Sunday 16 December 2012

Promoting a School Culture of Healthy Eating

Part of my role this year has been to create a culture of healthy eating at my school. Along with students driving the campaign at school, I introduced our version of "Nude Food" called "Kiwi Kai" which is a lunch with no litter or waste, but also with healthy foods. Through many student led initiatives, assembly presentations and blogging it has become a proud talking point at lunch times. 

The 5+ A Day competition inspired me to reinforce healthy lunches. So I created a Master Chef competition, highly scaffolded by the teachers as participants, which was a draw card to engage the kids as judges, but with a big student finale. This was my planning and support resources for other staff to aid them in the preparation and and teaching links across the curriculum. Below is a learning activity / assessment matrix based on Multiple Intelligences and Blooms Taxonomy which allowed students to choose a range of self directed projects to complete.

Matrix for 5+ A Day & Master Chef


Some blog posts about our competition:
School Blog:
1. http://hingaiapeninsulaschool.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/term-4-week-3-kiwi-kai.html
2.http://hingaiapeninsulaschool.blogspot.com/2012/11/2012-term-4-week-3-hps-masterchef.html

Students Blogs:
1. http://hps3-2012.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/student-master-chef-and-5-day.html
2. http://hps3-2012.blogspot.co.nz/2012/11/hps-master-chef.html
3. 5+ A Day Runner-Up http://hps3-2012.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/5-day-competition.html


Local Newspaper: 13 November 2012



A group of students also created a school recipe book and we were runners up in the 5+ A Day competition;  but more importantly our school came together and created a sustainable tradition, one that will hopefully go on to inspire learning about food and healthy living every year.

To develop a culture in a school you need the full buy-in and ownership of everyone involved. The whole organisation needs to "talk the talk, and walk the walk" of healthy food; from making their own Kiwi Kai lunches to helping grow and use the vegetables and eggs in our school kitchen.

Where to next? 
We will continue to develop our gardens and new chickens into our daily learning and discovery. Next year gives us another opportunity to take part in national competitions that help give the students a  sense of a bigger community and audience. 

I would like to see the HPS Master Chef become more student focussed  perhaps more like the actual Master Chef, but inlcuding more students involvement (perhaps chef teams). Some students also raised money as part of the Bake a Difference, a national campaign to raise money during Blind Week; and it would be great to bring a real benefit to our community through our learning about growing, cooking and eating healthy food.

Adults and students alike love coming together to celebrate food which feeds our bodies and minds, plus there is so much "core curriculum" learning around it you just have no excuse but to have fun and get cooking!


Wednesday 28 November 2012

Collaborative Teaching; my research, experiences and reflections


Ignite is a worldwide event in over 100 cities; this evening I went to one held in Auckland. Presenters share their personal and professional passions, using the Petcha Kutcha format of 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of just five minutes. It also allows a stage to practice public speaking and topics we love, and making connections with emerging leaders.

Tonight was my second presentation but still the butterflies panicked and I said "um" about 20 times! Still, I loved it, being able to condense my thinking helped me better reflect on what I had learnt; and I'll work on the public speaking!  The live video will appear on the Ignite site soon (it's ready!) and you can count them for yourself, until then I recorded a slower, calmer version for easy listening.

Most importantly I hope you can take something away to use if leading or participating in collaborative teaching.

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Reading Response Graphic Organizers

With the increasing amount of BYOD and classroom devices, I found it useful and fun to design a collection of reading response graphic organisers. I created them in Google Docs because all the schools I have taught at have used Google Apps for Education, and I am a huge fan of them as well as their collaborative and sharing features. They are easy to copy, duplicate, adapt, individualise or turn into a PDF to print.

Save yourself the work and please use these freely, and let me know which ones worked for you or if I should add any new ones. Enjoy.

Wednesday 7 November 2012

Who needs digital citizenship professional development?


How do you rate your digital citizenship as an adult? As a teacher? As a parent?



