QLC: Death by Digital Documents

Something I am grappling with at the moment is how to balance the use of technology in my classroom. I have come from a 1:5 ipad environment to a 1:1 chromebook environment. The students are comfortable using the tool but I haven't quite found those systems that fit my teaching and my routines. For example, giving feedback on writing in books that get handed in... something I thought I wouldn't miss, well it is much easier to read and comment and be organic with writing in the paper form.

So discussing this issue with my colleagues allowed me to see some possible next steps and to give myself permission to provide that balance that will meet the needs of both myself and my students.

• Not all work needs to be done digitally (permission granted!)
• Get them to print stuff out - blend digital with pen
• Have a look at what other teachers are using to manage so many online documents
• Use the Hapara workspace 
• Try out some tools like kaizena for voice notes.

There is no quick fix or perfect solution but I am interested in how other teachers manage the constant online viewing and storing of google docs?

NB: this is part of my ICT goal for this year around "What exactly does blended e-learning look like in my classroom?"

Play - Word for the Year

Source: Flickr

Play.

Play is my word for this year.

You can:

Play with words
Play with ideas
Play with numbers
Play with friends
Play with science
Play with music
Play with drama
Play with colour...

The list goes on.


I chose the word play because it was a word I could also share with my students.  I wanted it to become their word too.

The word play has injected life into ideas. It has created a classroom culture where through the idea of play, children can become the experts. An environment that values play also values risk taking, challenges, creativity, fun and laughter.

We all know how to play right?

And for me as an educator it allows me to play with my students. To see learning through their eyes. To have fun and encourage creativity.

Tests have become Spongebobs and P.A.T's have become Patricks. It's okay to fail! Actually it's awesome if you you #failfaster (a key element of successful game design and one that promotes risk taking). You can learn through playing games, you can even learn from designing games to play. Take peoples offers and add to them. Take part in drama games and release your inhibitions.

Play in our Year 6 classroom is compulsory. Is it in yours?

QLC: Managing Learning Assistants

Source: Pargon

My reflective question for today's Quality Learning Circle (QLC) was around managing learning assistants in the classroom. The purpose of the QLC group is to be asked questions to further reflection and perhaps solve the problem or come up with possible solutions/outcomes.

My current class has one ORS student and 2 students with identified learning needs. I currently have 2 different learning assistants 3 times a day.  I have found the last two weeks rather awkward having to juggle getting to know my class with planning for the LA.

My overall goal is to create an inclusive classroom that meets the needs of ALL the students, not just those with identified learning needs. I hope to use principles from Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to help me accomplish this.


Reflective actions:

• That I need to meet with my LA's to give them information about what underpins the culture and learning in my classroom. I hope that by doing so they will realise that my decisions and actions are not arbitrary. I need them to understand that I am constantly observing and collecting information on those students that helps determine their goals for learning. I do not rely on previous documentation to inform my actions and that my focus right now is building relationships with my students. 

• One of the particular ideas that I want to communicate is that student voice is very important and that I put a lot of thought into how to balance the power dynamic between myself and my students.

• To be effective, long term, my LA's would know what there role was and would come in a get on with the job.

• That a particular goal would be to decrease the amount of support the specified students received therefore adopting a model in which the LA's time was used to assist all students.

• I may ask all of my students to reflect on what they think the LA's role should be in the classroom therefore identifying what the students see as being useful.

• As we move towards more collaborative teaching, the LA's are going to need more specific training about how to work in that environment and understand the thinking that underpins the teaching and learning.

Starting over

I feel like I am back at the start again...

That's right. 2016 means a new school, a new year level and new opportunities for me. It also means feeling completely discombobulated in the weeks leading up to commencement.  Funnily enough I read Philippa's blog post with advice for beginning teachers last week thinking "man I'm glad I'm not a beginning teacher" and then today it hit me. I am a beginning teacher.  I am starting out again.

So I am going to write some advice to myself.

• It is okay to not know everything yet. 

And that may be the only advice I need to give myself. I am going to take Phillipa's advice and write my questions down in a notebook and then ask them.  I will suss everything out before bowling on in. I will be warm and amicable and listen with intent.

I realise I am not the only person in this position this year. There are actually quite a high number of us that have left the comfort (discomfort?) of our familiar schools to launch ourselves at new opportunities.  

If you are reading this and you are not one of those people but know someone else that is "starting afresh" give them some support in the next few weeks. We can talk curriculum and students but we don't know where to get the laminator sheets yet. We won't know whose cup is whose in the staffroom and we may not know everyone's name. Be kind.

To my fellow newbies, all the best with starting over. You are still the incredible teacher I knew last year. You will find your focus soon. Kia kaha! 

Press Play: Lets play games!

Photo Credit: derekdavalos

This post is a collaboration between Diana-Grace Morris and Leanne Stubbing from #WellyEd as they explore further the place of  games in education.
Why Game Based Learning?

I think Games Based Learning is Future Focused.

When I use the words like future focussed learning, I am referring to the process of doing, acting and thinking differently in such a way where it is not just what a student knows but what they can do with what they know. Critical to this is the doing, acting, thinking different -  with others.

