DFI 9, Google exam, ubiquitous.

We had to write a review for the course earlier today and I definitely felt a sense of mourning at the prospect of having to be back at school on Fridays and not being in the warm embrace of the DFI Fridays. I have really enjoyed these sessions and not just because of the chance to get out of the classroom for the day. The MOE would do well to provide a professional development day per week for every teacher in the country - it might sound ridiculous but I am pretty sure the benefits to everyone would be worth it, anyway enough dreaming. One of the real eye openers for me was hearing what life is like for primary school teachers. I am shocked at how different our worlds are and yet we actually teach the very same kids.

The progression being made through the DFI and weekly catch-ups with Herman have meant we really have developed our teaching practice in ways that move us along the SAMR spectrum to somewhere better than mere substitution of devices for paper.

There seems to be a lot happening in education and I am starting to see a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes in Gisborne. There are all sorts of connections being made here and it will be very interesting to see where all this leads us. Many people agree that education globally seems to be on the verge of some sort major paradigm shift as we start to understand what the technology is doing and how we can harness it in ways to serve our students better. What has become apparent to me is that very few seem to have crystallised any sort of vision or road map for this crazy journey we have started on.

When anyone with a phone has pretty much the entire body of all human knowledge at their finger tips, teachers and schools no longer have the monopoly on education that they once had, and the role of the teacher has to evolve accordingly. 

Something that occurred to me today is that for the people already on this waka it is important to remember that we are all at a different stage on this journey and there will be major hurdles ahead as the status quo is challenged and education changes. Many of the ways things have been done will simply have to be abandoned. I think will be a really hard on some people and sometimes a sad and even traumatic experience for some teachers. In the technology department at GBHS we have some incredibly experienced technical drawing/graphics teachers - in fact one of them even created the booklets used in most NZ schools today. We all love teaching graphics or DVC, but last year we had to face up to the reality that using set squares and pencils etc to do drawings was completely redundant. We had to just let it go in favour of an entirely CAD based system. Letting go of this area of teaching meant coming to grips with the fact that many decades worth of learning no longer held the value it once did and if this value is tied to a person's identity, as it often is, then you can imagine the human toll these changes can have on people.

On a positive note I was at a professional development course at Tauranga Boys High a few years ago and some of the older technology teachers told us that they had initially been reluctant to learn all the new CNC technology but once they bought into it they discovered a second wind in their careers that meant they weren’t even that keen to retire anymore.

That’s my two cents worth for the week. Ciao

DFI 8, youtube, sites, google

Last DFI then the big google exam, I will be pretty sad to be back at school on Fridays but at least I have a ton of new stuff to try out on the kids. Young Matt Goodwin was our guest tutor today - he was telling us a story about how much younger he used to look but he still looked younger than most of the year thirteens at GBHS.

I logged into this blog today for the first time since last week and realised that I had somehow managed to put in some double ups of ridiculously big graphs so the lesson there is double check the published work.

This week we looked at youtube, which I use a lot - both professionally and personally. TBH it seems like there is a lack of consistent functionality which made doing a tutorial hard but I haven't really ever had any problems using it so I won't be worrying about that. We had some fun using the polyline tool on google draw to make some self portraits which is one of those bizarre activities where you can vortex into losing hours trying to perfect the look. I tried this with the students a few weeks ago and they would have happily done it for the rest of the term. We also had a session on slides - this is a tool that seems to be used a lot by the Manaikalani crew, and I see why. It is a really versatile option and works well with sites, we also learned how to make an animation using slides which was pretty fun and you can check out what I made below. There is some pretty funny stuff out there if you check out stickman gifs - which my ten year old introduced me too!!

DFI 7 Data

OK today we rolled into the DFI with the previously enigmatic Stef showing up to help out - presenting stuff on data, forms, mymaps and sheets. First of all though we had our weekly hangout, this time with Dorothy Burt. Dorothy presented a slideshow about the share side of things, explaining how Manaiakalani is a series of networks and connections between schools. I was struck by the fact that schools most often only meet with each other to compete, and how detrimental this attitude of competition can be.

The share part of the presentation also reminded me of a pretty heart warming story from the week. I have a level two student who is always smiling and happy and has always been a really nice kid. I knew from previous conversations that dad is in prison for dealing meth and mum might be going soon. He has quite a number of younger siblings so it wasn't a huge surprise to learn that his large number of absences were mainly because he has to stay home and baby sit. The heart warming part of the story is that he told me he now has a chromebook at home and is able to do his english work even though he isn't at school - I wonder how many other students might be in a similiar position.


The best parts of the day for me were learning about forms, sheets and some of the ins and outs of cryptocurrency. I have used forms and sheets before but not as much as I have wanted to - my top tip today is that if you want to get a quick quiz together on forms just head on over to Kahoot and copy and paste the questions and answers into a form. I will be using the same form to do some formative and summative assessment on computational thinking and will also do a couple of kahoot quizzes to mix things up a bit.
                                                                                                                                       A little graph we made of our blog posts, note the                                                                               sharp drop off from Willie after the first week.

