Sticky learning with Hyperdocs Lisa Highfill

Often as teachers we see a resource, for example a HyperDocs and see it is invaluable. We must remember every resource is design for a purpose in a place and we must be reflective on how it can be valuable to our context and learners and be designer who draw on others practice. 

First we looked at three example HyerDoc lessons and I found that these are very similar to what I already do in the classroom just adjusted for my level. She said what makes a good HyperDoc is the for c, connect, collaboration, critical thinking and create.  She talked about getting children to explore before they explain. 

We want to bring about emotion and empathy. "Can you make a difference in someones life?" How will you go out in the world and make a difference. 

When you are leaping into something new. Don't do it too often or children get bored. She suggested that you do one Hyperdoc a term. It is about what is the thing that makes learning stick. 

A Hyperdoc is not a teacher! The teachers is moving, engaging students and providing scaffolding. 

This is a maths lesson gave me ideas for how to get the children doing DMIC and Evaluating each others ideas. 

It is about building in the support from the teachers in the design of the lesson plan. We can constantly be think about how we support the children we teach in our lesson design and digital scaffolding. 

We must always be a reflective teacher, keep what you love and adjust the rest to be what your children need. 

Lisa, talked to us about her youtube. She shares lots of video that provide opportunities to explore big ideas with children. 

Auckland Summit-playground

It is day two of the Auckland Summit and we are kicking it off with a playground session in this session we get to go to 3 different 15min mini workshops to learn about all kinds of things.

The first session I went to was called supersize your literacy with Google by Toni Westcott. She talked about how getting children working on together on a shared slideshows in which they all wrote on. This meant they could be more collaborative and kids could draw on each other ideas. She shared a lot of examples using this link.

She describe how the children worked in peers to create word walls. She talked about examples of pick a paths. Mixed groups for reading to foster engagement with the students letting them choose the text they are interested in and the skills they felt they wanted to learn. 

Session 2, the amazing earth race, this session talked about an integrated unit in which the student rolled a dice 4 times and had to use these dice rolls to locate the places they went to. For each location they had to find the place to sleep that was safe, visit a major attraction, and learn about the place and the language. They had to locate travel times, keep a budget, write a postcard back home. They had to plan their own time to make sure they achieved their trip. 

She also showed us the Hemingway app. This is a good editing tool that highlights parts of the text to think of. 

Finally I built a tower with LEGO. It was a trying experience and reminding me how often things fall apart and you have to fix them over and over and over :( but it is an important skill and something I very well might do with my kids early next term. 

Auckland Summit Ignite Closing Session

Day one of the summit is coming to a close and we are all excited for the Ignite talk.

Dreams Hopes Beliefs Wishes

Suan talked about life lessons from breaking his arm, playing netball. He talked about how his related to these ideas and how this led him to set goals. Some things take time to recover from and he talked about being the best version of himself.

Teaching computational thinking & Coding with scratch Anthony Speranza

Anthony Speranza, talked about the value of scratch for teaching children to code. It allows children to create code and not be caught out by HTML which will not work with one tiny error. 

We want to engage learners is productive learning that they love. 

Can we design learning that links to the key ideas Projects, with their peers, the inspire passion and play. 

This video is so powerful. It gets you thinking about how children use technology are they being consumers of content or creator to content.

When we think about our own digital technologies curriculum it talks about getting children to think computationally and really getting kids to understand how games work.

Scratch 3.0 no longer requires flash plug in so it can be used on iPad. Yay I have been waiting so long for this. This version has been update with a slightly different look it has tutorial that you can use.

By giving children an open ended problem and asking them to design and think more about it. What does my program need to be effective.

It was nice playing with scratch and seeing how much more the children can do now the scratch 3.0 is out!! Yay! Perfect timing for our inquiry topic next term.

If you have not explored CSFirst now might be the time. CSFirst is designed so that you as a teacher have a full lesson plan with videos so you can learn about teaching scratch while the learners jump straight in.

Scratch can also be integrated with Makey Makey, they plug into a usb and it think it is a key board. This can be used to create paper circuits to play music.  

Presenting Sites 101

Danni and I had our first presentation of the summit today. We had a very small group and the conversation and discussion about Google sites, blogging and pedagogy were fantastic. Thank you to all the people who were involved in this session. 

Digital Storytelling with Fiona Thomas

I choose this session today because my focus of my inquiry this year is writing and engaging children in writing. 

I am excited to get going and try some new ways of engaging with story tell that may motivate my wonderful learner to push them more. We want our children to be creators not just consumers of  content. We want to encourage learners to use their skills to create and be a positive member of a group. 

Writing can be one of the most challenge task for students to undertake and we want to push students to the point that they have the skills to write for a lot of different purposes. We want children to have multiple options for expressing ideas and learning the structure and idea creation of story writing.

We want children to have access, the ability to express themselves and engage with the learning. This is where students feel empowered. 

Who do I want to focus on:

We want children to start their stories by grabbing their readers attention. She talked about this as being a sizzling start. This came from a writing process model they used. 

We looked at this picture then had to write our own start. 

Disasters has struck! I was all ready running late for work when I released that my hair drier was broken. Not broken in the normal way where it wouldn't work but in the way where it created a wind storm. 

"Sitting in my field all day is boring," Said Poppy. She was the only daisy in the field who had any clue about the world. Yes she knew that the daisy being called Poppy was silly but that just shows how clueless her parents were. 

