Toolkits: Awesome Audio

This afternoon I took part in the Awesome Audio toolkit run by Cheryl Torrie. We explored the chrome extension 'Mote', an accessibility feature that allows you to add voice note feedback or instructions for students within Google Docs, Slides and Sheets. 

When using Mote in Google Slides you can leave verbal instructions making this extension a great tool for rewindable learning. Having both written and spoken instructions gives students a better opportunity to access the learning. To demonstrate this I have used a slide from last week's distance learning that was set for the students who require teacher aid support in class. By clicking on the Mote speaker icon and format options you can change the colour and audio playback options for each voice note. A bonus feature is that a Mote recording can be copied and pasted into different slides.

To insert the spoken instructions I clicked on the Mote icon which can be found in your extension tool bar if you have pinned it, or next to the comments icon in Google Slides, (refer to the image below). After doing this a box appears on the screen and prompts you to begin your voice recording. What I liked was that the box is moveable so that meant the need to memorise instructions was removed. Recording the instructions allows you to add a personal comment eg: 'Have fun!' which is often in the text lost when written.

The Mote extension also allows you to leave sound bites in the comments tool. To use this feature you need to click on the purple Mote icon in the comments tool. You then record your feedback and click done. Your voice recording is then inserted into the comments tool and can be accessed by clicking the play button. The comments tool is the only place Mote can be accessed and used in Google Docs.

Mote recording sit in the cloud and allows you to see who has accessed (viewed and/or listened to) your voice recording. This was a great toolkit to attend as I am already thinking of ways this extension can be used creatively and purposefully to open the connections to our learning up to a wider range of students. 

Teaching as Inquiry 2021

Click here to see how I align my inquiry with the Manaiakalani framework.

“Recognising and spreading sophisticated pedagogical practice across our community so that students learn in better and more powerful ways...”

The Manaiakalani Community of Learning is working together on this task using the expertise existing in of our community of learning. 

Labels:

LEvidence, LScan, LTrend, LHypothesise, LResearch, LReflect,

CPlan, CTry, CInnovate, CImplement, CReflect,

SPublish, SCoteach, SModel, SGuide, SFback, SReflect

Q2: What is it that we want our students to learn?

As a school we are unified in the fact we want to strengthen our students' oral language skills, for many of us, it is so our students are able to confidently talk about their learning and understanding in maths. This not only deepens their understanding but also strengthens their connections. Strong connections allow for confidence to be increased and with an increased confidence comes the ability to ask questions. By using content specific language in context our students paint a much clearer picture for us of where they are at. These pictures also help us to see where misconceptions and disconnects are hiding. It is this detail that not only informs our practice but shows us when we need to make changes. 

Our data shows that across each class there is a huge disparity between the students who have made the connections they need to allow them to operate at a higher and more challenging level, and those for who the gap widens each year. It must feel incredibly disempowering to keep trying and not reap the rewards of success that mastery of a concept brings. Talk Moves is something every student can do and is something where every student regardless of achievement level will begin to feel success. 

Transferring this learning talk to blog commenting is going to afford our learners a further opportunity to revisit their learning in context. The Covid 19 lockdowns of 2020, and more recently, of 2021 meant all our learning abruptly shifted to the online platform. There was a lot less opportunity to have that 1:1 teacher time that our lower ability learners need in order to help them feel supported when taking risks in new learning. Talk Moves will not only provide a well rehearsed pattern of conversation within a google meet, but in addition will allow our students to continue learning as they maintain the all important connections with their peers via their blogs.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we realised that if we were expecting the comments to be specific, the learning behind the blog post content needed to be equally as specific. By linking the language we want our learners to use to the Talk Moves process, we are providing an authentic opportunity for our learners to practise using the language we are hoping to see within both a blog post and a blog comment. By having the opportunity to practise we are removing the unknown and affording our learners the rich opportunity to learn both from and with each other in context. 