In an article in this mornings New Zealand Herald titled "Racy photos land teacher in strife" an assistant principal posted a sexy photo on her Facebook page which ended up being viewed by students and community members.  This raised the question for me whether this was intentional, a stupid mistake or an adult who has never been taught how to be a digital citizen.  

As a net geek and teacher committed to my classroom digital citizens I have made it my business to learn about what good digital citizenship looks like. But how many teachers or parent out there have been taught the goods / bads and do's / don'ts or the why's / how's; have you ever had professional development or training yourself?  So perhaps as educators we should be taking a step back and looking at our colleagues and communities. Ask yourself where the education should begin?

Stephanie @traintheteacher tweeted me back with a link to the New Zealand Teachers Council website "Teachers & Social Media". This site aims to promote discussion about the Code of Ethics for Registered Teachers, and they provide a range of scenarios good and bad to promote thinking and learning.  

School leaders could show this video at a staff professional development or community meeting. Use the discussion questions provided on the page "Committed to the Profession" to start a discussion. Perhaps you may find you need to provide digital citizenship skills professional development.

We all (students, teachers, parents, community) are living in a new digital world that has grown at an alarming rate. If teachers, parents and adults in our community don't understand digital citizenship and aren't good digital citizenship models, who will teach them?  Who will teach our children?

Monday 22 October 2012

Creativity is not a talent


The #edchat Daily provided me with so many fasinating educations links, and today I stumbled on an old talk by John Cleese on Creativity, worthy of being a TEDX talk. For half an hour I was captivated, found myself laughing in agreement and wondering if I was providing the environment to foster creativity for my own students.

Creativity is not a talent but a way of operating or a mood which allows their natural creativity to surface, these people have learnt to play and play for its own sake. Creativity is unrelated to IQ, everyone can be creative. However creativity is NOT possible in closed mode.

Closed mode is the mode we in most of the time at work. We ar active, and slightly anxious often in an exciting way. We are purposeful and get things done. Open mode in contrast is relaxed, less purposeful, more reflective, and encourages curiosity  In open mode we use humour and are more playful and under less pressure. We can play! The main characteristics of play are it's secludedness and it's limitedness, this sets it aside from daily life.

When we have problems to solve we should operate in an open mode. Yet once we find a solution we need to be able to switch into closed mode to implement and complete it. Both are important but importantly they should be used purposefully at the right time. Turning on the creativity requires setting up the right situation, and John has a recipe for that too. 

To get yourself into open mode you need five things:
Space - Time - Time - Confidence - Humour

Space: create a space away, sealed off from your usual daily areas.
Time: plan for a specific amount of time, an hour and a half weekly is good. 
In your space and time create an oasis of quiet, space and time to play.
Time: give your mind as long as possible to come up with something 
original. Successful creative professionals play with a problem longer, and are prepared to "suffer" the inner discomfort, tension to solve a problem. We often take the easiest route, the first solution. Rather defer the decision until required time, allow yourself pondering time.
Confidence: get rid of fear of making a mistakes and set the scene for the essence of play. While being creative nothing is wrong, always give positives, absolutely no negatives. The Japanese give the first opinion at meetings to the most junior, so they have confidence to talk about what they thought.
Humour: gets us from closed to open mode the fastest!

Creativity is the moment of contact between two separate ideas in a way that generates new meaning. Some ways to encourage it are to deliberately try inventing random connections, and use your intuition to judge it's value. Edward De Bono called it "intermediate impossibles," stepping stone to another idea.

I feel revived, regenerated and ready to set my students up to tap into their creativity, are you? 

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Ulearn 2012

This past week I attended my second Ulearn conference where teachers and other professionals get together during their holidays to learn, teach, collaborate, share, network and inspire one another. 
I presented again this year along with my collaborative teachers to share our journey and hopefully inspire others to give it a go.
Abstract: Collaboration is about producing something greater than you can on your own, its output is better or greater than the sum of its parts. As a team of co-teachers we have discovered the benefits of  cooperative and collaborative teaching. In this presentation we will share our experiences of moving from a single teacher directed classroom to a cooperative and collaborative studio where three teachers share guardianship for teaching and learning. We will share our successes and failures, ideas and tools that have aided us on our journey so far, and explore some models and research that guide us.

