inclusion?

Inclusion? I put a question mark here because I am not sure around the title.

Developing programmes of learning for all learners. I remember something here from when I was at Teachers College. But other things stick with me.

My mates at school who were always out at Reading Recovery, or a Mathematics programme. A student who in the same class year after year with the same teacher, she had down syndrome. A blind student who was part of my Bachelors classes at Polytechnic.
Working at the primary school before I started teaching who had a special needs unit and some of the greatest students who I remember today. The school also had a deaf care taker who I learnt sign language off in the working mens club on friday after school whit a jug of coke and raspberry drink. My first secondary school who had a special needs unit on site, who I would join for lunch and head up to the camp for the evening so they knew a teacher at school. The Deaf education centre who had a number of students in class who taught me so much about who they were.

I suppose I am lucky to have met so many wonderful people in my journey, and it continues. We have a unit on site and the students are made to feel part of the school. Many times walking down the runway(corridor) they are waking with me as I head off to a Learning Space or a break in the day, they great me, and I them.

But todays post is about some other students who are in my class. One who is a wheel chair who I have had on GET LOST and in other classes before. But this year it feels different, the WOT POINT Module is about getting to know the community, some of the history. While other students get to go out and find their building/structure, for this student it is a little bit harder. The paths and not formed well in the old areas, the bushes are overgrown, and because we are semi rural, sometimes there is not path to be found. We had tried to go out before, but the difficulties were too great. However, it sat in the back of my mind, we need to get him out, too see the building and take photos. Talking with the teacher aides and finding out what could be done. It wasn't until I was sitting in the Library talking with our staff that someone suggested a go pro. That I had in the office. Finding out about transport was through the SENCO. A plan formed and a chat with his Mum. Transport was organised. Today we used the handle bar mount from the go pro and attached it to his wheel chair so he could operate the camera function. Trail and error block 3, getting him to record a video of the hallway, and also take pictures of the library staff. He had the confidence to be able to use the go pro on his own.

At the end of lunch, a fresh battery, he was on his EOTC trip, up to the Hobsonville Early Settlers church.

A wonderful smile on his face when he came back. Proud that he had done what was needed. The photos were quickly transferred from the go pro and emailed to him. He now has his own images from his own EOTC trip and is busily going through critiquing them before he uses them on his work.

Thanks to the teacher aides that help him with his work, translating my answers, providing me with ideas to help, and also trying to help put into place what is in my mind. To our staff at school who support me by answering my questions and also giving me ideas to assist the students to have success with learning.

Week seven reflection

I think this week is one of the pit... This is something that we have talked about as a staff the last couple of years. It is something that we recognise, and the fun and humor of the place helps to reduce the impact. I would say however that this term I probably have missed something going on. I think its something that I may need to focus again.

This week I recognized students steeping up and helping others, especially in the WOTPOINT class, students have been working on developing their ideas for there 3D building in sketchup, and when students need help, others step in. I acknowledge Serena, one of our Teacher Aides who stepped up to help one of our students in developing the knowledge to build his own 3D church. He was engaged for the whole period, which is something to be said.

The fire service came to visit this week, yeap the smoke detectors work. It wasn't me.

The mornings are particularly stunning at the moment, we often sit in the staff room before school and watch the birds, this week has been building up my mathematics knowledge around networks and fractals. The conversation soon turned to distance between the birds landing on the rail, is there an order, where does the next bird land, and do they have friends or is there a pecking order on who lands where?

DESIGNW is focussing on developing skills and knowledge in image manipulation, this is the third year I have used the photos from places around the school. It is great to see how you can use a resource like this again and again with new students and what you can do with it.

I am often acknowledged for the other stuff I do in the school, this week was being able to support the volleyball girls at their final. Great to see them win, the coaching from the sports coordinator.

6:30am on a friday morning is when Adventure racing training starts. This week different interval training around the school field. You would think that the students would struggle at this time of morning, but they are up for the challenge.

We have Michael Hurst in on friday to do his one man show. I must say that Leigh has got me going to see a bit more arts and culture. A wonderful experience that our students got, and for some of them to learn to be a bit better audience member.