As teachers not all the adaptations we make work but by carrying out continued inquiry we are able to continually reflect, adapt and try. The ideas we try that are not successful are often referred to as mistakes. However it is by sharing these ‘mistakes’ along with our successes that others have the opportunity to learn the most from us. Something that may or may not have worked for one teacher, might just be the key that unlocks the door another teacher is trying to open.

Q1: Brainstorming Student Inquiry Foci...

At Panmure Bridge School our shared aim for 2021 is to carry out visible and rich teacher inquiries to help us meet one of our school’s strategic goals of 1 ½ times accelerated shift in Maths. 

Currently our inquiries fit under the wider umbrella of Achievement Challenge 6, to lift the achievement in maths for all students years 1-13, in our case years 1-8. Throughout 2020 our school wide professional development focus was Maths. This year we began the year with a teacher only day on maths that allowed us to top up our own knowledge ketes and strengthen our own connections to this curriculum area. Consolidation is the key to success here as it allows us to take the learning from 2020 and give it a place of value in 2021.

One area we can all implement as we embark on our 2021 learning journey with our students, regardless of level, is the strategy of Talk Moves. Talk Moves is a strategy that promotes classroom conversations centred on maths that helps to improve students' understanding of mathematical concepts. Talk Moves is a framework to prompt the discussion. Frameworks was the one thing most of us identified as being the most powerful tool towards helping increase student achievement. These frameworks or prompts were not generic, they were class specific, created by the teacher to help meet the learning needs of the students in front of them. The idea of frameworks or prompts was the most common tool teachers at PBS wanted to carry forward in 2021. I’m excited to see how each teacher adapts the Talk Moves framework for their class. As a teacher of Year 7 and 8 students I know that I can definitely learn from the work done by the teachers in the class levels below mine, as they can learn from me. Often a word that makes no sense to one person can be the word that unlocks the learning for another.

Last year we all encouraged our learners to use and apply their learning, and the language and vocabulary linked to that learning, by leaving purposeful comments on each other's blogs to promote authentic dialogic interactions. The differentiation came in the form of individual peer to peer comments in the senior school, and class to class comments in the junior school. Doing this allowed us all to peek into the learning going on in each room. 

At the end of the 2020 school year I had a check in chat with each teacher. Once again we were all on the same page with our reflections identifying that changes in practice not only gave us opportunities to develop a strong cybersmart program, but also encouraged us to think critically about the learning and language behind each lesson. In the senior school we realised that if we were expecting the comments to be specific, the learning behind the blog post content needed to be equally as specific. Rather than moving on and leaving this rich learning behind, as a school we have decided to focus our teacher inquiries around how the language and learning need to actively participate in Talk Moves can be harnessed and replicated in blog comments. 

Data from the SLJ shows that the value we placed on blog commenting helped our students to connect to the learning shared online by their Manaiakalani, and their wider outreach school peers in a meaningful and purposeful way. Dialogic conversations were not the exception, they were the norm. With this evidence and the evidence we have from our 2020 learning journey, we have chosen to capitalise on this momentum and continue to strengthen what we began last year. The power for us as a school is how each teacher puts their own spin on it.

One size definitely does not fit all in this case. What I am excited about as the in-school COL teacher for Panmure Bridge School is finding out how each teacher approaches this challenge. We all agree that we want to use Talk Moves in Maths to help us meet our school’s strategic goal of 1 ½ times accelerated shift in that curriculum area. The changes we identify that we now need to make to our practice is where the learning will come from.  It takes a village and each member of our PBS village who willingly shares their practice, ideas and inquiry journeys allow us to strengthen our own teaching and learning skills. 

For us, it is the opportunity to consolidate our learning from 2020 that we hope will be the key to our success.

2021 PBS Teacher Only Days...

Hearing a shared message is always the best way to make sure as a staff we are all on the same page. This year our professional development helped us strengthen our connections to Maths, and to Physical Education through Healthy Active Learning. I am really looking forward to implementing my new learning in both curriculum areas.

