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. 

Over Languaging Learning - How much gifting is too much gifting

I was so excited after our last CoL PLG that I jumped straight into languaging learning. My co-teacher and I had decided we were going to do narratives about owls with our class as this integrated nicely with what we had been doing in art and the stories we had been reading in class.

I was working with the 1B writers which are my target group for my inquiry. I had had them for a few weeks and they seemed to be doing well with the gifted language and creating sentences with support.

I decided that I would Language learning and that I wanted to give them choice as these were two big things we had talked about in our PLG. I created an explain everything with lots of gifted words and sound bites for each gifted word or phrase. The first lesson went really well but what I found was that there was so much choice and so many new words that the children felt overwhelmed and only those with the ability to face challenges head on kept going and the rest became highly dependant on me.

So with the help of the colleagues I started to ask, How much is too much? Is simple better? When are high expectation too high? How can I come at this group from a place they know and build in an exciting and fun way? How does choice feature for these learner or does it?

This writing task really made me question myself. One thing I did find work was students recording their sentences and using this to help them write, almost like a self created dictation. It allowed for a clear connection between speech. I also found when gifted words were connected with a meaningful picture they were more likely to be remembered.

I still have a lot to learn in terms of languaging learning, especially in writing. I would love to hear what others are doing so please leave me a comment.

Words Have Power

Dr Jannie van Hees reminded us of the need of all our learners in terms of vocabulary acquisition.

What are some of the things we are noticing:
-Fluency-Concertation
-Knowledge gap
-Writing like talk not crafted
-High demands texts.

We must remember that language is oral and print and within that sit the vocabulary. Just because students are exposed to language does not mean they will up take that language.

They need:

FOCUS and NOTICE

Put in the effort

Take part (participate) fully

Push myself to the edge 

Dig deep for what I already know

Learn from others – notice and focus

I share – others gain from me

Think and talk; think and read

WONDERING and ASKING opens up possibilities to know

These conditions need to be normalised in the classroom and be part of everyday. 

We must think, Where is the languaging of the learning in my inquiry?

We want students to extend their ideas beyond just one simple idea. We want them to add detail and this is only done through practice. When students have more pair talk and shared talk, challenges and models of how to offer more language. 

How can we make the environment more dialogic? How much sharing can I make happen in a day?

Jan suggested we need quantity of quality.

We should be thinking about the texts about the world that are current and interesting for the learners and how we can build language in a meaningful way. 

One way Jan did was by using fluency to help build understanding. She did this by chucking the text by putting breaks between ideas. 

There are so many quality texts out there the challenge is to do quality and quantity. 

CoL Meeting

It was interesting to think today about the data more and identify patterns in one schools data and wonder if this is a pattern across the CoL. 

We talked about how collaboration is such an important part of inquiry and when we talk and discuss together and found that while our inquiries had very different foci we all have similar themes that emerged from our problems.

 

We as teacher need to think systematically about the data and get distance from the data, zoom out. This is why we need partners in our inquiries. People who can stand alongside us and help us to zoom out. 

We must consider what we value:

-Achievement

-Progress
-Māori learning as Māori
-Key competencies
-Participation
-Affective outcomes

What do we need to know about? 

There is so much to unpack in terms of the issue. If we are look at achievement in writing. We need an overview of where they are at in writing, their attitudes towards writing, their spelling ability, their current vocabulary, their oral language ability, what they like to write about, what children can do and how they do it, reading ability and known words. 

The measures we might use include:

-Looking closely at writing samples. 

-Spelling test. 

-Survey of children's interests. 

-Videoing student writing (how do they write). 

Next steps: 

• Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.
• Begin to collect evidence and data  and come to the next session ready to share your preliminary findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge i.e. using your baseline student data and evidence

After Our Meeting I sat down with Rebecca Jesson and discussed my inquiry and this is where I am going to start with writing: 

Before writing, how do they get ideas and what do they do with those ideas, having got their ideas What do they with them?
What do they do when they get to a word they don't?
How do you know if you are right?

Why is it Catalytic?

3. Explain why you judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year (In chemistry, a catalyst increases the rate of reaction, but it also offers an alternate path for the reaction to follow).

This group of learners have been stuck in the 1B writing bracket for a long time. They write very short stories and lacks specific vocabulary. I believe this is a catalytic because it is holding them back not only in writing but across the curriculum as they try to respond in a write form in reading and inquiry.

I read a quote that said

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

— Louis L’Amour

I think for my learners at this point in time the catalyst is giving them the tool to start and to get to a place of flow. I think the best tool is vocabulary that is the water that I need to support the to full the faucet with so that when they start writing they have lots to flow. I also think that vocabulary being increase orally and capturing this to make it rewindable will help to increase recycling of that vocabulary increasing students ability to use it. These ideas come from the professional learning we have been doing with Dr Jannie van Hees. 

I know I still have a lot of learning to do around this problem but I believe increasing writing amount and vocabulary for these learner in a way that is recycling language is a key that may help them across the curriculum. 

While I have tried a number of things this far I feel I still have a long way to go in finding the big ticket approach/approaches to address this issue.