Keynotes, Breakouts and Tasters
What I love about these conferences is that you see true collaboration being modelled at many levels. 
Twitter: #ulearn12  -  conference participants tweeting teaching and learning gems from a huge range of keynotes, breakouts, presentations, workshops and tasters. 
I won a uTunes voucher for the best tweet that summed up the theme of the conference.

Google Docs: There are so many good events that we miss but collaboration happened on a large scale at Ulearn12 as all Ulearn shared notes are shared and it is easy to get notes from other workshops.
Our school staff all collaborated on one document for all our notes as well. It is wonderful to have collaboration happening as a norm across our whole staff.

Google+ and Hangouts: aside from some workshops covering this, they were very quiet digital spaces.




Some of the keynote and presentations I attended:

Keynote: Dr Jason OhlerNew Media, New Kids - New Literacies, New Citizens
  • Be a door opener - be the teacher on the screen in 50 years that inspired greatness
  • Everybody has a customised work space - what about customised learning?
  • Personalising learning through mobile technology and connectedness.


What is good thinking?  by Mary Anne Mills

  • What is the evidence that your students’ achievement is rising now that they are learning thinking skills? 
  • She spoke not about strategies but the 7 Dispositions of good thinking. 
  • We train kids to ask questions, but do we ourselves good ones ourselves? 
  • What are the assumptions they make and how do we unravel them?
  • We need creative thinking that is thinking outside the square and we need to provide the right dispositions for them to thrive.



Universal Design for Learning - Lynne Silcock 

  • See CAST website for more information.
  • Aiming at reaching the students who are not special needs but failing in their learning.
  • Autism >1 per 100  -  Hearing = 10/100  -  Dyslexlia = 5?7?10? /100 - ADAH = 2?6?/100?
  • How many are special? MoE target the bottom 5% but what about the rest of low achievers?
  • The Class (Studio): diversity is valued = greater diversity (range of needs)
  • The curriculum is designed for the “average”
  • Universal Design for Learning is a approach to learning / a flexible framework
  • (designing your curriculum so it meets the needs of more students, especially those ‘under the radar’).
  • The big picture: designing your curriculum so it meets the needs of all students using multimodal 


Keynote: Khoa Do 

  • Focus on what we have, not what is lacking - be grateful.
  • If you get knocked down you have to get back up... Resilience.
  • Tell authentic stories.
  • There are ways to cross every barrier!
  • Knowing your teams weaknesses are better than knowing their strengths


Keynote: Kevin Honeycutt - Collaborate, innovate, educate!

  • Record yourself so you can teach collaboratively with yourself (Flipped Learning).
  • Kids need us in their digital playground.
  • We should be collaborating as a community for kids.
  • If we get kids doing great things with technology they won't have time for the bad things.
  • Authentic audiences make you a better writer; blog.
  • Create - don’t just snack on other people’s brilliance.
  • The trick is to help them learn to do it(digital) responsibly and safely.
  • Help students manage their devices and not vice versa.
  • There is no age limit to learning.
  • Work with brain - talk to brains takes away judgement of appearance.
  • Don’t wait to be good at something before you try - just do it!
After Kevin's inspiring keynote he happened to end up with us for a tea break. We chatted about our school and how we could connect again in the future. 