St Patricks day on friday, a good place to end the week.

Technological Products-thoughts

This is one that I am struggling with at the moment.

Technological products are material (tangible) objects that have been designed by people and developed through technological practice to serve particular functions.
In every technological product there is a crucial relationship between the (chemical) composition and structure of the materials used and their performance properties.
For this reason, technologists need to be able to evaluate different materials and select the most suitable for their purpose.
They also need to understand how existing materials can be modified or new materials formulated, and how choice of materials impacts on the design, development, maintenance, and disposal of technological products.

Being in a digital technologies space, what am I to do?

I have bene thinking about what 3d printing material could be used to show this, the ideas of plastics(pla) and being able to reuse.

Looking at the other ideas of 3d printing, wood, flex(rubber). Just thinking about the amount of printing and projects to work on.

https://www.mindkits.co.nz/filament/special

Thinking about the idea of disposal, how do we dispose of our waste within the school? What waste do we currently have? 

Developing a piece of work to show the waste and the outcomes from it.

All the exemplars I can find are around wool(fabrics) or food technology.

Week six reflection

Week six reflection. This week was one of difference. Due to athletics day being on a Wednesday, it would affect the amount of days that big project runs, so swap Tuesday and Wednesday. This helped with one thing for me, an EOTC trip to the pop up globe to see Othello. Watching the students digest the play, the blood and the atmosphere was awesome. It was a play that I did not have the opportunity to study when I was at school. The opportunity for our students to see it performed in a like globe theatre is something special.

Getting students to understand how their brain works and what quadrants are at work is one thing that we spend time on. Students being able to understand themselves as a learner. Yes, I included play-doh (from my nephews, thats what they get told), for students to develop something physical.

Orienteering continues, in a cold wet day, which they loved, once they got over the, oh no, I going to get wet. The conversations around route choice continue in the van on the drive home.

The first prototype of the runner system was built and tested this week. Including a list of future enhancements.

• admin page to see all times, clickable to see individual user profiles
• data dump from box to araako
• different profiles for different event types on box
• Character correction on names of people
• different colours on neopixel for different aspects
• 3G
• update website to include hobsonville run, safety, course
• process to get community engaged, media
• second box for school
• Make the website a bit more pretty
• weather integration
• change profile on settings page
• preloaded settings for neopixel
• lost tag procedure and process
• tracking who is still out on course, not tag off
• backup of all web files and sql before next development

It is entertaining to watch our students practice for the shakespare festival coming soon. It is amazing how much they understand and want to get it right.

Adventure racing training started this week, a 5km run, which the runner system was used for the first time. It has been great to see the students so far committed to the 6:30am starts.

And last, fear, I have a fear of heights, something which happened when working on a construction project when I was younger. A former student offered tickets to go bungy jumping, something I hopefully one day will attempt. But not today. Instead today was just enough to go walking under the harbour bridge to the aj hacket bungy pod.

Earlier this year, one of our teachers who teaches physics jokingly said that he wish he could go bungy jumping. A former student occasionally offers some tickets to be able to do this. I managed to get a ticket to enable our teacher to do this.
In the process of todays jump, the other ticket when to someone I knew for the school, it was great to be able to catch up and talk about 12 years ago.

I look forward to next week, and must start thinking about what to do in the holidays coming up.

Oh yeah, athletics got cancelled, so Wednesday was Tuesday at school.

How are modules and SPINS going? Progress reports have just been completed, just the odd student needing to get their evidence in check.

WOTPOINT moves on from sketching to development on the computer through google sketchup.

WALLE moves on as students have been working on their programming and development of sensors, need to work on the teamwork a bit more.

DESIGNW, students have confidence in using tags to create webpages and are now moving onto some image manipulation.

HWMGHTWE, moves away from khan academy and the SQL work, this stuff is honestly at NCEA Level 3 sometimes, I must say that I am impressed at what the students have managed to cover. Now to move onto the next part, php understanding.

I must say that I am missing PROJECTS, I have just been offered the development of something rather cool, which would fit in with projects really well, has a great partner and travel.

