Celebrating Success

This week we noticed that some of our students had hit the 500 post mark. An admirable achievement by anyones standards. We felt they needed some recognition for this so I created our very own 'PBS 500 Club' badge for their blogs. Huge congratulations to those students and yah me for working out how to create this GIF!

Smart Searching PD

Today our Year 8's were taken through a session on smart searching with Mairi Ogilvie from the National Library. We were reminded of how to ask search engines the right question to help us find the information we are looking for. This was a great refresher for me too! The Year 8's as experts were asked to share their learning with the Year 7's. This was the best part for me as I observed so many of our quieter learners in a new light as they shone as 'teachers'. I am a firm believer of the thinking that we learn best when we learn with and from each other.

To make this new knowledge accessible I created a page on our site to allow my learners to work through the smart searching challenge to consolidate the learning a week later.

Click here to access the follow up tasks and a 'how to' exemplar created by Cecillia that takes you through the stages of narrowing your search.

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NZLA 2016 Conference Takeaways

Having attended the NZLA 2016 Conference in Waitangi I am inspired to begin term 4 and to share my new learning with both my learners and my colleagues. Here are a few of my takeaways:

Photos

Karen Melhuish Spencer

• As teachers we need to stay connected and have conversations with our students and wider school community.
• We need to deliberately teach digital citizenship and keep informed
• As teachers we need to enable and support our learners journey as digital citizens
• No ‘sheriff’ on the internet = no rules therefore our learners have to manage their own identity so we need to teach skills of social connections and make students aware of the consequences of passing on viral messages

Alison Davis

• We are challenged to continue increasing the number of students who are intellectually engaged by changing the treadmill - learners need to be in the driver's seat
• Finding out the needs of our students - big picture data
• Gather student voice to id the hard spots/gaps
• LI and SC are needed to make the learning explicit
• Academic vocabulary in the classroom - need to make it accessible to the students
• Think > Pair > Share > Compare (Explain your thinking... 'How would you explain...?')
• Teach the struggling students the strategy > then they teach the others in the class - kids listen to kids!
• Reading comp. is about accessing the ideas
• Strategies are just the tools, but need to be able to transfer to different text and at more complex levels, how to use it and when to use it. Tools need sharpening - upskilling - (Decoding tools, vocab tools…) 

• Reading > Writing > Grammar connections are needed
• Unpack exemplars and co-construct SC to grow u/st

ARBs

(Verena Watson/Sue McDowall)

• ARBS have 2700+ resources available 
• Homepage - https://arbs.nzcer.org.nz/home
• Concept maps link to strategy support

• Eg comprehension strategies have links to teacher support materials, definitions/explanations and all the ARB resources that support this learning
• Research articles are available

Questions

(Rita Palmer)

• Exploring different ways of encouraging learners to ask deeper questions (wonderbag, qu matrix, what if, synectics...)
• Give a student a qu to answer and they will learn the passage they have just read

Research says

• students ask less than 5% of the qu
• 70-80% of qu are at factual or recall level
• Teachers call upon those they see as higher achievers far more than those they perceive to be lower achievers
• Teachers must teach chn how to ask qu ‘without strong questioning skills students are merely learners on someone else’s tour bus’ - they maybe on the highway but someone else is doing the driving

Diversity

(Verena Watson/Sue McDowall)

• Connections to the familiar are affecting text buy-in from students
• Read aloud to help make connections
• Tchr PD must be current and practical based
• Use diversity don’t cope with it, cater for it or embrace it!

• Diversity = a rich class
• Need to prepare students to deal with diversity - ideas that differ from our own

NZLA Conference Presentation

Kiri Kirkpatrick and I were invited to share how we incorporate digital literacies in our ILE at the NZLA 2016 conference at Waitangi. Great to have such an interactive audience and to receive such positive feedback. 

Paying it Forward

As teachers we are always looking for ways to make personal connections with our learners. Today I had the absolute privilege to be taught by Ma'ata. By tapping into the cultural capital and expertise our learners have we can see them shine in a whole new light. This was Ma'ata's 'Pay it Forward' task for our PBS CARE awards. She created a DLO on Show Me then took me through it making sure I had my pronunciation correct. At the end of our learning time the smile on her face made this one of the best teaching days of 2016! Thank you Ma'ata.

Ma'ata's post:

This is a picture of me teaching Mrs Anderson how to count to 10 in Tongan. I used the DLO I made to help her learn. I think she was good at saying the numbers in Tongan.

Setting ourselves up for success is a step by step process...

Making connections with the learning is the key to genuinely deepening understanding. By tapping into the knowledge gained across multiple learning areas we can encourage our learners to merge these various knowledge bites of independent information. Our task today was to do exactly that. Earlier in the year we explored the ways personification and the 5 senses can help us see things from a different perspective (-the original task link is on slide 2 of the teaching DLO below). This term our inquiry focus has been Olympic based. Over the last five weeks we have looked closely at how elements of Hauora, Diet and Training can affect an athlete's performance. By viewing the 2016 Olympic games through the eyes of an athlete standing on the medal dias, I hoped that my learner's would make stronger and deeper connections to our topic.

The images below show the process we went through to help us retell an event through someone else's eyes.

Merging images to make personal connections had everyone hooked. As a class that lives and breathes the ethos of collaboration, I noticed at least half of my learners chose to 'stand on the podium' with a buddy. Another interesting observation is that the colour of the medal was invisible. National and personal pride completely overshadowed the gold, silver, bronze hues.

With the imaginary eyes of the world on us we now needed to fill our knowledge 'ketes'. After all you can't describe something you have never seen if you don't have the tools to grow and foster an imagination. Our tool for this was 'Sketchnote'. I had read Karen Ferguson's post about her own experience of picking out the main ideas and focusing on them by 'sketchnoting', and decided to afford my learners the same opportunity. The image below reflects the way one of my learners added to her own 'kete' using this method. 

Sketchnoting allows us to record information using our own words or pictures. This learning tool is helping my learners make notes that make sense to them rather than simply copying what someone else has written in their own handwriting. Being able to retell their very personal 'sketchnote' stories to a friend underpinned the understanding and allowed those strong connections to be made.

Where did this information come from? The answer, multiple sources. I provided links to online newspaper articles and challenged my learners to use their smart searching skills to find supporting information that they read, watched and listened to. It is very rewarding to watch the seamless interchanging of their subject specific 'thinking hats' as knowledge gained during these lessons was synthesised and recalled to meet the learning needs of this lesson. 

Being given the choice of selecting the way they want to approach the 'create' aspect of this learning has both engaged and empowered my learners. Some chose to show their understanding through interviews or conversations using ifaketext.com; others have opted to write narratives; one learner has decided to write an email home to their family and two groups are in the beginning stages of storyboarding their movies. 

Were connections made today? The simple answer is yes! 

7 Phases of Behaviour Infographic

This afternoon Jo Turner led our staff meeting to help us identify the 7 Phases of Behaviour. using Geoff Colvin's escalator graphs to help us make a visual connection. In keeping with the sketchnote and infographic professional development highlighted on the Manaiakalni google + page I decided to have a go at creating an infographic to represent the main ideas and my notes from the session.  I found this a lot easier than I thought once I had established  what I felt were the main points. It is interesting to think about what triggers negative behaviours in a classroom. Much of this being triggers that we don't see - reference here is to the iceberg. It's important to remind ourselves to look below the surface and think carefully about how we as teachers can defuse a situation to help our learners de-escalate towards a continued calm phase.