Learning to Inquire: Developing curious minds, and deep understandings for a changing global environment by Chic Foote /Helix Consulting 

  • http://todaysmeet.com/ULearn1 (like Twiducate) but you can transcrip the discussion  however neither has a widget for embedding.
  • Learning IS inquiry - What do we mean by inquiry?
  • Being inquirers ourselves help solve the challenges of teaching.
  • We don’t have to always teach our students literacy through the same lens
  • - Global Competencies Matrix


3 Teachers 3 Classes 1 Vision (The Learning Hub) 

  • Started with "what if": create collaboration with single cell classrooms?
  • Spaces are important.
  • Using wiki/blog to deliver some content.
  • Year group (Y2, 5, 6) mix well, special needs kids fit in more easily.
  • Students get to mentor / tutor / support each other.
  • Classrooms connected with “learning street”.
  • Students can work at their stage not age.
  • Use one teacher teach other roam / support approach.
  • James Nottingham - Challenging Learning (been working with PD) allow kids to wobbly etc solve problems ‘pit’ on own but knowing the there is support 
  • I like that they teach the student the vocabulary and concept of ‘the pit’.


Again my brain is bursting with learning, growing, and having fun at Ulearn12, till next time. . .

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Google Apps for Education NZ Summit


The Google Apps for Education NZ Summit was held at Albany Senior High School, a fantastic example of high school using spaces to enhance learning. I wish I had been to a high school like that. A few highlights of my day.

Meeting the Google for Education team: makes me want to become a Google Certified Teacher even more. Come to New Zealand Google Certified Teacher programme, please.

Jim showed us around Google Maps and Earth. The distance measurement is a great Maths tool and being able to embed photos and video on maps is potential storytelling.
There are so many possibilities for learning and here are a few I had:
- Draw or overlay school plans on Maps (our property still shows an empty field)
- Create virtual tour of our school.
- Map a year of our school with photos, writing, links to blogs, Docs: a multimedia yearbook. Some mapping tools are Scribble Maps and Google Mapmaker.


I have always struggled with getting workable links out of web album sites like Picasa and Flickr. How ever I learnt how to get the right photo url link for an image in both sites. Just right click on the image and Copy Image URL. Nice.

The rest of the day was interesting but had come expecting to be challenged yet found a lot of the presentations was stuff I knew. I ducked into one informal chat session to ask for help to solve a Site issue that's been bugging me for ages. That header in Sites, I hated not been able to control it. So while waiting I started digging away in the settings and see a shiny new Edit site layout label.



Which gives you the website minus the header and logo. You can also adjust the footer and navigation bars as well. I like it because it give me more room for creativity. 







So a day of learning, great company and as always; I love Google for Education!











Wednesday 3 October 2012

Are you Co-teaching or Collaboratively Teaching?


Co- is for?
Co-Teaching
- to teach jointly.  

Co-llaborative Teaching
- to work together with others to create more than one could individually.

According to Cook (2004), co-teaching can be collaborative, although does not need to be. Collaboration usually refers to how individuals interact with each other, not what they are doing. Any activity including co-teaching, may or may not be collaborative.

Co-teaching Rational
  • Meets need of individual students
  • Provides more individualised instruction
  • Opportunity for flexible scheduling
  • Can create positive model for social interactions
  • Sense of collegial support 


Co-teaching Characteristics
  • Two or more teachers shared guardianship and responsibility
  • Heterogeneous group of students
  • Shared delivery of instruction in some curriculum areas
  • Shared physical space - ownership
  • Participation based on student need 


Factors to Consider
Every class is different and is community made of many different people with different needs, some factors to consider when selecting a co-teaching approach are:
  1. Student characteristics and needs- consider students personality and learning needs
  2. Teacher characteristics and needs- consider human nature and personality types
  3. Curriculum, including content and instructional strategies- consider the type of content and instructional strategies
  4. Pragmatic considerations- consider the setting and spaces


Co-teaching Approaches
One Teach, one observeOne teacher leads while another purposefully observes for specific types of information and together they analyze it.
One Teach, One Drift
One teacher leads the instruction while the others drift, or focus on small groups based on student need. Which can allow for differentiated teaching. It also lends itself to when one teacher has a particular expertise.
Parallel Teaching
Teaching planning is created collaboratively between teachers. The same planning is then taught to half or groups at a time. 
In mixed Year classes it allows for group differentiation by stage not age.
Station Teaching
The lesson content is usually split into various activity stations which students rotate through. Teachers often at one station each to provide scaffolding / teaching, other stations may be independent. We often use during inquiry - content is complex but not hierarchical.
Alternative Teaching
One teacher teaches the main group while the others work with smaller groups to pre-teach, re-teach, supplement, or enrich instruction.
Often used when student mastery of concepts vary largely.
Team Teaching
Teachers plan and teach students, together in a coordinated way. Teacher need good comfortable professional relationships. Instruction becomes conversation or to demonstrate some type of interaction to students.


