LearnPath - araako

I have been busy doing some updates to a system that I am developing at school. LearnPath.



Or as the students know it as araako.com

Araako is a system to help students develop their understanding of the hub curriculum, their my being, my learning, my community.



























How can LearnPath show the following?



Students work through filling in different sections of araako through their profile.



Personality test, this is based on the https://www.16personalities.com/ personality test. This enables the student to put in what their personality type is. A way to remember then strengths. The personality types are one aspect we get students to look at how they learn, how they work with others. The different personality types of listed here. https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types

Short story. In some ways this adds a bit of humour to the area, having an opportunity to write something short provides opportunities for students to be creative.

Profile. Other social networks have it, why shouldn't this? The avatar needs to be changed to the community that they are in.

Habit that they are working on. The Hobsonville Habits allows students to select a habit that they are working towards, or a habit that they show strength in. This can be used in either way.

Goals, both personal and academic excellence.
Though, it could be nice rather than a graduate profile statement, to be a more learner focussed statement.

Academic Excellence Has developed the generic learning skills and the specific knowledge, skills and understandings that enable learners to excel in their chosen pathway.

Personal Excellence Has developed the personal values, dispositions and capabilities that enable the learners to lead a happy, healthy and successful life.

Developing understanding through the Hobsonville Habits, allowing students to delve deeper using the habit cards to understand and show strengths and weaknesses.



Personalising the header colour, allows the students to have some form of customising. These are limited to the materialisecss colours, available here http://materializecss.com/color.html


I have half developed a way for students to see what they have covered curriculum wise.
But this needs to have a bit more done to it, to show the learning objectives that have been covered.


Red - MODULES
Blue - SPINS

Developing a different way to look at the habits, all the habit indicators have been added to the system and it picks 5 at random that students are to develop some thinking around, wether it is for their own goals or around developing and understanding their learning.




Through one of the reflections to offer opportunities to develop SMART goals more, similar to what Amanda has done here https://amandargreenhalgh.wordpress.com/category/goals/

Through this I have been looking at other ways to pull apart goals.


While it provides opportunities for students to show aspects of the habits, one of the main things I design it to do it is to provide a way for students to do reflections.

The reflective nature of what they have learnt is the focus of a number of research papers.
http://www.ideaedu.org/Resources-Events/Teaching-Learning-Resources/Encouraged-students-to-reflect-on-and-evaluate-what-they-have-learned
https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/meaningful-reflection/


How can we provide opportunities for students to do this within hub. I have talked with students about blogger and other opportunities, however they wanted it behind a wall. Many are not yet at the stage where they feel comfortable posting online. Especially Year 9 and Yer 10 students.

What should go into a reflection?

Learning

While the learning of the student is important, there is also the learning of the teacher.

This was summed up this week by a post from Maurie, the principal of Hobsonville Point Secondary School. I believe it shows the learning that our teachers at school are going through and explains what their journey is at present. http://principalpossum.blogspot.co.nz/2016/02/others-voices.html

I myself am I going through that Journey. Taking up a leadership role this year. The Learning Design Leader of Technology.

Over the weekend I attended the subject association committee meeting and contributed towards the discussions. Many of these are the same that happen at each new committee. How to develop a regional based structure, as well as Professional Development of the members.
It was interesting when I listened to the conversation, around how to develop regional based participation, the word clusters kept coming up. This causes many confusion of what a cluster is, we now have cluster of schools, clusters of teachers. The idea that has merit is one of Hubs. Considering how we have Learning Hubs at school, we need to develop what these regional Hubs will be focussed around, and who will lead the Hub. This will be developed as we go on through the year, but first thing, who is in each Hub? Have we got the areas sorted?

That night saw conversations with a cousin, who is into supporting youth through scouting. The ideas of dispositions and developing these as part of the scouting curriculum is of interest to me. It is great to see various students at school interested in scouting and talking about it with us teachers. The ideas around the slackline development as I talked about in my previous post came from his ideas. We are now developing a shared understanding of the lingo used. I also handed over the 12 GPS units that I used to support the Get Lost initiative that we ran at school last year for his scouts to learn how to use. Developing mini geocaches where scouts get GPS coordinates to be able to find, that then moves to geocaches around the city. Many talk about how the phones that they use could be used. But there is something in having just a basic tool to do a complex job that makes it unique. Also having conversations about his son's learning and how he is going at school, makes for some interesting conversations in the different way students learn.

Working through on Sunday writing an educational paper with another teacher about a project that we have been developing over the past four years has been one of reflection and challenge.
While writing this paper, it has been amazing the number of ideas and learning that I have taken from Hobsonville Point, and how before I was at the school was developing ideas and context around.
One of the ideas was around how teachers could mentor each other, which I see as the basis of the critical friendship that we have at school. See Ros' post about what this means. http://rosmaceachern.blogspot.co.nz/2015/10/critical-friendships.html

The other is around growth mindset, being open to try new ideas, through searching growth mindset and Hobsonville Point Secondary School I came across Steve Mouldey's blog post which has been the basis of this weeks Hub lessons for me. https://stevemouldey.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/growth-mindset-activities-for-students/

I will have to search the #hpssblog (only just being introduced) more for other ideas I can use in my learning.

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.

comfortzone

If there is one thing that has challenged me so far is that I have had to step outside my comfort zone.