Based on playing Never Alone  and seeing the games my students are creating, I think it is possible for Game Based learning to be a vehicle for thinking about the present and future differently.

For myself, to teach, act, think differently requires the classroom teaching/learning space to oscillate between certainty and uncertainty. The certainty of curriculum knowledges applied into a variety of certain and  uncertain spaces. An uncertain space is one not previously understood, where we are unsure what to do.

I create spaces for my students to design games in class because I observe the students relating to each other in ways I haven't seen or heard in other curriculum areas.  When students are creating games the classroom soundscape literally activates the room. The room moves quickly from silent, to slow talking, to loud fast talking, then drops down to silent and re loops. I refer to this soundscape as the “hum” There is a learning hum going on and it is not the same learning that’s happening in my numeracy and literacy lessons.

Game Based Learning can nudge ‘strong collaboration’ amongst students. Not only are students creating something that they could not create on their own there is tension - a lot of it. We need our students to experience these tensions and move from social collaboration to team collaboration. To move towards Strong collaboration I think the  Key Competencies  need to be firmly anchored into the teaching / learning process.

Diana-Grace

Thinking that inspires me...

Cognitive Edge

Facer, K.  (2011) Learning Futures Education, Technology and social change

Gee, J.P (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Gilbert J. (2005) Catching the Knowledge Wave

Wagner, T. (2011) Creating Innovators

Game based learning links so well with play based learning.

“Play should be our greatest work, as it is the biggest driver of innovation”

Laura Seargeant Richardson from Play Power: How to turn around our creativity crisis

The type of energies that we use when we play allow us to think more creatively.  We use multiple intelligences. During play we demonstrate an ability to think beyond the unimaginable, change and manipulate ideas and collaborate with others.

In the 1980’s a father invented a game of make-believe for his 12 children to keep them occupied over the summer.  The children were  sailors on a ship. Their father, formally in the navy himself, was able to help recreate his place of work.  The children took on all the duties required to man the ship.  It was as realistic as one could imagine and the rocked back between work and play.  Actually the lines between work and play were somewhat blurred. The game lasted for years and in recent reflection those children (now adults) were able to make direct connections with the skills they learnt during their make believe play and what they now do in their jobs as adults.  .

So if we take this example of play as work and apply it to our classrooms one could argue that the more realistic the experience the more authentic the learning that occurs. Role play is a highly engaging way to interest students in the potential problem solving of wicked problems. Teacher in role is one of my favourite ways to introduce new learning experiences. What if we took that one step further and blurred the lines of work and play so that our experiences in the classroom had a direct effect on our community outside the classroom?  What if the games we designed had purposes beyond our own enjoyment? Or is the process more important than the product?

Then there is play for the purpose of play alone.  The “suspension from reality” where we can take risks that do not have a direct effect on our lives (Gee as cited in Wheeler, 2015). I can fall off the ledge in Temple run and get another life!! I can feed a monster the wrong colour condo and risk him getting angry and then change my strategy to get more points.  I can persist at finding the right path to the next level. I can work out new ways to do things. The world will still turn, the sun will still rise and I will still have reports to write! Haha.

Unless we are playing alone, play involves complex negotiations of turn taking and rule following.  The neurons are firing! The social skills we develop during play have direct influence on our brain development (Hamilton, 2014) therefore playing is good for you! Bonobo monkeys have been observed to use play to connect with each other, to cooperate and create together. From an evolutionary perspective, play is embedded in everything we do (Behncke, 2015).

The more I look at play the more I see potential for it as a vehicle for learning. Games are a form of play, one that our students are already engaged with. Let’s build on this!

Leanne Stubbing

References:

Wheeler (2015) Game based learning: suspension of reality

Hamilton (2014).Scientists say child's play help build a better brain.

Richardson (2011) Play Power: How to turn around our creativity crisis

Meek (Sept 2011). Overboard [audio]

Behneke (Mar 2015). TED Talk: Evolutions gift of play - from bonobo apes to humans  [audio]

Game Design with Year 3/4

I don't think I had ever thought I would spend a Friday morning designing a digital game for a 66 year old Grandmother to play. But I guess that is what you end up doing when you sign up for a workshop called "Gamestorming" - A way to generate transformative educational thinking!

Game based learning is an area that researchers are looking at more carefully because of the way that the process of learning occurs and also how it engages students (KQED, 2013).  Game design fits well with Design Thinking, the process or mindset of generating ideas to help create solutions to real life problems. Gamestorming is a creative way to generate and explore ideas and innovate with others.  Rachel Bolstad and Dan Milward used a combination of design thinking and gamestorming to get us designing our own games that Friday morning.

My reflection on the process of designing a game is that it was incredibly fun. I was fortunate to have a wonderful team to work with and we spent quite some time creating our play profile. "Raewyn" became a real person, she was someone we wanted to hang out with, and we wanted to make her the best game we could.  Using the process that Rachel guided us through we unpacked games, looked at elements of games we knew Raewyn would enjoy and looked for what she still might be missing... in the end we came up with a community based social action type game utilising Raewyn's guerrilla knitting background and love of pictionary and bananagrams to help shape our thinking.