Co-Teaching to Collaborative
Research indicate that co-teaching, has traditionally been used to provide support for students with mild to moderate disabilities (Sileo, 2003). It also reduces the teacher to student ratio (Friend, 2001). Collaborative Teaching blends the same ratio of teacher to student as a traditional classroom but blended together.


Co-teaching provides a foundation for collaborative teaching; co-teaching = activity (verb) and collaboration = how (adverb). There is no one way for successful collaborative teaching, yet the rational, characteristics and approaches of co-teaching provide a sound foundation to build your team. I would say collaborative teaching requires even more:
  •  Supportive caring relationships and open communication between teachers.
  •  Honest modeling of collaboration in learning, social and professional lives.
  •  Passionate agile teachers who are lifelong learners.
  •  Sharing, using, and owning spaces.
  •  Shared guardianship, structured responsibilities.
  •  Using digital tools to enhance collaboration.


Rule of Three
Stephen Heppell - I have a simple rule of three for third millennium learning spaces.
  1. No more than three walls so that space is multifaceted rather than just open.
  2. No fewer than three points of focus so that the "stand-and-deliver" model gives way to increasingly varied learning groups.
  3. Ability to accommodate three teachers/adults with their children. Larger spaces allow for better alternatives for effective teaching.

Have you had any collaborative teaching experience to share?


References
Cook, L. (2004). Co-Teaching: Principles, Practices, and Pragmatics. Retrieved from http://www.ped.state.nm.us/seo/library/qrtrly.0404.coteaching.lcook.pdf

Friend, M. (2001, February). Co-teaching for general and special educators. Paper presented for Clark County School District, Las Vegas, NV.

Heppell, S. (2004). Stephen Heppell’s rule of three. Retrieved from http://rubble.heppell.net/three/

Sileo, J. M. (2003). Co-teaching: Rationale for best practices. Journal of Asia-Pacific Special Education, 3(1), 17-26.

Saturday 18 August 2012

A Week of iPads

Learning to share and use a small pod of iPads has been a slow journey, however now that my cooperative teachers and I have allocated device time, we have been able to plan to use them more effectively for learning. We struggle with the balance of having laptops free so students can access them anytime, with using them effectively through planning.

During Maths on the iPads this week I used EduCreations a screen recording whiteboard that allows students to record audio, write freehand and type. It has multiple pages and if all the iPads are signed up to one class account then the students work can be saved directly to the website where we can grab links and embedding codes.


During group guided teaching we used it as a mini whiteboard while
practicing the strategies. The students went off after and recorded themselves
working out problems which will make great evidence and portfolio samples.

In Guided Reading my students and I used
Tools4Students graphic organiser iPad app to sequence the main events of the text we were reading. The US$0.99 app has a good range of graphic organiser templates which are easy to email when completed but can't be saved.





I didn't  use the iPads as much in Writing as I could have. We used Inspiration to do some writing brainstorming and used a Notepad to type up the students writing and add a drawing.

The more ways you use iPads for teaching and learning the more ideas you get, the more possibilities show themselves. As I share this pod of 5 iPads I enjoy the challenge of using them in new ways when I get some dedicated time with them.

This week my focus was using them within guided teaching. Next time I'll focus on using them  for evidence based follow up activities.

What good ways of using iPads in learning have you used recently?

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Sharing Student Audio

Audio tools have become more common in mobile phones, ipods and ipads. I find it a helpful tool for assessment and capturing the voice of my students. With these devices it is easy to capture the students voice and share then it by email or embed code. However it is not always easy to share these sound files on blogs and websites. These are some of the tools I have tried and my thoughts on them.


