digital information - habit tracking

Getting students to track how they are using there Hobsonville Habits within their learning.

Twitter is such an interesting tool to see how people are using digital technologies within their learning. To gather information and inquire into what is happening with that data.

It started with a tweet...

How Might We show this understanding with our collection of data.

Being able to get the students to enter the data. Making a simple easy to use interface. 

Each day students would be able to change the sliders to indicate their use/understanding/development of the habits.

You might ask about why there are two sliders for each, the top one is for students to enter, the bottom one is for the learning coach.

Once the data is entered, how to best show the patterns, at the moment this is available to the coach only, with future development for the students.

It is at the moment being thought about doing this is in slightly different way, being able to turn on and off habits to be able to show patterns over time.

Notes:

• Keen for some wellbeing/hauora aspects too... so we can keep an eye on that. Could be cool if as well as a ranking, that somehow/somewhere they justify with evidence so not token judgement?
• Complete this one. Perhaps a group of Coaches pilots it and iron out bugs and streamline usage ready for term 2 across school launch.

Curriculum coverage

For the past year and a half I have been thinking about a solution to help us make sure that we deliver a balanced timetable for our students. Being the timetabler also helps to push that challenge.
At HPSS we want to develop the ideas of a Personalised LearnPath

Personalised LearnPath

The Learning Coach works with students to identify passions and link their interests and needs to their learning. Learners negotiate their LearnPath (personalised learning programme) with their Coach to ensure that what they are learning is relevant to them. The Coach supports and guides students to set and meet challenging learning goals.

https://sites.google.com/hobsonvillepoint.school.nz/hpss/curriculum/learning-hubs

We have a great system in place already to gather this information together when developing the module booklets, it is the next stage of the process. The part in hubs and selections for students that I want to develop. Looking at a students selections and trying to make sure that they have selected everything that you want, some of it is relied that it has been done correctly and the instructions followed by the student.

As timetablers we hope that this has been done correctly, checking 240 foundation students timetables takes a fair bit of trust. 

One of the teachers at the school developed a way to do this in Google sheets last year, but there is a fair bit of modification to get it going. I did wonder at the time whether I could get something similar working on the web, but I kept putting it on the back burner. 

paper checker

Ready for this year, I thought about what I had to do today and spotted some time, next thing I was in phpmyadmin developing a database to hold the requirements for our q2 programme, a quick copy of the structure and I had the q1 programme in as well. Next came entering all the codes of our modules, something simple to do with sql statements.

Then using my php template, I had all the students name listed. Now to develop a quick check programme against their selection and all the learning areas to see if the module name existed. Add a number to the counter, and display. 

Surprisingly I checked everything by running form the data exported from KAMAR and I had it working within an hour of starting.

Next I created the foundation years check and tested it from the data collected by one of my new hub students, eek, will have to go back over the requirements with this as it failed to meet the coverage.

Suddenly, this brought a new issue, why do we check at the end of the process, why not develop something that could check before the information is entered, to save any issues that may come up before they happen. A quick verification from some of the staff in the staffroom and away to develop the prototype. This will continue to develop as we go through the year that it will pull the information straight from the database, at the moment all dropdown boxes are entered manually. However it does check the selections against the database tables for learning area module names.

This is the start of the showing of what a student will have covered for a year. 

At present the student fills this in through a google sheet document. I would like them to see coverage throughout the year through a google chart API and webpage so that they can share this quickly and easily when doing reflections and check in's. How do we make learning visible?

Examples of information

I have been thinking about how I wish to develop digital information this year and have been thinking about understanding some of the concepts that I want students to understand.

I have decided to use khan academy to help with the in class work. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/sql Developing the students understanding of SQL, this will allow the students to develop understanding and projects through an online environment that doesn't matter what device that they use.

What I have to look at:

Teacher guidance

To support students to implement advanced procedures to produce a digital information outcome at level 7, teachers could:

• provide an opportunity for students to learn and practice a range of advanced procedures in a database and at least one other software application 
• provide a brief for a specified digital information outcome, or guide students to develop their own brief 
• ensure students are aware of the requirement at this level to produce an outcome that integrates data from a database and at least one other application using dynamic linking 
• ensure students apply design elements and formatting techniques accurately and independently as they develop digital information outcomes 
• ensure students apply data integrity and testing procedures as they develop digital information outcomes 
• ensure students understand their legal, ethical, and moral responsibilities when developing digital information outcomes in terms of the social implications of the outcome within an organisation and the wider community.

copied from http://seniorsecondary.tki.org.nz/Technology/Achievement-and-learning-objectives/Level-7/DTG-7-2

Here is the new todo API information that is moodle 3.2 dashboard, getting students to understand how data is stored in other applications will help them through their own developments.

Add a todo class (pretty please can we have an actual class rather than just stdClass)

• Some properties of the class:
• unique id (context id, component, area and item id?)
• name - the name of the thing the todo relates to (e.g. activity name)
• url - the url of the thing the todo relates to (e.g. view.php of the module)
• user id - the id of the user this todo belong to
• course id - the course if that the todo relates to
• icon url - the icon for the todo (default to the module icon)
• start date (optional) - when the todo starts
• end date (optional) - when the todo must be actioned by
• item count - how many associated items there are (e.g. 4 unread posts)
• action name - display name of the todo (e.g. "submit assignment")
• action url - url of the todo action (e.g. link to the assignment submission page)
• action start date - a date after which the todo can be actioned (only display the action url after this date)
• action state - Has this been actioned? Eg, The assignment was submitted.
• Add an API class to provide access to todos (get todos for a user, get todos for a user grouped by course etc).
  • Retrieval of todos needs to suppose pagination (and pagination with filters, e.g. first 10 todos in the next 7 days, second 10 todos in the next 7 days).