"What are you?" asked the little girl as she pulled me from my home. I felt violated so my reply was short, "A fuzzle!" I yelled.  

After a hard day in the classroom what else am I meant to do. I had been working so hard on my diet but all the running, jumping and crawling of our maze had made me do it. 

Technology should add value to learning. 

This tool was not at all my favourite. It closes if you stop writing. 

This is a fun looking tool in which you can create fake text message conversations to show conversations between characters or to and author. Best for higher up the primary and secondary. 

This is a tool that gives you picture to match your picture. 

You can create a class with a topic pack for everyone to have a go with. You can create your own cartoon you and create a class photo. 

I have seen some amazing ThingLink. This is a great tool for creating amazing picture that share information. You can create links to more content from one image. 

This is a comic creator that allows you to create comic of all kinds. 

EdTech Auckland: Keynote Time to Wonder

Today is the first day of the Edtechteam Create summit in Auckland. We all packed into the hall at Aorere College.

First up in the Keynote presentation Time to Wonder from Lisa Highfill, is the co-author of the hyper-docs handbook.

Lisa is a year 5 teachers and educational coach. She is wanted to talk to us about learning. She said she has been watching kids with the eyes of a scientist learning what made the kids tick. Her science ideas came from her dad who was an inventor.

She talked about all the things her dad 'invented' and how all the things he came up with someone else had already invented. It was because this that she started collecting all her good ideas in note book then in a Google sheet that populated by texting them to herself.

There is a fear of putting good ideas out there. There may be no new ideas but the value of an idea is putting it out there and sharing it.

We watched this video and discussed what learning we saw....

Here is what we thought: 

We want all the children in our classroom to be rubber band babies and we want to be rubber band babies also. Learners who are excited, curious and explore new content and most of all create new content. 

Is the question we need to ask about content is "What do you wonder?" How do you get to the point when kids can wonder. We have to help children build knowledge that helps them to ask questions. 

For example provide a rich multimodal that makes kids dive into ideas and learn. This is the site Lisa share when she was learning about Avalanche.  

She talked about gifting children multimodal text sets to get children asking questions, wondering and move away from all asking for answers, because learning is so much more than that. 

A Question can take you anywhere:

All she has said links back to what we have been talking about for sometime in Maniakalani the idea of multimodal learning and getting kids thinking about content.

Often our kids ask closed questions where the answers don't build new knowledge, so it was important to get kids asking open questions that will get kids learning new things. We want learning to be dynamic and to empower children be learners and be excited. She explained the hyperdocs are live documents that are always changing.

We want children to have option when they create. I liked the way she had videos of how to use the different creative tools that encourage children to make choices and try knew things. She encouraged us to share all we create.

Let's get learners being, creative, excited, engaged, curious, passionate people!

Pekky The Pukeko

There are many sources of spoken language, song, stories, videos, face-face communication, poems and so much more. 

The uptake potential is different for our children, digital interaction with has less uptake than the face to face interactions that have a social context.

We then discussed this text and the key ideas breaking it down and identify the vocabulary groups we we would discuss with the children. We talked about the ways this could become a much larger piece of learning. 

Some of the vocabulary we discussed, boisterous, engaged in play, favourite place to play, tugged on the laces, powerful red beak. 

We want children to understand that words keep company with each other because words have power and if we gift words in group children will know to use them in groups in way that make meaning. 

Words have Power Part 2

Today we had Dr Jannie van Hees visiting us again today. 

The number of text the are in children lives is a huge factor is achievement, we know this from a number of resources. These texts however are best when they are accompanied by talk. We also need to be aware of the language we use with kids, if we keep puddling around it simple texts spoken, written and visual then all kids will know is simple texts. No matter the age or stage children need to be exposed to lots of texts that are too hard for them. 

What does this mean for our PM text that are simple in their nature that we use to teach students to read. Is there a different way of looking at this but not throwing out what we know. We can't just have kids repeating what they know we must move them beyond what they already know. 

Children have an outstanding capacity to learn, we must never be afraid to push children to work at a level they can't do it on their own. 

A question we must ask ourselves: How much time are we spending pulling from the kids and how much time are we spending gifting. 

Jannie then reminded us of the conditions we want for learning. She suggest that an encourager should happen 3-6 times with the teacher has a higher likelihood of up take. Jannie talked about putting the effort back on the kids and using specific feedback. 

We need to deep dive into the text, it is not to say we need lots of activities but that we need time and quality conversation to really truely build understanding. 

Talking with detail is a major change maker for our kids. Learners need to know they have to dig deep and that the expectation in the classroom is that we share in detail. We want the children in our class to talk to us the whole class not just the teacher. We need to work on how our children talk to everyone. We are sharing our thinking is because we learn together. 

No matter what we value each others contribution!

The teacher is a major scaffolder, however children can be great scaffolders if we scaffold their scaffolding and families can be scaffolder also. 

We want kids to talk the detail and expand our ideas. 

We want to stop saying it is more interesting, We want to say because you used more detail that your audience know what you mean. 

We must have a mantra as a teacher: I will alway offer vocabulary that talks the detail and say thing they would not normally utter. 

We need to get children to unlazy their brain, don't use the easy word because you have another word. 

We must keep thinking gifting, gifting, gifting.