As I have said before the amount of amazing tools and resources available "out there" in cyberspace is phenomenal and probably just overwhelming in most cases, every week I am stumbling upon some new stuff that I want to include in my sites for the juniors, but I just have to do some consolidation of what I am already doing before .

Somehow I also managed to find out that Tim is also a bit of a cryptocurrency nerd. Funnily enough it is something I have just been reading about and relates straight back into the stuff that Dorothy was talking about in terms of networking and connections.

DFI 6 Tonui colab

Where do I start - these blog sessions are always at the end of a long day and since that day is also a Friday I sometimes struggle to get coherent thoughts out of my brain. I have to point out that it is never for lack of inspiring stuff we have been doing on DFI Fridays or during the week.

Today we were at the Tonui colab/Ex mindlab which has got to be one of the most pleasant work spaces around - period, Gisborne or elsewhere. We were joined by the esteemed David Winter, who I originally thought was just a local teaching dropping by, but turns out to be the outreach adviser for Manaiakalani - or something to that effect. David talked about visibility and the need for student work to be seen  or sometimes not seen depending on what it is. I had a good chat to him about schools moving into inquiry based learning and that sort of stuff. I really liked his analogy about thinking what the lowest rung is on the ladder and who is holding on to it before we start to take it out.

We then kicked off with the Tonui crew and a Kahoot on computational thinking - a guy called Robbots took an early lead then got smoked by David, Cheryl and Perky. I - whoops I mean Robbots was manually pressing those answers within nanoseconds so the top three must have had some of Elon Musk's neural links inserted, like in the video Shannon showed us next. Shannon did a fantastic presentation about the new digital technology curriculum. I have been doing a lot of  research about this myself and she nailed it with a concise and well thought out summary. She talked about the future of jobs and automation which is a pretty interesting and at times depressing topic. A guy who I really admire and have referenced in this blog before is Yuval Noah Harrari, who is an Israeli historian. I don't know of anyone who does a better job of connecting the dots when it comes to explaining how automation will impact us. I agree with Shannon that there are exciting prospects for some but I also agree with Yuval who predicts the rise of the "useless class". It sounds like a pretty insulting term, but he uses it to intentionally be provocative and start some uncomfortable conversations  about where we are heading.

On to something lighter now. We had some fun with a bunch of the CS unplugged type activities and I will be using some of this stuff next week when I get my new year nine and ten classes to experiment with for next years digital technology courses. Once again I was impressed with the lessons the Tonui crew presented and will be stealing a few ideas. It will be interesting to see how much prior learning the kids come with in the next few years - hopefully by year eleven they are able to code and come up with their own fantastic ideas for projects. I can see the kids fusing their ideas and knowledge about coding, robotics and horticulture for instance to create real hardware and software applications for the real world.

We finished the day off with a bit of robotics and 3D madness in Cospaces, which is yet another tool that the students can go crazy with. Willie and I came up with a great narrative and we should be scripting an actual movie or animation in the near future, probably a romcom featuring a character named Fancyboy and a witch. Great day - thanks to Shannon, Emily, and Mac.

DFI FIVE, SITES, SITES, SITES.

DFI five started with a hangout. Gerhard Vermuelen from Manaiakalani up in Auckland talked about the share part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa. This was really timely for me as I spent a portion of my evening last night lying in bed with my ten year old son Taika and he was really excited to share what he had been writing at school over the last few days. It was awesome to hear what he had written and see how proud he was of it - in fact I will share it here as it is so kooky but brilliant. Gerhard's hangout highlighted how in most cases a fantastic piece of work like this may only ever be seen by the teacher marking it and then it can probably be found at the end of the year in a dumpster. We shared it with family overseas and it we all had a chuckle at his crazy little imagination. Hopefully this will become the norm as digital fluency gets better and more and more families can share their kid's learning journey with them. Here is Taika's effort.

The lonely giraffe had been looking for a girlfriend for several years,he hadn’t found any. After 2 days he had given up,with nobody to support him through his tough times except his imaginary friend he was hopeless. Until he found a hot tall tree now things really changed round for this guy girls all wanted him so bad. Eventually him and the tree got into an imaginary fight and got separated. Lucky he found another girlfriend she was different because she was a real giraffe but they got along and had a happy life. THE END




The rest of the day was spent looking at google sites and was brilliant timing for me, as I am working on a site for my new year nine digital technology class next credit period. It was impressive to see what everyone else in the class had been doing. The quality and variation in the aesthetics of the sites was very high and will only get better. We talked about how the students would find the sites and I think everyone agreed it will be an ongoing process of incremental improvements based on student feedback, but I keep thinking less is more with the sites. It will be interesting to look back at what we are doing in a few years and see what we think. I was sent this link to a website that has everything wrong about it - it is a game to fill out the form, might be a great example to let students or teachers use to highlight the importance of simple navigation around a website. https://userinyerface.com/

Enjoy

DFI 4 Cybersmart, Hapara, chromebooks, ipads, screencastify, hangout.

