The Bashful Blogger

Unfortunately, I have had to reluctantly make the decision to move my blog to blogger.  Edublogs is no longer a viable option for me or the teachers and classes in our cluster as we are subjected to google advertising or paying an annual subscription.  Please update RSS feeds to my new URL http://belindajjohnston.blogspot.com/

Trevor Bond

We all have a world view (knowledge) – how we see ourselves, relationships and surroundings.

This drives personal beliefs and opinions – convictions based on experience, knowledge, understanind and perhaps faith.

Beliefs lead to values – a range of concepts, attitudes, behaviours and skills. A value is the level of importance you attach to something – concepts, attitudes, behaviours, skills, relationship, object or person. “Values” is an attempt to pluralise a verb.

From what you value comes attitudes – a choosable state of mind which governs how we react and behave in any given situation.

Attitudes drive behaviours/skills.

A visual representation could be used with learners. Changing any of these is a result of learning.

Teachers can’t learn anybody anything. We are responsible for providing learning experiences and providing opportunities to broaden world views. World views can be used as a filter to ignore new information or to alter beliefs and opinions.

What we value is derived from our beliefs and opinions. The best indicator of what we value is how we act and interact in different cirucmstances.

You don’t need to have a values programme. What long term impact does it have? What is the purpose? How do you measure it’s success?

The primary NZC mandate is the development of the key competencies. If you are working on “thinking” how about working out existing beliefs and based on them what you value. What attitudes will be foster and encourage, what skills/behaviours to facilitate?

Stuart Hale and Sue Brown
stuartnz@mac.com

Fully integrates with iApps.
One stop multimedia shop.
Develops student thinking and learning skills.
Promotes HOT.
www.nzmac.com

Teaching & Learning – what is happening in the ampersand?
Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking.
20% of NZ students are not reaching low benchmarks in Science after five years at primary school.
Use NZC to bring clarity to our practice. Non-negotiable principles. NZ teachers can collaborate on the hooked on thinking wiki by sharing.
How can we help students better know themselves better as learners?
Effective learning is when both students and teachers can explain where they are what they need to do next.
SOLO = structured overview of learning outcomes
Students from 5 years old able to use SOLO and talk about their own level and what they need to do to move on to next level.
Help students understand the common language of learning – task descriptors from NZCEA – use these for explicit teaching. Criterion based rubrics to help them self assess.
.Use HOT tools and ICTs purposefully to support learning outcomes.
Teacher planning shows differentiated learning experiences at all levels of SOLO will assist students learn how to learn independetly.

Presenter:  Trevor Bond

A thinker is a learner.

A learner is a questioner.

A questioner is a learner

A thinker is a questioner.

Questioning is the engine house of thinking (de bono)

Questioning is our most important intellectural tool (Neil Postman)

Who asks the mosts questions in the classroom – teachers or students and to what ratio?

Teachers 99.98% (mostly administrative and convergent, divergent are the minority)

Students 0.02%

‘When I ask questions my teacher gets angry’ article in Teachers Matter.

Teacher questions very different to learner questions.  Learners are wanting to fill in the holes in their understanding, knowledge and skills.  There are three main types of learner questions:

• Requests
• Rhetoric – the answer is not the agenda, both parties already know the answer (disguised imperative)
• Inquiry

1. Primary layer of questioning – fertile, essential, inquiry, rich, reflective, questions – drives the learning, cannot be answered until you have asked and answered a whole lot of other questions.  No one right answer and many possible conflicting answers.
2. Secondary layer – subsidiary questions, fact finding, information seeking, open, closed, fat, skinny, key, search
3. Intermediary layer – in between these two layers is the thinking process!  Diagnostic, analytical, evaluative questions.

What are the core skills of an effective questioner?

• identify the need or the problem
• identify the relevant contextual vocabulary
• ask a range of relelvant questions
• take them to a variety of appropriate sources
• persist, editing quetions as necessary, until they acquire the needed information

What is a good learner question?

• It is relevant
• Can be taken to intelligent (person) and non-intelligent sources (stored information eg google)
• Gets you the information that is needed

Poor questions

• Where can I find it? – what is it
• What skills do I need? – for what
• How do I get there?- where is there, where are you now

We all often ask poor questions and get away with them because those involved know what the context is, thus we often model poor questions.  By answering poor questions instead of teaching students to ask better ones we also promote poor questions.

