DFI - Devices!

 The Ubiquitous Nature of Learning - Rangiwhāwhā

The focus of our first session was the concept of “ubiquity” and ubiquitous access as a powerful affordance of digital learning environments. The notion of A4 captures the four dimensions of ubiquitous learning as Anytime, Anywhere, Any Pace with Anyone. 

Dorothy emphasised that ubiquitous doesn't mean advocating “death by screen time”!

What the ubiquitous affordances of digital learning should aim to afford is improved choice (when, where, how) and equity (access for all), especially for low-socioeconomic families not served well by education. Data from the Summer Learning Journey shows improved learning for matched students (by achievement level) when engaged in SLJ during holiday breaks (outside of school). Longitudinal data also shows students who remain in Manaiakalani schools demonstrate accelerated progress in the classroom, particularly in writing. 

Deep Dive into Cybersmart

Vicki emphasised in this session the importance of the positive language in the CyberSMART versus cyberSAFE messaging. I really like the use of the term “smart” to underscore the empowering of students to be resourceful and mindful digital citizens. Two key aspects of supporting students to become cybersmart is: a) Manaiakalani Cybersmart Curriculum ('iceberg above the water'), and b) Secure systemic structures ('iceberg below the water'). These dimensions were usefully captured through this iceberg graphic: 

In Manaiakalani there is a collective, across cluster focus in Term 1-3 on Smart Learners, Smart Footprint and Smart Relationships which is planned and shared through the Cybersmart Annual Review. In the same way as Learn | Create | Share, I like that cybersmart has a focus per term which builds coherence of practice and languaging across the network of schools. Should we have this for reading, given reading is a high target achievement focus for many schools?

Today’s Create

It was super inspiring to watch screencast videos of Year 1 students confidently explaining how they access and save projects in Explain Everything! Although I really appreciate the utility of EE, I’ve had little practice with designing learning projects, so it was useful to explore the whiteboard tools through Gerhard’s activity:

Conversely, I have used but not embedded Hapara Workspace in my classroom, so it was helpful to have Kerry and Vicki demonstrate some of the affordances, particularly for the secondary sector: tracking student completion, assigning grades (achievement levels) and the multiple copy feature for resubmissions (NCEA; formative assessment). I am keen to extend student agency this week by getting them to upload their Wordwall quizzes for other students through Workspace. I will let you know how it goes! For today’s mahi we curated some Cybersmart resources and I was able to setup cards and publish:

Other Very Helpful Tips for Today 💡

#Tip1 - Engage students in the Beinternetawesome site.

#Tip2 - It’s the little things … when searching for a file in Google Drive, first click on the file found, and the folder path is displayed at the bottom of the screen. How did I miss this before??

#Tip 3 - Use QuickTime to create a screencast on MacBook.

DFI – Enabling Access

Dorothy kicked us off today with a reminder that one of the main joists in the whare of our Manaiakalani kaupapa is being “Connected”. The diagram of the Manaiakalani Outreach clusters powerfully demonstrated for me the scale and richness of the partnership which offers extensive opportunities for connection (and conectedness). One of the essential ‘oils’ is the shared language of Learn | Create | Share across the learning network. 

Each year, in Term 1 the Manaiakalani Learning Community focuses on Ako, on Hanga in Term 2 and on Tohatoha Term 3. There are multiple layers of professional learning support for the community to come together and co-construct effective teaching and learning in connected groups, with this shared term-by-term focus. 

Additionally, RSS is a mechanism whereby Twitter has been commandeered for Manaiakalani purposes. Every time a student (or teacher) posts on a blog, RSS selects the last post to position at the top of the collective Twitter feed which now has 410,000 posts! What an achievement! The RSS Twitterfeed can be accessed in one place: 

Another opportunity to connect classes and learners is through Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu which promotes blog commenting in everyday learning. The TeachInquire RSS feed 'pushes' posts from Teacher and Leader Professional Learning blogs into our inboxes: this has its own affordances for being kept abreast of what's being innovated (and inquired into) across Manaiakalani educators. Google Currents is also harnessed to bring teachers together through PLD Groups in the Manaiakalani Community. 

Leading Learning using Google Sites

The visibility of sites is actually a form of gifting because it offers repurposing of others’ practices and resources to scale:

Visibility is one of the five affordances of L-C-S that independent research shows accelerates shift (Woolf Fisher Research Centre):

- Engagement 

- Teaching conversations

- Cognitive challenge

- Visibility

- Scaffolding

When we are creating sites for leading learning, it is vital we are intentional in designing learning that promotes these 5 affordances. For example, sites have a key role in facilitating Engagement incorporating: visual appeal; multimodal-multitextual; choice; connections to home & blogs; archiving).   