 I used SoundCloud for a while and liked that I could group a whole lot of audio files in one widget. I disliked that the free version only allowed three free file sets. So I moved on. 
Podomatic is another similar service, I tried it a few years back and found painful to use, although many teachers recommend it.

















Vocaroo
online recorder has been one of my favourite over the years, it is easy to use, link to and embed into other websites. The down side is that it doesn't show on ipad, that's Flash! However you can now upload other types of files including mp4's like those from our iPods. My students sent this recording to me by email, see the example embedded into Blogger using the HTML tab.


Audiopal is another similar service.






I use Google Sites for all our websites, yes it's harder than wiki's but I want to learn to get the best out of it, so the best way is to use it. After a chat about this problem with @sharpjacqui she showed me her very useful site GoogleDocsClassroom which answers all those "how to" questions.

The best way to store and play audio files is using the website itself. Upload the sound file to your Site or Wiki, then embed a widget audio player. Then you control the original file and it plays on an iPad! 

- To see how to do this in Sites go to GoogleDocsClassroom and scroll down to "Embed mp3 files on a Google Sites" (it works for mp4 too). 
- To see how to do this in a Wiki go to WheretostartwithWikisandBlogs.

What success and challenges have you had sharing audio files?










Thursday 7 June 2012

CORE Breakfast

 The smell of coffee and pastries made a delicious start to the CORE Breakfast hosted at Hingaia Peninsula School this morning. With lots of wit and humour DK shared his thoughts on social media for educators which were packed with sweet practical ideas. It was an inspiring morning and I left feeling creative.
As there was a nice Twitter channel using the hashtag #corebreakfast I decided to create a word cloud from the text. I learnt we can make learning more delicious with social media, we just need to play with it ourselves. 
What did you learn?





Monday 23 April 2012

Registered Teachers Criteria

Since 2011 New Zealand teachers are required to justify their professionalism using the Registered Teachers Criteria (RTC). The RTC describe the criteria for quality teaching, which replaces the previous Satisfactory Teacher Dimensions

Nick Rate wrote an excellent blog post on the Registered Teachers Criteria and professional ePortfolios, he looks at it around the framework of the Teaching as Inquiry framework.

I am a very digital person so most of my evidence is digital and thus easy to link to a document. I have chosen Google Presentation to record my RTC evidence as it is easy to embed into other websites and updates. Below is an example of how I have started this process, it is important to be able to continuously update and change this document on a regular basis. 

Other RTC Tools
This wiki shows examples of how to provide evidence for the RTC in eLearning contexts

The Teachers Council have also created a Word document "Registered Teacher Criteria Self Assessment Tool" this is an excellent tool that provides scaffolds and ideas to reflect upon the RTC.

We are all different learners and I believe their are many other creative ways of showing evidence that will suit you. If you find these scaffolds helpful feel free to use them or get creative and do something different. In the end as long as you can give evidence that you are meeting the 12 criteria then you are meeting the requirements.

How do you reflect and record the RTC for yourself?


Sunday 25 March 2012

Igniting Collaborative Teaching


Ignite at HPS


I was lucky enough to attend my first Ignite evening host at my own school. Ignite is a worldwide event, where presenters share their passions Pecha Kucha (PK) style using 20 slides every 15 seconds. My first encounter with PK's was in my interview for my current job, I remember searching Google to find out what it meant.

The Emerging Leaders Ignite evening is a network of educators ready to challenge themselves and share their educational journey. Watch ignite talks from previous events here.

I was also 'lucky' to get to present for the first time along with my co-teacher from Studio 3. Collaborative teaching has been a new and exciting journey for us this term and we tried to capture our path so far.

PK look easy but are really challenging to capture you message clearly in a short time. Below is our slideshow. I look forward to trying to share my learning at Ignite again, and learn from other passionate educators.