Questioning Skill Taxonomy

• Skills of an effective questioner (see above)
• Stage 1 – created statements rather than questions (or a nul response)
• Stage 2 – any non-relevant question (does not contain contextual key words or phrases)
• Stage 3 – asks yes/no/maybe questions using relevant key words and/or phrases (is, can, does, could, may, would etc)
• Stage 4 – uses the seven servants (who, what, when, where, how, why and which) and the key words to write a relevant questions
• Stage 5 – uses the seven servents, relevant key words and phrases to write relevant questions
• Stage 6 – using relevant synonyms of key words to edit key questions
• Stage 7 – uses multiple question words to create a probing question when interviewing an “expert”

The target is to operate between stages 3 and 7 as necessary.

Skimming and scanning digitally – edit – find – [keyword] – next reference etc.  Can be done on browser, word, pdf etc.

Evidence of success – cohort analysis, track the questioning stage over each year level

Why?

• Kids to learn skills and take bck to schools, skills not already being covered in schools.

How it was planned?

• cluster wiki, with email
• Kids presenting and teaching to kids, representatives from each school
• 4 groups presenting in the morning, other 4 groups in the afternoon, student choice of what to teach
• each student to learn a new piece of software to take back to their own school and teach to others
• CD to take home, info from all workshops not just those attended
• goody bags – collected from sponsors at ULearn!

Cost – approx $150

Keynote speaker from Sitech – gave demos.  Each school supplied four presenters and four laptops.  Students and teachers introduced themselves.

Student journalists – photos, movies and articles.

Morphing (Diane Scott:  Wharepapa South School, Te wamutu)

Free software to transform one image into another. Download software from http://www.tucows.com/preview/365265

Why teach squiz morph?

• advertising
• movie special effects
• showing a life cycle
• ilustrating fantasy or sci fi stories
• life lines – aging people (child to parent to grandparent)
• forensic science
• e-Portfolio – beginning of year, end of year, OR Year 0 to Year 6

Scrapblogging Juniors at Pokuru School

www.scrapblog.com – signup

Can add music, stickers, photos, movies.  Online books that can be viewed from home. Purpose was to record learning and events in the class.

Audacity

Purchased head phones a cheap USB microphone.  Purpose for students to record themselves reading stories aloud, copy to CD and put in a bag with the book for others to use. Audience for someone in a lower reading group a younger class.   Long cable on microphone so can’t hear the mouse click.  Sound effects like cymbals for turning the page. Always saved project into audacity and also as MP3.  Could also use in podcasts, powerpoints etc.  KIds enjoy making covers for the CD jewel case using photos of book covers.  Use template in Publisher.

Voicethread with a Year 3/4 Class

Embeds into class blog on blogmeister.  Each student has their own page on the blog.  Can upload photos, word documents, movie clips, powerpoint slides.  Audience can leave comments by typing, talking, movie or phone.  Used for students to give opinions about books they are reading, with justification.   Alos used for students to articulate their learning about the thinking hats.  Very motivating for the kids to see how many people view the voicethreads on their blog.    Each student has their own profile under the class login.  Free registrations are only able to store three voicethreads.  Educators can upgrade to a pro account for USD10.

Advertisements using ComicLife, Photo Editor and Publisher

Designed background, added text art etc in ComicLife (downloadable for around $4).  Print Screen (or Mac Screen Shot)  Scan drawings, insert into Publisher and use transparency tool to remove background.  An exercise in using the best from each programme to come up with the product you want.

Pivot

Animated stickman.

• make a basic animation
• add backgrounds
• using powerpoint to add music (save animation as a gif)
• powerpoint with background and music

Access through EPIC on TKI school login.  A research tool for teaching skills to students.  Around 60,000 safe website links.  Access online24/7 home or school.  If you search a keyword from the main page it will give you hits from the different levels on Britannica depending on student age and ability.   Also choices for media (movies and games). Important to show teachers and students how to cite material used from the site.

• images/media – a movable magnifying glass
• journals/magazines
• additional references, local library
• Web’s best sites
• own work space – stored on Britannica server
• world atlas integrated with google maps
• timeline
• country comparisons
• subject browse and sub categories
• big events – can put in birth date and see what happened in the world that day
• games – english, maths, science
• teahcer resources
• News/ABC/BBC Kids
• AnimalActivity of the day/week
• interactive lessonswith concepts and objectives
• learning zone for Pre K to 2
• Discover our world
• curriculum mapping by year level and subject

The Fourth Way of Leadership and Change

e-Learning/ICT in itself will have no positive effect on student achievement unless pedagogy is also adapted.

