Session 2 Digital Fluency Intensive

Today was another exciting day. We looked at hangouts, how to access through gmail, the App or through the calendar.

We then had the opportunity to be part of a group hangout using comments and google map.

Next we delved into the Manaiakalani pedagogy of learn, Create, Share with a focus on accelerated learning.

Ako:

This was looking at how in harnessing technology we are able to amplify our effective teachers practice. 

Recognise - Provide authentic texts

                Develop thinking critically and strategies

                Develop collaborating

                Provide more choices

Amplify  -   Getting ie. resources to help with learning for

                          example,Tki, NZ curriculum, Teachers pay Teachers …

              -    Giving ie. Sharing through blog/site

Turbo Charge - Provide students with the opportunity to unpack their learning

through clips, 

                                 Images, rewindable learning on site

Effective practice removal of barriers, opportunities

                                     For new ways of learning

We need to remember that each school will be different as we all have individual communities.

Gerhard then introduced us to Keep and all of its amazing features while also helping us  clean/organise our emails and calendar.

After lunch we were back to hangouts.

To help us become more proficient at this, we have used calendar, to set up 2 hangouts with members of our cohort during the week.

Session 1: Digital Fluency Intensive

I have been a part of the Manaiakalani cluster for ten years this year and I am always surprised at how I discover or relearn something new in every session that I attend.

An example of this would be the strong partnership developed between whānau and schools in the very beginning of the introduction of digital devices within schools. I had no idea that parents and whānau were asked how much they could afford to contribute to their child's access to a device or how whānau and students could see Saint Kentigerns over the river and hoped to have similar access to technology. 

After today in my professional workflow I will be making sure that I always set up new folders as share with anyone with the link and only change this with documents that I don't want visible to all. I will also be taking the short-cut of Shift z with me where I can add shared items to my drive where I want rather than move (so that the file doesn't  then move for others who have access to the file).

I was also made aware of 'Voice Typing' in 'Tools'. I am excited to use this with some of my  students - especially those who have great ideas but that struggle with writing.
Another tool that I discovered today was 'explore' at the bottom of documents where you can complete web, images or doc searches.

To finish our day we had to create a visual poster or news letter. I chose to make a poster as an example to my students of the learning that we have been focusing on this week in maths. we were advised to set up as A5 so that it can been seen on our screen and to use tools to set up tables to keep our images where we want them to be. Another tip was to search transparent png or to remove back ground from images 'remove.bg'. When we were happy with our design we removed the black table lines by going to 'format table'

Here is the poster that I designed today.

I am looking forward to next weeks session.

On Tuesday I gave a presentation to the Junior Syndicate to share my learning of critical literacy. As teachers we all aim to prepare our students for success in this ever changing world and I believe Critical Literacy is just one area in which we can do this.

Shift since using new writing criteria

In using the new criteria sheet at writing time my students are now producing stories that are in sequence and have the correct structure for a recount, however we are not producing a lot of detail or interest words it is time to make a change.

I introduced this book by Roald Dahl, The Enormous Crocodile. This book is a good introduction to words that can add detail and interest to a story. Each day we read aloud 3-5 pages. The students were hooked! We looked closely at any new language that was introduced and thought aloud of ways we could use it, for example: the word swizzle.

 appeared in the sentence buddy of some students that wrote about playing hide and seek with their friends . I swizzled my head around quickly as I looked for my friends. We also printed off colourful adjective cards from sparklebox and grouped those as an activity - what words had similar meaning, what words had opposite meaning, put all the colour words together etc.

Inquiry Map

I had a very interesting conversation with our in-school COL teacher (Robyn Anderson) and she helped me to complete a map of my inquiry for the year. This map will help me to keep focused on my inquiry and the main focuses that I have identified for myself and my students.

Student created success criteria for recount writing

After looking at my students writing I realised that we needed to come up with a success criteria together. First we looked at an example piece of writing and looked closely at the features that were included in a good piece of writing.

Example:

We then highlighted the features that we could see and from that made a criteria that we could follow during writing time. Below is our new criteria for writing a recount.

Criteria for recount writing

1.Writing must have a title

2. When did this event take place: Yesterday... On Monday... At the weekend... In the holidays... A long time ago... Last night... After school... Today... This morning...

3. Sequence the story/event: First... Next... Then... After... Finally...

4. How it made me feel: excited thirsty sad wet happy hungry scared hot surprised tired angry cold

5. Check punctuation: . full stop ! exclamation mark ? question mark , comma ‘ apostrophe “ ” speech/ talking marks I capital letters

6. Edit my writing for spelling corrections Can I add some interesting/describing words

Update on reading and writing after testing Week 5/10

                                                                                                                                                                           

Reflections: Testing Regrouping, Refocus:  for Reading

Big improvement in reading fluency and understanding of text in all groups. Students love to read. Making reading to punctuation (full stop) and reading in two’s has really developed fluency, understanding and confidence.  The weekly sunshine classics challenge has also been a big hit with the students. Each week each group is provided with 12 new books. The challenge is to read and complete each book and the activities to 100% the student with the most read books and activities for the week receives the golden reader certificate. Each week I delete the old books and replace with new books over 4 levels (all below their guided reading level) when we need to repeat as all books have been covered but we are still having problems with the activities I delete my class, re-enter and load them in again approximately every 5 weeks. The progress I am seeing is great, well worth the extra time.

Reflections: Testing Regrouping, Refocus:  for Writing Improvement from all groups. Kamela, Aarush, Jerome and kane.M use a chart with list 1,2 and 3 spelling words blu tacked. They make their stories using the words on a whiteboard and then record the story into their book (Kane. M has his printed out which he writes over on day 2 and then dictates his story to me/t.Aide who writes his story onto paper for him to cut and paste the story into his book). A big focus on punctuation this term during shared book, poem, guided reading, shared writing has all helped develop the use of punctuation in their writing books. The students love making sentence buddies for the focus punctuation which they then put on the wall. I also have noticed that my students are writing many more ideas in their stories. Writing time is mainly free choice (5 minutes to draft picture, 15 minutes to write story, must use the whole 15 minutes, then proof- reading and editing with the teacher.) and generally all writing produced is recount. We have looked at letters and next will be acrostic poems and instructions.