My notes from the Maths PD with Marie Hirst

My notes from the Physical Education PD with James McIntyre

Bursts and Bubbles 2020

This afternoon the Manaiakalani COL teachers shared the impact of their 2020 Teaching as Inquiry as impact bursts in a panel setting that gave me many valuable insight to take forward into 2020. Thank you so much to everyone who shared their inquiry journey tonight. I have thoroughly enjoyed walking through my 2020 inquiry alongside you and the support I have been given as a member of this awesome team. Here is my journey...




This year I wanted to explore if 'strengthening connections to Smart Relationships will help our tamariki to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in context in maths, reading and writing'

Our feedback from the Summer Learning Journey team was that our Panmure Bridge School students had strengths in blogging, however, seemed to drop the ball when it came to the commenting component. Many of our learners had either overlooked responding to comments made on their blogs, or simply replied with a thank you. So I wanted to find out why this had happened.

My thinking was that by learning how to leave feedback and ask questions of others, their own connections to the learning would be strengthened. I wanted my learners to refer to learning intentions, confidently use content specific language, ask questions that prompted the recipient to justify their thinking, and understand that giving and receiving blog comments was an important part of our learning.

Having looked closely at my target student's blogs, I noticed that learning intentions were often omitted and explanations of tasks began with 'Today we had to...', or 'Here is my DLO of...'. The detailed content and purpose for learning was actually missing from the post, and prompted questions like this one, 'Mrs Anderson how can I comment on the learning if I don't know what they were learning?'.

Before we could focus on commenting, we needed to first create quality blog posts. Once this was in place, the challenge to create dialogic comment threads began. I use the word challenge because my learners wanted a competitive element. They spoke, I listened and each week my target group and I came up with a new challenge, with the winner from the previous week having the final say.

My learners now:

• Write quality blog posts which have become the expected norm, with this group of students being quite critical of each other. The unexpected bonus of this, was that these students were also very supportive of their peers. I saw a number of posts being rewritten or edited without me intervening in any way.
• Have a shared ownership of the learning which saw the depth and regularity of comments increase as confidence levels grew.
• Seek clarity and use content specific language. This is not only evident on blogs, but has also become the norm in our classroom

The achievement data and student voice evidence I have for this is on my blog, but something I want to celebrate today are the timestamps on blog comments. These show these students are engaging in, and thinking deeply about their learning outside of school. However, this success is not yet the norm for all my learners. I chose to work with this group of Year 7 students so that I will move into 2021 with an 'expert' group who can model best practice and help me continue this journey.

Changes to my practice that my learners benefited from were:

• Regular meetings as a group
• Co-constructed blog post scaffolds with explicit connections to the learning and vocabulary
• Explicit instruction and modelling of content specific vocabulary, blog posts construction, questioning and blog comment construction.
• My learners and myself became accountable
• Commenting time was actively planned for.

The most important learning I made through my inquiry is that by embracing change we strengthen our ability to provide our tamariki with the tools they need to strengthen their connections to the learning.

TAI 2020 WFRC # 10 To what extent was the intervention successful in changing teaching?

I initially linked my inquiry question 'Will strengthening connections to Smart Relationships help our tamariki to understand and use content specific language and vocabulary in Maths?'  directly to our school wide professional development of maths, but due to the changes lockdown and distance learning presented, I widened my focus to incorporate the additional curriculum areas of reading and writing. This is something I see as a bonus as it afforded me the opportunity to reinforce and make connections across these curriculum areas. 

Since beginning my in-school COL teacher journey in 2017 I have realised the power knowing how to transfer learning across the curriculum areas really has. This isn't something new or something I hadn't done previously, but rather something I learnt to take time to think about and actively try to facilitate by consciously drawing attention to, and is something I feel is one of the key changes in my practice this year. 