DFI four - nearly halfway through. The further along this digital fluency journey we get, the more and more the big picture starts to reveal itself. It's like doing a big puzzle, and the further along you get the more you start to make out the individual parts of the puzzle and how they relate to each other - which in turn accelerates how quickly you can see the entire picture.

This week I was chatting to Herman and a few other teachers about the whole digital technology/project based learning trend and whether or not it is just the latest fad that will wash over us like chatter rings, fidget spinners and any of the innumerable other fads that have come and gone over the years at school. This is a really pertinent question to ask because we are investing considerable resources into this fad, both in terms of individuals, schools and the country as a whole.

At the beginning of this year I was thrown into the new digital technologies curriculum with pretty much no PD, no support and no idea what I was doing (like 1000's of other teachers around the country) - I really didn't expect to enjoy teaching coding. My mis/preconception was that it is all about math and a very logical subject. Something akin to teaching algebra, calculus and statistics - boy was I wrong. I love teaching this stuff, turns out it is mostly about design and process and for the coding there are hundreds of amazing resources online that the students can use and even if I knew how to code, it is much better that they do it themselves.

I can be a pretty obsessive person and I have to admit I got pretty obsessed about the whole digital tech thing and started reading and researching everything I could find on the subject, so here's my take on it, for what it is worth. As cynical as I can be about new initiatives at schools I think this one is different. We really are living in a world that has, and is, changing fast, and the education system is stuck in a paradigm that was created for another time and place - this quote resonated with me in terms of where we are at.

“The industrial revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with 30 other kids who were all born in the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the Earth another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter it's past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven't created a viable alternative.” Yuval Noah Harrari - 2018

So how does all this fit together with a random digital fluency intensive blog post - in one of the most far flung corners of the planet. Well, I think we may have reached a tipping point, or critical mass in the education system, a place and time when the digital fluency of educators and learners meets the world class and visionary NZ curriculum. A place and time where we have all the the tools we need to reinvent the education of our young people so that they can go out into this crazy brave new world, as prepared as we can possibly help them to be.

I know I'm supposed to be reflecting on shortcut keys, screencastify, hapara and being cybersmart and these tools and concepts are awesome, but I see them as just part of a bigger picture - a fad that I don't think will go away anytime soon.

And just so you know I was doing the mahi, here is my screencastify effort, with added drawing in the video - and a bonus picture of my partners in crime. Enjoy

Google sites, multimodal learning, hangouts.

Sorry for the late post but on Friday afternoon I was a bit too brain dead to actually do this so I thought I’d just go home and try doing it using the voice to text on Google Docs, which I'm using right now. So for the DFI 3 we looked at Google sites and it's something that I think is a great tool. About 5 years ago I got really excited about Google sites and I started doing some, and I did a bit of PD on them but they were just too clunky and they didn't work very well and I pretty much gave up on them until this year when I started doing the PD with Herman and he showed me how much better they've gotten. This PD was interesting for me too because I started teaching websites for the first time this year, but using HTML and CSS code which is a really much more difficult. I know from firsthand experience how important the design and planning phase is, so it was really interesting to see some of the stuff that we did on Friday. I like the concept of using multimodal presentation to cater for a range of learning styles. 

From my point of view I think the use of Google sites is the key to digital fluency, it's a really powerful tool for teachers to be able to present their units in way that makes 21st century education possible. Just as importantly I think teachers are able to easily share resources this way. I am really glad to be part of the DTTA group, the digital technology teachers association, it is amazing to see how people are sharing resources digitally. You will find videos, slides, assessment schedules, posters and pretty much anything and everything you can imagine and you can easily put them into your own sites or use them for units plans. I find that working on sites is relatively easy and I think anyone with enough basic skills to make a Google presentation only needs to up-skill slightly to make a reasonably decent site. The other thing that I find about sites (I don't know if it's just me because I enjoy design) is that they can be quite addictive and you can get really caught up in doing all sorts of little design things and making all sorts of stuff to improve the look and functionality of your site. 

Having said that I think the key to a good site is really doing your planning beforehand and thinking about the layout and the functionality of it. Use the kiss principle and keep it simple. I'm working on the digital technology vision strategy document at the moment and I've decided that the best way to do it is to present it as a site. I’m amazed at how you can just have layers upon layers of information for different pages in the links to different sites that are really easy to navigate. I think that's the key to the sites and one of the reasons I'm not huge fan of Google Classroom is because of the way that it becomes quite hard to find things. I can see in the next few years our school will be putting a real focus on developing sites as the focal point for teacher's PD so that we can do rewindable, multimodal, 24/7 learning.  I think sites really allow for huge amounts of flexibility and like I've said before I think these are going to be the key to bringing 21st century learning with the 6 C’s to GBHS. 

Even though I'm pretty well versed in making Google sites I still managed to learn quite a few new tricks that will make my sites better in future. Well I have to say the voice to text is not too bad but I'm gonna have to go through and fix up quite a few strange little things, I'm just reading through and looking at words like applesauce which I'm pretty sure I never said anyway that's enough for now.