Paenga Kūkara

Vicki then took us into a Chalk ‘n Talk around personalising a learning site. The recommendation to use Unsplash and Pixabay for Royalty Free images was really useful. I added buttons and content to an Apps Toolbox site which our Digital Strategy team is creating in my school context. The idea of the site – under construction – is to have a single place where examples of activities can be accessed for a range of “go to” apps teachers have designed effective teaching and learning with.

DFI - Google Sites - It's all about the Visibility!

Dorothy led us in a session to explore beneath the floorboards of the Manaiakalani kaupapa: Making Teaching and Learning Visible. In the simplest terms “Can we see it or not”? Learning must be visible for students and whānau at home. But it is a two-way street because teachers need to have visibility of students’ mahi and that of other teachers. The default is “visible in the Manaiakalani kaupapa” of day-to-day teaching and learning including planning, process, assessment outcomes and reflections. A powerful analogy that really resonated with me was Dorothy’s use of the image of a fenced Council walkway to emphasise that:

Multimodal Affordances

Kerry took us on a Deep Dive into what is meant by ‘multi-modal’ as differentiated approaches to teaching in a digital classroom. The term multimodal refers to the different methods of making meaning: visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and gestural. An important point that we didn’t cover this morning, is the different affordances of using (and combining) different modes and in education, decisions about which mode (or modes) best suit my communicative purpose. When thinking about multimodal design for learning some key cognitive processing principles by Richard Mayer are worth considering. Gunter Kress, “the father of multimodality” emphasises how our world is increasingly becoming image centric versus text centric, with text often playing a supporting (or explanatory) role in particular contexts such as online, digital spaces. 

Exploring Manaiakalani Teacher Sites

After Vicki took us through a Chalk ‘n Talk with Google Sites we had the opportunity to explore Angela Moala’s site and the multitext database. The database is a fabulous resource for curating and ‘borrowing’ text sets across clusters and year levels. I was particularly interested in Robyn Anderson’s choice of  an “anchor” or main text in only audio mode with supplementary print and video texts. I like that the learning design may intentionally foreground an audio experience to potentially free up cognitive resources to focus on meaning making (and potentially note taking). It would be interesting to capture teacher’s rationale for their multimodal (and other) choices of the texts in the sets.

Create

The culmination of today’s session was using our Google Sites and knowledge of text sets to create our own site. I joined Makoare’s bubble and have started a text set resource featuring Māui me te Rā: 

DFI - Dealing with Data

In this fourth DFI, I appreciated Dorothy tracing the Manaiakalani journey in choosing a digital platform and developing practices for sharing and connecting online. Dorothy posed the question “Why share?” and pointed out that Tohatoha (Share) is right at the core of all civilisations.  However, back in 2005, sharing exploded digitally through YouTube and then Bebo and Twitter. It reminded me that the digital action of sharing amplifies affordances from the speed, to being able to broadcast to the whole world. In the development of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, tahatoha was an important part of “hooking” learners into an authentic audience for their learning (especially when young people were first engaged with the emerging phenomenon of social media). Sharing with purpose is now unconstrained by time, people and place:

Dorothy also made some important distinctions about the ‘linear process’ of Learn | Create | Share. The act of sharing can be regarded as a ‘finishing point’ which is an important life skill for students to be ‘work ready’. But it can also be a starting point for learning: a student’s thinking on a blog post can kick off discussion and provocations for the next lesson. 

Google Forms, My Maps and Sheets

As today’s DFI was also themed around data we kicked off our sessions using Google Forms. I was inspired at the Wananga last week by Rebecca Jesson’s exhortation to “Know Your Learner as Reader”, so I created a form to gather student voice about attitudes to reading and gauging interests. I also added a video at the end to inspire reluctant readers and for students to listen to other young people’s views on reading that they may not have thought of before:

We also created Google My Maps which is an app I have not used before but has huge learning design opportunities particularly in maths, social studies and geography. I really liked that My Maps can import data from Google Forms and I can think of all sorts of ways students can connect to one another’s backgrounds, places of interest and where they have been/want to go in the world! If you are interested, here is a My Map of places you may not be familiar with in the Waiuku, Franklin area:

I found Vicki’s Deep Dive into Google Sheets extremely useful. Despite being a long-time sheets user, I still found a number of tips I will surely be incorporating into my everyday data work. For example:

• the shortcut to freezing rows and columns;

• paint roller formatting; 

• conditional formatting rules (e.g. to colour all students who are below a certain raw score or level);

• restricted editing rules (for cells you don’t want touched by anyone else!);

• explore suggestions - these Google suggested graphs and analyses of your data are a real time saver;

• data validation - for keeping entry clean and limiting responses to drop down choices.

