Rachael's Professional Learning

Thinking about empowering teachers as well as learners is top of my list right now. Taking what I am learning and sharing with my team is something I am trying to find the time to do - not always successfully. Even today's short session on the new technologies curriculum has given me so much to think about. With our new entrants, we are using this all the time without even realising it! It is something that we need to take a long look at to make sure that we are confident delivering to our learners. The link to the Raranga Matihika resource is definitely something I will be sharing to give them the confidence that we are covering a large amount already and that with some additional tasks around binary and very basic coding the children will love this! Progress outcome 1 can be as simple as children following instructions to cross the road and then giving the instructions to others, debugging them and finding any errors and making changes.  I think the computational thinking side of...

Today was a lot of thinking about keeping our children secure online, I found it really helpful having had support from Kelsey in the past using iPads with our year 3 and 4's. Knowing the background behind the support from smart learners, smart footprints, relationships as well as informing parents about this was really interesting. I particularly connected to the part Dorothy spoke about the displays when you walk into a school showing you what the focus is on and that made me think about our school. We are still relatively new and don't have displays up everywhere. I love the idea of the positive, helpful, kind message and I will be taking that back to my team as well as the senior management team.  Looking at the Harpara dashboard in more detail has given me a much better idea of how our year 4-6 teachers keep track of their 80+ students and the work they are doing. So great to be able to support them with their learning and also hold them accountable for what they are doing...

Connected Learners Share Today was really useful. I set our site up at the beginning of the year, and as with last week, the refresh was great and I have been talking with my team about how we could use it better within the class to motivate and engage our learners. Another colleague has also given time to talk about using Explain Everything and with a bit of luck in getting some more devices, we could be onto something! Looking at the sites through different lenses  - visual engagement and ease of use, made it easy to see what needed to be done on our learning site - from a simple descriptor so that visitors know the age of the students and location of the school, to putting the actual date on learning rather than our school system of Term 3, Week 7 - this means nothing to anyone apart from teachers! Making the home page relevant to the learners by including images of them was an easy fix as was being able to change the shape of the buttons. The process of creating a drawing, then...

 I really enjoyed today learning about the pedagogy behind the learning sites - is the learning visible or not? A really simple question and one that I have used to look at our existing learning site. The answer - not all learning is visible and this is probably due to a number of factors - none of which are irreversible!  Great to hear about the behavioural engagement with the site and also the cognitive engagement - will the children be attracted to the site and want to engage with it?  Will the content keep them there and challenge them, support them and enhance their learning?  I had previously used the multimodal text approach with year 3 and 4's - now being back with New Entrant and Year 1 children it was so useful to talk through with Latham about how to transfer that to very early reading. Of course so much easier when someone who has used it gives you examples that have worked in the classroom! So below is my addition to the multimodal spreadsheet using a bo...

Well - Google Sheets - not my favourite thing in the world to be honest! I find them very confusing. Working through the tasks today, and applying formulas for working out the average and the totals was okay - I could follow that. When the conditional formatting started I just found I was lost. When I was trying to apply a function to more than one row and I was dragging the blue corner down - all the numbers were changing so that they were all the same - time to stop, take a break and come back to it another time! I can create charts and put them on a separate sheet, also choose from the range of charts available.  For the work I do in the leadership team looking at data my skills I have are okay - it is something I would like to become more proficient at but at the moment it's nowhere near the top of my to-do list :) Analysing the blog posts from the archive was interesting - looking at the data it's easy to see the trends and add a narrative as to why these things happen. Da...

Another extremely full-on day - probably the trickiest one so far for me. I found the Maps presentation quite confusing, in that the map was zooming in and out randomly and not working the way the presenter was explaining it. I will take some time and have a look through the slides at a later date.  Looking at how we can use maps was interesting and I can see when we look at where in the world our blog comments are coming from we could import this data into the maps and show the children. There are I'm sure many other uses too - but that's the one I'm thinking on at the moment.  We created a map with information imported from the Google form we filled out this morning. There was a lot more to the information gathered than I realised and can see huge potential for our learners.  I enjoyed learning more about Google forms and the options around the types of answers you can choose and also the information easily gathered. So many uses particularly around getting information...