Today we had e-asttle testing. This morning was reading for the year 9 and writing for the year 10. We had two different modes of testing going on, online and paper based. Good thing to as we had a look at our bandwidth usage when just having half thw school on and we feared the worse if we had all students doing the e-asttle maths test in the 2nd block. Quickly plans were changed and phone calls being made to try and sort out our bandwidth requirements.

Part of me was thinking, why is this problem happening? I have come from a school where we had a 1Gig internet connection and we would have coped with an online e-asttle test.

Year 9 students were sent to the gym, year 10 students sat the test. In the gym I learnt quickly from watching Anna work with 120 students. (I am thinking at this stage how do you control 120 students) Students were split into teams, given bands to represent their teams, and instructions given on how to play.

The activity was multi-sports

A number would be given and a sport. The number is the number of players allowed on the court from your team and the sport to be played.

One-touch

headache

football

netball

basketball

When a goal or point is scored, the game stops, and the next number and sport is given.

This afternoon, I was assisting in the same activity, with year 10 students. In about 30 minutes we had all the year 9 students coming into the gym. What is going on, we needed a plan. Mitch (sports coordinator) and myself took the year 9 out to the courts, we had a netball hoop, could do football and headache as well as touch. But no basketball. Splitting teams up we came up with split into the three learning communities and then split one of them in half again. This worked well and we had a good activity running. Only problem was we were getting more students joining us, we needed to split again and have another court running, no netball hoop on this court, so limited to three sports.

Everyone from both teams playing headache

I need to ask what the rules are around one-touch, so I am better prepared if I have to do this again.

Are teachers prepared to spend time outside of their comfort zones?

challenging

Today was our first day of school. All the idea and vision from the last week have now come into play.

This morning started with a Kitchen Table meeting, minus the kitchen table. There is now more staff than can fit around a kitchen table. The meeting in the library space allows a comfortable spot to talk.

Time spent with the students involved ice breaker games and activities. Some thing that I need to work on this year.

The challenge of the day was the film challenge. To look at a habit, a place within the community and to incorporate other aspects were possible. To have 4 hours for students develop an idea, get footage and edit it before showing to their community by 3pm. The official viewing will be Wednesday afternoon. But it allowed me to see the students outside of a classroom, engaging with one another.
Problem solving was a big area of focus today. Using iMovie for the first time on an iPad mini was a challenge in what it can and can't do. I think I am too used to adobe premiere.

Here are some images from todays challenge.

Cutting out images 

Joining together

Outside the Primary School

Had to get the image of the dog in the film

Beginning

Tomorrow, I start my third school as a teaching staff member. Ever since the day in the classroom I have been wondering how will I work in this environment? How will we work together to create learning with students? What will the learning look like?

It was rather interesting when I received the email about the induction at school. It was over three days. Normally induction in schools for new teachers have felt like lets cram as much information in a day as possible. What is the vision of the school, the staff handbook, get given your equipment and then you are have a teacher only day.

This was not the case at HPSS.

Induction - Day One
Vision and Values

Being a Learning Coach

Restorative Practice

Induction - Day Two
Being a Module Teacher

Assessment and Reporting Processes

Intro to Big Projects

Induction - Day Three
Being a Project Facilitator

Blended Learning Tools - Moodle/Google

Throughout these days I have had the questions I went in answered, but also importantly, I have raised more questions as well. This is different, this is a good type of different. I can now see that these days have been pivotal in developing the growth mindset needed.

Which was interesting, as I sat on Thursday night in a Twitter #edchatnz session, which looked at: Let's talk about growth mindsets. 

Teacher Only Day
Having the vision set out and looking at what a Growth Mindset is and how we need to be developing this as teachers as well as with our learners. Looking at Warm, Demanding and Balance and what it means for us as a staff. It seems that our principal looks at this as part of his survey of how he is going.

The teacher only day allowed us to get to know each other on staff, a great way was the one minute intro, in which we had to develop a slide to go into the presentation. To see staff interests, highlights of life and aspects about them that would take normally half a year to know. 

Looking at the teaching, I have a Specialist Learning Module, or a SLM in school language that I am working on with an English teacher. This has been on mind as soon as we received the piece of paper during our induction. How am I going to Digital Technologies with a Technology focus with an English teacher. I have been racking my brain for days, thinking about websites, print media, sound and video First thought was movie trailers on what they were creating. However we have to look at how to include Characteristics of Technology with a theme of Culture and Diversity. It wasn't until I sat down with one of the new teachers and we started talking about static images, though it now visual images in English that I got thinking about Comic Books, what is students could create a comic book page showing the theme as part of their english work. With this, we have an idea. Now to name the unit. I look forward to these as we develop our ideas and thinking throughout the year.

I have been thinking about a number of things throughout the induction, but there in lies a problem... I am the new guy. In reidteacher's blog he talks about the same issue. Being a new person, how do you suggest new ideas, new thinking. It is human nature to sit back and see what is happening and be a little bit more comfortable before offering new ideas.

What is one of those ideas, it is seeing where a students technological literacy lies... I know schools look at e-asTTLE tests, and IKAN tests for mathematics. However, where does a students technological literacy lie. This is somethig that me and another teacher have been looking at for a while. Skills are not enough for what is required for scholarship and higher level. We need students who can look and understand Technological Practice, Technological Knowledge and Nature of Technology.

I look forward to the challenges that start tomorrow, I think the first one could be how to do a film challenge in the rain around the community. Bring a Jacket!