But the Top Tip of the Day for me was Sparklines as a fabulous way for seeing trendlines in student data:

We concluded our day with a create session using a fabulous blog analysis task by the amazing Robyn Anderson at Panmure Bridge School. If you are not using this task, I would highly recommend, getting students to analyse their own blog statistics - great connections to information literacy skills in maths!

Manaiakalani Wānanga 2021 - Powerful Relayers

Moving to an online Google Meet platform this year, Wānanga 2021 was again the pivot we were all looking to for collective programme direction. I, for one, was not disappointed. The day had inspiring and sobering provocations, showcased MIT teacher innovations (which we should all be digging into) and of course, the all important research analysis for planning ahead to 2022. A huge shout out to Dorothy, Russell and the wider team of organisers and presenters for all your mahi. Some of the “hotspots” I have been digesting include:

• Pat Sneddon’s metaphorical analogy of Learn | Create | Share as “our vaccination and syringe which is our capability”. Although the nation is “stark and different” in these times of pandemic (and increasing economic hardship), Pat emphasised teachers as powerful relayers both in terms of: i) the vaccination message, and ii) being able to deliver seamless, ubiquitous, effective learning for students and whānau.
• I found Pat’s use of the term “relayers” to be particularly thought provoking because of the connotations with electrical charge, and that relays convert small electrical stimuli into larger currents. 

• What might we take from the analogy in light of the wider messaging from the research team and the MIT teachers’ innovation? Electrically speaking, relays are amplifiers. Although people generally associate relay with sports (where team members take turns passing the baton to complete a race) the important point about relays embedded in electrical products is they not only hand signals on, but current is radically changed during switching mechanisms. Dr Rebecca Jesson’s provocation picked up on this theme by asking leaders how they will support teachers to power up reading change-actions. She highlighted 5 components of deliberateness and emphasised the importance of leaders’ intentionality and participation in the relay: i.e. as teachers identify areas for change, consult data, and devise SMART goals...the process should not stop there. By inviting leader feedback (e.g. observation; review), and building in co-evaluated next steps, space is created for reciprocal transformation to occur. What I took from this is: a ‘powered up change in practice” does not happen in isolation. 

In terms of identifying change-areas from the data, Dr Rebecca Jesson, Georgie, Kiri and the Manaiakalani Research Team presented comprehensive analyses of observations and surveys of teachers, students, leaders and families. The resulting framework from their mahi offers a powerful model for conceptualising reading practice design going forward as it: a) brings together elements of the Manaiakalani pedagogy, high leverage practices and digital affordances, and b) is a mental model to plan effective reading practice:

An initial look at the data (though unfortunately I was not able to sit in on any of the all important collective sense-making) highlighted some “big ticket items” that for me, centred on connections: 

• Firstly, how connections can be amplified across text sets. Drawing on the work of LaVenia (2019), text sets were “too frequently a hodgepodge of selections organized under a vague theme, such as serendipity or adventures. Fortunately, the most recent versions of core programs present units of instruction with unified themes and selections that build knowledge over several lessons” (LaVenia, 2019). 

• Secondly, leveraging the connections across text sets as new contexts for known vocabulary and for multiple exposures. Teaching new vocabulary is well represented in the data but what are our more deliberate methods of optimally planning for repeat encounters? 

• Thirdly, personal student connections to texts are made via mirrors, windows and sliding doors -  Dr Rudine Bishop’s notion of mirrors and windows still demands our attention beyond Dr Aaron Wilson’s challenge in 2020: that is, for our students to see themselves reflected in their reading  - their diverse “rich mosaic of experiences, values, perspectives, and cultural ways of knowing, being, doing, and communicating.” I wonder, are we following through this two stepped, layered process as Bishop conceived? That is, getting to know our students and finding mirror texts that reflect their identities, and then, using window texts, to open up diverse worlds, which students make sense of (and critique) in light of their worlds. Both offer connections back to students’ lives and experiences to amplify engagement. Apart from strong Matariki representation, our data still shows the need for far more intentional mirrors. 

• Critical reasoning through extended discussion and questioning: A big push is needed here! How can we get far smarter in our planning by leveraging the ideas (or characters or settings or styles) between texts, as competing or dissonant voices? And equally important, how do we empower children with talk principles that promote critically reasoned conversations about those ideas?

• Lastly - and “a real accelerator for learning” - how are we deliberately plan to build the (self) assessment-capability of our students? In other words, how do we strengthen learners' executive function muscles? For a profile of characteristics, the research team promote this useful summary:

There is so much more to dig into, and I still haven’t got to the MIT teachers inquiries and innovation! But that’s for another post... Going forward, I am keen to review the Manaiakalani observation research practice examples and associated reading programmes clusters are using, but I am also keen to know:

Question. How does the above resonate with you in your context? And if so, what will be some of your next steps in the powering-up relay?