Reading Practice Intensive, Day 2: Know Your Reader

Hi Everyone, 

I have really enjoyed Day 2 of the RPI. It has been so good to dive deeper and get to know our own readers better. It has been really good to get to do this by looking at our own data.

I enjoyed hearing a little more about the Kaupapa and the pedagogy behind what we are doing. I felt that the information about literacy cycles was very valuable, bringing it back to the process and intention behind our planning. I really liked the connection between the shared aspect and motivation to complete work. If we are creating opportunities for them to show learning in exciting ways that they want to share they are going to have more motivation to complete the task. This idea of students creating podcasts was really cool. 

It was interesting to see how I can utilise the Teacher workbook. It seems like a great place to keep track of the data and monitor groups. It will hopefully make the next steps clearer and also help to track what we are doing over the year. It does seem quite overwhelming at the moment as there is a lot of data to add in there which will be quite time-consuming, but I think it will be worth it once it is all in there.

I really liked getting some tips to be able to utilise my PAT results better.

It hard hard with our reading classes being different from our homeroom classes as the data is not in sets so we will have to look across classes for individuals. Adding the information to the reading tracker sheet will hopefully help with this though. The connection from the PAT to ARBs is such a cool function to include activities connected to the skills. It is great to have activities that so clearly relate to the skills we are focusing on teaching. 

Where to next:

-look deeper into finding out the why behind why students aren't choosing to read in their own time. What can we do to change this?

-use the reading challenge, and add in some other tasks such as creating a podcast to review the book.

-look at the PAT data to find out the next steps for my groups

-Use some ARB activities in my teaching

-look at how to incorporate the taskboard with our current slide format. We use this team-wide and the format has been working well for us and the students 

Reading Survey Data Analysis

Kia Ora Reader, 

Here is the data from my reading classes' student survey. 

I found it really interesting that the student's attitudes towards reading and their view of themselves as a reader was overall quite positive, they understood that reading helps them but they don't tend to read in their own time for enjoyment, though they did mostly enjoy reading for enjoyment. It will be interesting to did deeper with them to find out what the barriers are to reading and figuring out ways increase their motivation to read for enjoyement. 

RPI - Day 1: Reading is Core

I felt that today was a great introduction to the RPI. It helped to bring our students as readers to the front of our minds and gain a deep understanding of what skills our readers need to be successful readers.

I enjoyed having a bit of a reflection of myself as a reader and thought it was good to reflect on my own reading practices (my reading for enjoyment tends to stop when the term starts). It also makes me think back to our getting-to-know-you bingo at the beginning of the year and how many students couldn't say they had read a book over the holidays. When I said I had read 4 books many were amazed which has made me think about the power of us as role models for reading and the time we put into reading, especially in front of our students. Time for quiet/independent reading for the students is often a time for me to see a group or follow up on a problem but it would probably be more beneficial for me to model that enjoyment of reading. There is also so much more that could be done to follow up from this time to promote excitement around books, e. g. more sharing and celebration.

I enjoyed Richard's reminder about reading across the curriculum and the examples he gave to include fiction and non-fiction topics e.g. reading about sharks you can read non-fiction texts, stories, myths and legends, watching videos, new articles, etc. It is important to be intentional with our planning to incorporate a variety of texts.

I look forward to diving deeper into the aspect of the reading pillars of practice. We have looked at the High Leverage Practices over the years but I think having an active focus, homework, and opportunities for reflection with others and accountability will help to embed these into my practice as often these aspects drop off when we are not consciously focusing on them.

I am looking forward to doing the survey with my learners to find out more about their reading habits, thoughts, and feelings about reading to get a baseline. I also think that the reading challenge resource will really engage my learners, so I will be giving that a go. I think I will also take back the reading about the reading about motivation to my team as we have a lot of readers in our hub who don't have a lot of reading motivation.

I am really looking forward to learning more about the task board and modeling book

Session 9- Digital Fluency Intensive - revision

Wow! how 9 weeks flies. It has been a great nine weeks with lots of new and interesting learning

Today our Kaupapa word was Ubiquitous. Ubiquitous learning is about the ability for students to learn anywhere, anytime, any pace from anyone.

This topic is so relevant at the moment with the student learning from home and online. An important aspect of ubiquitous learning is ensuring that learning is rewindable. This gives students access to learning opportunities for learning when they may not have had it at home in the past.

The Summer learning journey is an example of ubiquitous learning. It means that the students who take part are able to continue learning over the summer and don't experience the same summer drop off. As Dorothy spoke about, I will be interested to see if the students who regularly took part in our learning online comeback to school with less of a drop than the students who haven't engaged.

The next part of the day was our opportunity to set the Level 1 google educator exam. The exam was a bit intense with the time there and constantly ticking down. But I got it finshed and Passed. Yay!

Reflection of the DFI

I have loved being involved in the DFI I have learnt some many new skills and extended my knowledge of some applications too. There is so much much I could mention but here are a few things that stood out to me:

• Google Keep - I have used this a lot in my school work and personal life since I learnt about it in the DFI. I have ides it to make cloze activities of texts that students are reading, it helps with work flow being able to quickly save those web pages that you don't want to bookmark but will go back to later... and it is great for shopping list (especailly during lockdown beacuse it updates in real time and you can add collaborators)
• Mymaps - this was completely new to me, and while I need to explore its uses more I have enjoyed playing with it and managed to uses it in my online learning to show where ANZAC cove was in relation to NZ. One of my student blogged that he liked seeing the map which was cool.
• Sheets - Where do I start, I really had no idea of the functionality of sheets before that session. I knew how make and sahre a sheet, add text to cells and merge cells etc. But it is so useful being about to freeze cells, actullay do sums and create charts. It is so useful for data collection and I can't wait to explore how I con use this with my students.
• Mutli-modal texts - I had a bit of background on this from the beginning of the year with Kelsey but it was great to get into more and to have a play. I also enjoyed hearing about the theory behind using multi- modal text. During my online learning I have tried to use mutli-text using slides. My students enjoyed being able to get information in differnt ways. I ensured that I always included the text, a listen to version of the main text a a video.  
• Maniakalani pedagaoy - I have really enjoyed the time each session spent getting to learn more abut the pedagogy behind Maniakalani. It really reinforced why we do the things that we do in our classrooms and online. 