The first way: 60s-70s Innovation without coherence

The second way: 80s- early 90s Top-Down Government – goals, performance, targets – support bottom up

The third way: 90s Top-Down government – support bottom up, goals, performance, targets, resources, materials, training, lateral learning peer pressure and support, public engagement integrated services

Finland

• 5 million people, essentially mono-cultural
• clear societal vision
• strong public investment
• high quality hight status teachers
• steering by the state
• local curriculum development
• trust, cooperation and responsibility
• improvement through uplift
• leaders who teach
• no initiative-itis

Nokia accounts for 40% of national GDP.  Nokia named after river, town, rodent!

High quality teachers with enough pay but not outlandish.  Within broad guidelines teachers develop curriculum.   Schools described with atmosphere of trust, teachers take responsibility for ALL students.  Collaborative trust and responsibility.

The school belongs to everyone not to the leaders/principal.  If the principal is away does he/she have the trust, has he/she built the capability for the school to run well without them for a period of time?

London – Tower Hamlets

• Diverse, poor community
• Poverty no excuse for failure
• Over 10 years (since 1996) student achievement levels lifted to national norms
• Director and Principals co-constructed measurable shared targets
• High quality teachers with commitments to the community
• No standard assessments
• Teacher support into classrooms – help with preparation, duties etc
• When the school effects the community you can get more effective engagement

Comparing education with other successful industries/companies

Internet shopping site, Australian cricket, automobile manufacturer:

• Competition between schools is detrimental – we are all part of “education”

• Agreement on units of measurement for performance – to reflect what they are trying to achieve.

1. An inspiring and inclusive vision:   A compelling and inclusive moral purpose steers a systems, find it together
2. Public Engagement:  Open professionalism that includes the public builds awesome schools
3. No achievement without investment:  Schools cannot excel alone but need communities and society
4. Corporate Educational Responsibility:  The businesses that get invited to the educational policy table should be those practice corporate social responsibility.  Accountability sould be mutual and transparent, not secret and one-sided.
5. Students as partners in change:  students are usually the targets of change efforts and services.  They are rarely change partners.  Without students, there would be no teachers.  If shcools and school systems sustain a broader vision … teir students will become committed to changing the world.

3 Principles of Professionalism

• High quality teachers

• prowerful professionalism

• lively learning communities

4 Catalysts of Coherence

1. Sustainable leadership
2. A net with no nanny – spread innovation, stimulate learning, increase professional motivation and reduce inequities, govt to set-up and support but not control/regulate
3. Responsibility before Accountability – to ourselves, each other and our students.
4. Build from the bottom, steer from the top – improving policy delivery, democratic and sustainable path to improvement.  Standards but no standardisation.  Bold targets, hard work.

I’ve recently had the privilege of making contact online with students from my very first class back in 1995 (Year 7s)!  The first one made contact with me through the Old Friends site which I registered on many years ago for the purpose of tracking down people I had gone to school with.  This contact with “Alana” quickly led me to my Facebook account where I’m now “friends” with around half of that class and I’ve had updates on many of the others.  I cannot express how exciting this has been for me!  Like many primary school teachers, my first class was the most special for me and I remember them all very well.  I’ve kept their photo on my wall in all my classrooms and offices over the years.  It has been delightful to see what they have all been up to and hear their memories of year together – I’ve laughed out loud at some of the messages especially the one askng me if I’m still obsessed with ABBA!  It has been immensely rewarding for me to make contact with these young adults whose lives I touched briefly and has given me many warm fuzzies …

On a similar vein I was also recently contacted via www.oldfriends.co.nz by a woman I went to primary school with and haven’t seen for 35 years!  We met at St Lukes for morning tea last Sunday and it was amazing.  We both turned up with photo albums and spent a fascinating 90 minutes catching up on each other’s lives and swapping memories.  We both remember some events the other one did not so it was lovely to fill in a few gaps from those early years.

Both these events have had a very positive impact for me and simply would not have been possible were it not for sites like Old Friends and Facebook.  If you are not already registered I urge you to get onto it today!

I’ve just read a post on John Sutton’s blog about student comments on blogs. It has some good ideas for introducing the topic to a class and examples of rules/guidelines to put into place.  Definitely worth a look if you are using a blog with your class.