Hub is going rather well, students have noticed the step up in activity and work. I must remember that friday is reflection day. I have had two more students added to hub, which is good, one student was in my hub two years ago, the other will keep her brother in line. A comment from them on friday, "This is the first reflection I have done this year." 

Week five reflection

This week has been around getting to get things going. I try and do one practical hub activity a week, which is something interesting and requires team work to make it happen. Marshmallows and bamboo sticks were this weeks mystery box activity. Having enough marshmallows at the end is always an issue as resources seem to go missing throughout.

Exploring the point is something I still enjoy. This time was to the other side of the yellow bridge into old Hobsonville. Windows of the house that was removed to make way for the motorway, a pottery lava flow that I understand turns into a stream when it rains. Getting students out to explore and make sense of our past.

I am not part of the projects staff this year, but that does not stop me from getting involved. Students are wanting to promote a community event that is coming up and thought of our local coffee providers. Getting stakeholder feedback from these provided the students with some valuable skills.

Getting involved in sports, orienteering for our adventure racing students is a must, something they identified last year that they needed to improve. Listening to their stories when they come back and looking at their routes makes me want to take it up again.

During hub on Wednesday I was challenged to complete a maths worksheet, complete a column and see how long it takes you. I don't think I have done this type of activity since working at the primary school. I must admit that I left some answers blank.

I normally attend sports games to watch students play, this year I think is the first time I have gone and watched one of my hub/form class students in an outside play. Based in the early 1900's in a place called Grovers Corner.

Getting the 3D printer up and working after a break is always something filled with problem solving, especially if the filament has been out in the air and light, it goes brittle. This was made a little bit easier as I asked one of my former hub students for a broken guitar string to help clean out the nossle. The robot was successfully printed and added to the collection. The students work for the aquabots challenge is being printed currently.

 

Week four reflection

This week has been one of being adventerous, getting outside the comfort zone. With the WALLE SPIN using LEGO EV3 robots this has been around trying out new ideas to get students working as a team, using iPads to do the programming side of things. This has been a little bit harder than I thought, will have to look at some ideas to get students working together towards to outcome development.

Went to a live recording of the Project tonight, a great experience that had laughter, serious notes and the odd strange part. When you are watching them set up for a interview with someone off screen and then they suddenly stop talking, you know that its pre recorded. It took the audience a little bit to get used to this. Some of the things happening in the background during the whip around the country were funny. Thought I would try this out, as I enjoyed being audience for sportscafe when it was running last time I was up here.

Getting the sticker for codeclub was also good this week. It doesn't seem that long ago when we were starting it in Christchurch, when 65 students signed up and two nights for a term went into developing such an awesome programme. Thats enough this week.

Best comment heard this week, "Did beavers build the Hoover Dam?"

Week three reflection

When I realize that I should also be making some reflections on this week as I ask my students to.

​Where did you encounter struggle this week, and how did you deal with it? Dealing with timetable and issues that were happening beyond my control. Having Kamar and hapara syncing together and the issues with custom timetables caused me to kind of lose it this week. Good to know we have have great people at school that can fix this. I didn't deal with it too well. Also remembered that SPINS are no longer just on Thursday which i needed to get the robots charged and unpacked for.

What about your thinking, learning or work this week brought you the most satisfaction? Why? Getting into teaching, watching students work through the work and hearing the realization that something's do that 45 minutes to problem solve and figure out, the same length of time it took me to realize that what I was doing didn't have any database connection lines of code in it. As soon as I looked at the error logs it all made sense.

The reaction of students when the realized what they would be being in my WALLE module, the realization that they "get to learn with $300 kits of EV3 lego", that was a comment from a student. A tweet from a parent that night was "A heart to dissect and robots to play with makes for an amazing day at school apparently".

Also having a student that was sick email in and ask for help, she wanted to catch up with here work, was able to email here back with google classroom codes and the email came back that her anxiety levels had reduced. Also posted some of the work that she had missed in hub through.

It has also been great watching the new schools in Christchurch start, some great posts of the learning that they are going through.

