving on to our focus for the day of Data, we looked at Google Forms. Forms are a great way of collating data, with a number of different question formats. We were given the opportunity to create our own forms. 

Google My Maps (as opposed to Google Maps) is a really cool new app that I was introduced to. I can see a lot of applications for my class - and I have created my own map (see below). Check out the cities I have been lucky to visit with my wife. 

From here we moved onto google sheets. I feel pretty comfortable with sheets but did learn about options to filter options. This tool enables data to be accessed by the users to be specific to their needs. For example if you had a class set of data and wanted to view boys reading levels, you would be able to do this automatically. There is so much functionality within Google Sheets including the ability to lock data inputting, viewing edit history and the ability to Split Data to columns.

For our afternoon session we took our learnings on google sheets to analyse a students blog. See below the chart that was created based on the analysis of a students blog at Point England School. It is clear that this student likes to blog a lot in the middle of the year, and that 2020 (COVID!) had a massive increase in blogging.