Here is an example of some of the multi-text slides I have created.

I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom and digging in with the things I have learnt.

Until next time,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive -Session 8 - Computational thinking

Today our connecting with Maniakalani focus was about Empowered learners.

The idea of empowered learning is that the device is not just a tool, it is used to transform the learning experience for students and whanau.

It was eye opening to hear about the daily challenges that many families in low decile areas face, I am sure we have some students in our community who have to worry about some of these problems.

The empowerment of learning gives students the opportunity to take control of their lives and futures. Students becoming digitally literate also gives families opportunities to find control.

Our big idea today was Computational thinking (learning to think like a computer scientist).

This was about empowering students to be digitally fluent and able to use their skills to enable them to be the creators/innovators rather than just the consumers.

We looked at the DLO's from the new digital curriculum. Then we looked at the future of tech which showed  us the future our students are heading into that they types of thinking that they will need to be able to adapt to.

https://studio.code.org/s/mc/stage/1/puzzle/1

In our exploring coding session I chose to look more at the applications/sites we can use as I have had experience to things like CS unplugged. I enjoyed the opportunity we had to explore different websites and ideas we can use with the kids. The block coding was fun and very addictive. I am going to look into Minecraft and similar coding games to link into my literacy programme because I have a group of boys who love Minecraft!

In our create session I chose to have a go with scratch. I had played a little in the past but always felt quite confused by it, so it was great to have a good amount of time to explore the tool and get a grasp on a few of the basic skills so that I feel comfortable to teach my students. Below is a like to the scratch I created. 
Going for a walk scratch

Thanks for reading.

Until next time,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive- Session 7 - Devices

This week our connecting to Maniakalani learning was all about being cybersmart.

I had previously thought of being cybersmart being about learning making safe choices online, however today I learnt that it is more than that. It is about empowering students to be active participants online, being confident to share their learning. I liked the point of teaching students to have healthy interactions in their digital world, it's not about limiting them to keep them safe, but more about teaching them how they interact with their online world and a safe and respectful way. 

Next we had a deep dive into Hapara. Hapara is an aplication that allows us to see students learning. We can see the learning they have in their drives, their blog posts, comments on their blogs, monitor their emails, see what they are currently doing on their devices.

Useful new learning on hapara:

• You can move students around in dashboard to see kids you need to see the most at the top. 
• allow time for students to tidy drives - fun to reward tidy drives.

The main idea of the day was devices.

Chromebooks

We did a digital dig about the chromebook. It was great to refresh my knowledge and I also learnt some helpful shortcuts along the way.

Here is the digital dig I completed. It has lots of tips and tricks. 

iPads

It was great to have a chance to explore explain everything by creating and also by looking at tasks teachers have created for students. It is amazing what you can do with it when you start playing with different features. It had been quite a while since I had used explain everything and it had changed a lot. I really enjoyed how creative you could be when using the iPad, so much so that I got a bit distracted...oops! I can see how it would be very useful in a junior classroom with iPads as it is simpler and works more effectively on the iPads..

Create

Our create session today was linked to our cybersmart learning this morning. We looked at some cybersmart lessons, I focused on keyword searches. It was great to think about how simple it can be to slip the cybersmart ideas into other learning. We created screencastify videos to explain the lesson we were looking into and how we might use them. 
The video below explains a lesson plan for keyword searches. 

Thanks for reading my blog.

until next time,

Sarah

Digital Fluency Intensive Session 6

Our Kaupapa focus today was about the connected aspect. 

We heard how being connected sits closely with visibility, which we learnt about last week. Dorothy explain the the ideas of Learn, Create, Share is what helps us to connect as a network of schools. The connections that we have also allow students to have connections with other students through the use of their blogs.  By sharing their learning and being able to see what students at other schools have being learning allows them to connect with the wider world. As a city girl who has worked in a couple of country schools in the past I loved Dorothy's example of the student blogging about possum shooting, something that is a regular for them but students in city schools are being exposed to a new experiences or ideas.


It was good to hear about the twitter page to be able to see the blog posts from around the cluster. This makes it feel so much more manageable to view the blogs from around the cluster, I have finally given in and signed up to twitter.

Next we moved onto the main focus which was enabling access to learning. We had a look at different learning sites, including our own. The main points I took away from this were:

• Keeping it simple and uncluttered
• Photos of students made people feel engaged with the site
• the use of sites in consistent for a student from year 1 to 13 
• Questions to ask:
• Is the site visually appealing? Does it hook in the user?
• Is the site functional for users?
• Is there connection to the blogs?
• 3 click rule - only three clicks to the learning.

We got feedback on our sites from others which was really useful and gave me ideas I had't thought of. We were then given time to make changes to our sites. It was so great to have this time because often the focus is on getting the content on the site and functionality/appeal get a little lost. 

I hope my site is more user friendly for my students and visitors, it will be something I continue focusing on as the site changes and develops. If you want to check it out click here for the link.

Until next time,

Sarah