Copied from https://docs.moodle.org/dev/My_course_overview_improvements

While the work does not need to be an API, it will help the students to think outside.

co creation

It has been an interesting couple of days at school. I decided to get a project that I have been working on and off one up and running again. It is a RFID scanning system to assist with a 5km run, where people can scan when they start and when they finish. This has been talked about in my blog post, Challenging myself as well as building on building on existing message.

I managed to get the base version that I had been developing up and running again, after formatting the SD Card and reimaging it with the LCD drivers with this time with a 3.5inch screen attached to the RPi.
Through this I have been trying the GUI and the console version, I must say the console is helping as it is providing opportunity for rapid prototyping with its quick restart and low loading.

With the base system and running, it was time to start thinking of the next part, linking the data into a more suitable outcome, instead of being just on screen and in a text file, link it into a database service.

This is where I had a conversation with one of the students, what next. I showed him what the program was doing and how I had achieved some of the aspects. It was however something that needed to be developed better and have some more features. 15 minutes later he had a plan written on what the program could have done to it to support the ideas. Overnight he wrote a function that allows the creation of text documents to support start and finish tags, manage data during an outage or lack of connection.

This morning was integrating his function into the program and testing the ideas to see if they work. Many conversations have taken place and coding changed, is this a pair programmed piece of work now. Looking at what we are doing, could the standards that exist support this idea?

He has now taken a copy of the code home to continue development, as well as the dimensions to develop the next phase, putting it into action.

Looking at getting the data out to a mysql database so that we can add in different features, these will allow students to do creation of their own data next year using a mixture of google charts and bootstrap.


Note: since we are recording seconds, there is a function within mysql called SEC_TO_TIME() which will help with the conversion



There has been some great working on this project, It now no longer saves files to the raspberry pi, instead it is linked up with mysql.
Using google chart api has now allowed the data that is collected to be graphed based upon a PIN number.

Instead of using bootstrap, now use materialsecss, this is something different, while it is still responsive.

The beginnings of the website

What is the learning that has happened?

Version 1:
Development of rfid scanning system through the use of raspberry pi
Addition of LCD screen to the raspberry pi
Simple testing

Version 2:
Adding in database system to record data
To add mysql.connector to raspberry pi, sudo apt-get -y install python3-mysql.connector
Note: no phpmyadmin setup, for security, instead have to use mysql command line. (very important to note as it took me 2 hours to realise this as I have not worked on the project for 3 months)

Version 3:
Creation of website to show data through use of materialisecss and google charts api
This has now been complete, there was a bug that wouldn't allow the top record to be shown, this has now been fixed. Great setup and information is being recorded, this has been verified through a live test of the system on Monday 28th November through the EOTC Get Lost.

Version 4:
Login system to see profile

Version x:
Put out into real world and promote to a small group. Need to think about what this looks like and can be powered and developed.
- The idea of badges, for number of runs, beating personal best.
- The idea of developing a team, and running each week.
-

Also have to think about how to promote and develop promotional material.

Transforming Assessment Praxis

I am on a pilot of a new NZQA Best Practice Workshop model, which is around Transforming Assessment Praxis.

While it hasn't been all inspiring, as most of the work that they have been talking about over the last five weeks has been ideas that I have been working on with my students for the past couple of years. It has made me more aware of what we are trying to do at HPSS. Knowing the learner and working with contexts.

As well as looking at Naturally Occurring evidence

While watching the three hour session tonight that I missed last week, around What currently drives you current assessment practice, What students value, Future shifts, Modes of assessment and naturally occurring evidence. I have been sent two assessments to moderate by another teacher, looking at these tonight and putting the ideals that I have been working through, I have been able to make some changes to evidence statements. While it is an assessment in Digital Information, database creation, the assessment is written in such a way that it allows for a student to develop their own context, yet also offer ideas for those students that can't think of one, or it does show the students what the rigour of the assessment should be. Having the conversation with the teacher on the phone while modifying the assessment through Google Drive has allowed for some great conversations to happen about how the assessment could be delivered, and what contexts should be included to help develop students ideas around rigour.
Evidence statements have now been changed to allow for a screencast of the database working by the student to show how it would function.

But the highlight of the work was on area of the assessment that had been developed which was on to show skilfully or efficiently as required as part of the step up of the assessment. This is the masterpiece of the assessment in my opinion, without even knowing it or putting it in for assessment sake, this allows for naturally occurring evidence of the technology level 2 achievement standard around planning to be included. So a 6 credit assessment, is now a 10 credit assessment.

In the presentation I was watching tonight, was included some information on overlaps. This is something I think originally looked at when the assessments came out, however I think I was turned off at the amount of evidence required by the standards. Having a better understanding of the standards now and evidence required through my role in the subject association helps me to now develop better assessment outcomes. A feature of what we are looking at as part of the Workshop15 in the holidays. To many teachers are talking about the amount of evidence needed for assessments now. Why are we not thinking smarter and allowing the technologies that we use everyday to assist us.

I know look forward to the next two weeks where I get to put my plans for the task into action and develop an assessment resource 

Things to consider …

Prior to writing your assessment resource, you will need to consider the following:

• Your goal
• What the student voice has told me
• Student input into context
• Knowing my student
• Documents which will inform my assessment resource (Achievement Standard, Conditions of assessment, Clarifications documents)
• Modes of assessment
• Variety of ways to collect evidence

My Goal, to look at how naturally occurring evidence and authentic contexts can help develop engaging learning that can be used for overlaps of assessment.