I will probably post this through to my blog later on, but thought it would be nice for family to see what I get up to at work in Auckland.

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?

Pushing beyond

While watching masterchef over the past couple of weeks, I start to see some similarities with what they are going through.

From going from their normal cooking through to developing creative and innovative dishes. Trying new things and seeing success and failure.

The challenges that they face, develop, build upon. How the judges help with feedback as they are going through.

The same can be said with the school that I am at.

We have the Innovate. Engage. Inspire.
Challenging is one word that is used a lot at school. Developing the collaboration with the teaching, the contexts, and the learning areas. One thing that comes to mind when I started was that there are no textbooks, not even class sets of english books, instead students can choose the book with help from the Innovate information librarians at the school. The blended learning opens students to do both offline and online work. Having the device available in the learning space allows students to not be stuck on a meaning, a word, or having to wait for the next part of their learning. Instead a student being able to see the learning objective and how it works with a rubric or learning design phase helps then to see what is next.

Feedback, one on one checkins with students, I see more and more importance with these, it is a student and teacher working together to develop the needs of the student in class. having the 80 minute lesson and the co-teacher in the room allows these to happen in a more natural way. Progress reports are not a surprise, we have a no surprises rule. The progress report at the end of term is around how the student has meet the learning objective of the term, rather than an achievement objective. The comment is to the student about how they went, and what their next steps are.
But feedback is not just teacher to student, it is also teacher to teacher. Working in an environment that is co-teacher, feedback is constant, what is working well, what didn't work. Even challenging each other to try new ideas are constant. I believe that we have developed better as teachers and the challenge is now where to from here, can we go back to the single space and teacher? But it doesn't stop there. It is also Senior Leadership coming and looking at the teaching and sharing feedback about what they saw, the good and the bad. But thats not all, the Principal also looks at what is going on in the spaces and contributes to the feedback.

The mystery box, Should learning be a mystery? Students use the booklets four times a year to develop the learning that engages them. Use what they they know and build on it.
The booklet allow students to see what contexts the modules and SPINs that have been created around the theme for the term. The role of the learning coach is to make sure that the students have curriculum coverage throughout each term, while also looking at the specific needs of the students in their hub..

Outside the classroom. Having the opportunity to use spaces outside a classroom, this allows students to be out in the community, be responsible citizens. I love using the spaces that we have in our community, the 80 minute lessons allow students to go out and capture the information that hey require for their work. This allows for individualism within contexts, allows students to be creative in what they develop and have ownership of their work.

Looking at the passion of the students
The development of the dispositions, rather than the focus being on a solely academic is a passion that I see more of the students working towards, it has a large importance in our school that the end of the year awards are around the Hobsonville habits rather than being solely on academic success. Having a student who is passionate on the learning that they are doing, many of our students do get their first selections in what context they want to learn.

How to deal with failure?
Sometimes things don't work.
Sometimes the groups that students put themselves in don't work well.
Sometimes students have to be told were to sit.
Sometimes students don't work well on devices.
It is having the confidence to deal with these situations, having open dialogue with the students and having mini chats to get the thinking going about what is going on.

Default State
How do we move from the default state, this has been something that has come up in early on me starting at the school, how do we move from the default state, away from what we have done previously or done again and again. The linking in with the co-teacher, and the themes of the terms and semester help make sure you don't. Making sure that the learning objective is being carried out. But it is also helped by the other parts of the planning.

HMW INNOVATE through personalised learning?

HMW ENGAGE through powerful partnerships?

HMW INSPIRE through deep challenge & inquiry?

Innovation
Each week they look at an innovate way to display or develop the food. How do we show innovation within our classroom, developing the next innovate and creative?

The staples and pantry
The staples of learning, the equipment that they need in every lesson, these have not changed much, Pen, Paper, Pencil, and Device. Though there is some normality of people being upset about students needing a device for lessons, at one point were people upset that they moved away from the pencil?
The fact is the staples in the kitchen continue to change, develop, so must ones learning.

The pantry allows students to access other material, resources, equipment that they may need. The same for our students through online environments.