Drawing attention to the learning intention helped us to identify the purpose behind the learning. In maths for example, the purpose of the lesson may be to 'make ten then add', and in reading might be to 'identify the main ideas', however because the word 'purpose' has been unpacked and used in context, the outcome is that my students know why they are learning what they are learning in both curriculum areas. Revisiting learning intentions (LI) to strengthen my own knowledge has meant these have become more specific. For many years I have written learning intentions on my teaching DLOs and discussed them at given points in the instructional lessons. One big change I have made this year is to record the LI's on the board, in modelling books or on whatever I am using to build the rewindable opportunities that allow visual connections to be made. I now make a conscious effort to begin each instructional lesson by introducing the learning intention. It has a dedicated place within each lesson and is referred to throughout so that I can show my learners where the connections are between the purpose of the task and the actual task. Even though I write these LIs before we begin the learning, on many occasions these are now tweaked and reconstructed with my learners using their words. The latter being highly valued as I think as teachers, it is important to embrace opportunities to learn from our students.

Identifying the learning intentions on blog posts became our point of focus when commenting on each others blogs. When I asked my learners to comment on their peer's blogs I taught them to first look for the learning. Knowing the purpose of learning intentions helped my learners to find the learning in the post. We followed this with a focus on questioning and explored the difference between open and closed questions. This enabled feedback to be given and questions to be asked that dug deeper and linked directly to that learning rather than surface level comments linked to the visual features of the DLOs. As a direct result dialogic and rich learning conversations in the form of comment threads emerged.

                         

At the beginning of my inquiry this year I realised I needed to revisit how to write a quality blog post so that my learners had the tools they needed to work with when creating comment threads. The way I chose to do this was to create a blog post scaffold, and was something that forced me to really think about what learning I wanted my students to take away from each lesson. 

our blog post scaffold was created during our first round of distance learning and was  initially written by me, we progressed to co-construction as the year went on. Each scaffold gave my learners the title, blog post labels, the learning intention, a few points of information and / or a short co-constructed blurb that used the content specific vocabulary we had been using to unpack the learning, and a prompt to give a personal insight to the task. 

As with any class, my learners have a wide range of abilities. Some learners need a lot of scaffolding, while others use that scaffolding as a prompt, in this case, to help them write their own task description. By co-constructing these scaffolds with my learners we first get an opportunity to revisit the purpose of the learning and the content specific vocabulary we have been using, then get a further opportunity to think about the title and labels. 

By strengthening this area my students were then able to leave quality comments as they had the vocabulary tools to work with. 

I linked our cybersmart lessons directly to the learning taking place in our classroom. This allowed for immediate connections to be made. We revisited the purpose behind leaving a comment and discussed how this would help us strengthen our own connections to the learning. When I looked at the way I taught my learners to be cybersmart I realised I was skimming over components I believed my learners had already connected with and knew how to use. This was something I changed immediately. I realised that despite having participated in cybersmart lessons about how to write a quality blog post and comment since their digital learning journeys began, many of my students across all ability levels had not actually made a strong connection to this. 

To effect change here I began weaving this into all our sharing sessions. The words I used were the same, the scaffolds I used had the same structure and my expectation was that all blog posts would contain each element needed to allow our audience to make connections to our learning. Blog commenting was unpacked, scaffolded and given a place within the timetable. I found by actively planning for these opportunities they became the expected norm. 

Modelling and purposefully using the content specific vocabulary was another area I concentrated on in my own practice. In day to day classroom life often we think we are doing something, but the reality is often it this doesn't happen. To support this my observations this year have all focused on my use of content specific vocabulary (CSV) and how I am supporting my students to use this in their blog posts and comments. 

What do you want me to notice during the observation?

• Do the student blog posts match my teaching DLO?
• Are my instructions explicit?
• Am I using content specific language throughout the lessons?
• Does this language link to the task and the LI and cybersmart?
• Are the students using CSV in their blog posts to explain their learning?
• Do comments left use CSV reflect a connection to the learning?

Kiri Kirkpatrick observed my practice in Term 2 and then again in Term 4. Both observations had the same focus to allowed us to have a rich discussion. From these observations I see that I:

• Provide very explicit learning intentions, both verbal and written
• Vocabulary introduced by teacher and generated by students is recorded on the board so students can refer back to CSV
• Students are engaged and ask questions for clarification.
• Opportunities for peer to peer talk to strengthen connections

The most important learning I made through my inquiry is that by embracing change we strengthen our ability to provide our tamariki with the tools they need to strengthen their connections to the learning.