So... as all excited educators do... I got my class to do some gamestorming of their own.  The task being to design a new fitness game.  This was actually an idea I had suggested last term as we were exhausting our repertoire. So in random groups of 5 they got ready for their challenge!

The Plan

They started by using 3 different post-its to write down a digital game, a non digital game and a fitness game that they enjoyed. These got stuck round the room under those headings. So instantly that is 75 ideas to work with...

Then they needed to in their groups choose 2 of those post its from each category and unpack what you actually do in those games which makes them fun and challenging.  They found this bit quite hard and I had to ask lots of questions to help them get thinking.

The next step was to combine some of those elements to come up with their own game.  One team got their idea right away while others carefully thought about their game and took a bit longer.

The 5 games that were then pitched to the audience were as follows:

• Plants vs Maths
• Crossy Surprise
• Hunt and Kill
• Octocraft
• Clash of Uno

The audience then gave feedback on post its using "I wonder..." and "I like..."

The students then spent time sorting out the data - which I quickly linked to our statistical inquiry from last term.  They needed to use the feedback to make any modifications to their game.  Again this was challenging and needed much discussion and filtering and negotiation.

So then it came to actually playing the games...Before we started I mentioned the idea of "fail faster" which I had watched in this YouTube clip that Rachel had shared with me.  It fits well with growth mindset, which the students are all well aware of.  Basically I told them that there was a high chance of the game failing on first play but that was ok, we almost needed it to fail in order to improve it.  An interesting concept in itself that I would like to explore more.

So with the only requirement for this game being that it was for fitness, 3 of the games were maths based and 2 were actual fitness games.  This was an interesting surprise.  I think that they were using a game that we play outside called maths chess and interpreting it as a fitness game because it is played outside (concept #2 to explore further).

The teams trialled their games on half the class to begin with and modified as they went.  I was luckily enough to have Marianne Malmstrom (Knowclue) visiting me that day and it was a great chance for me to reflect with her on our observations of the process the students were going through.  She noted that all of the students used positive feedback to help the team improve their game as well as noting the level of negotiation that occurred within each team but also with their players. Student leadership was also noted.

The two fitness games proved to be the most successful in their trial runs with students asking to play them again and students who weren't playing them asking if they could play them too (they looked fun!). So after a democratic vote the students decided to play "Hunt and Kill" as a whole class.

This game according to the students has elements of Monopoly, Black Ops, Minecraft and Hide and Seek in it.  It is played in our school gully playground which is multi-levelled.

From what I understand of the game, the taggers find people who are hiding, there is something about a destination question asked (need to find out more about this part before I play) and if you get tagged you lose a limb.  When 3 limbs are lost, you become a zombie.  The role of the zombies is to push people out of their hiding spots.

The students played this game for 15 minutes before only 1 remaining "person" was left.  It was fascinating to watch. It had a level of complexity that I couldn't quite understand because I wasn't play it and everybody was engaged.  There were 24 quite sweaty children afterwards so it definitely constituted a fitness game! After the game the students reflected on the name of the game saying it didn't really suit it because nobody actually gets killed.  Hugo, one of the masterminds behind the game told us that the original name for the game had been E-Limb-ination.  And because our class enjoys a good pun it was a unanimous vote that it should be ever known as that. 

The students told me that they would like to go through the process of ideation and feedback again and that they enjoyed working in groups. Last term their feedback was that they wanted more opportunities to create and have hands on learning experiences so I hope that the process of making a game allowed for that.

For me the process lent itself to a powerful learning experience. They had to be creative thinkers, solve problems, negotiate, work as a team, communicate, accept feedback, adapt, be flexible and be resilient to failure.  I am reluctant to link it with any particular curriculum areas because I am trying to break down the subject silos.  I do wonder how this experience will shape our future learning experiences and where we might end up next. Oh - I also better remember to get some more post-it notes!

Shouldn't we be doing it too?

Source: Flickr

In February this year I wrote a blog post about The Key Competencies of Team Work.

As part of the #edblognz Connected Educators Month blogging challenge I have been asked to reflect on a previous blog post.  I have chosen this one because this year I have been continuously reflecting on the theme:

If we think it is good for our students then shouldn't we be doing it to??

In my original blogpost I unpacked what the key competencies would look like if we applied them to how we work in teams within schools.  I want to go further now to address some of the other areas that I have been thinking about that require us to "practice what we preach".

1.      Staff Meetings

In our classes we try and break down power dynamics and are moving away from the notion of "teacher as expert". In staff meetings one person presents information for others to follow/engage with. 

In our classes we try different strategies to engage our students. We don't just use the same one. In staff meetings, we tend to be given information transmission style and then talk in small groups.

2.      Professional Development

In our classes we differentiate our learning to meet the needs of our students. We use personalised learning or use UDL to help us design this.  We encourage student choice and interest. As teachers we get given "one size fits all" PD. We are told to prescribe to what our school prescribes to.

(Thanks for your thoughts about this Bede!)

3.     Leadership

In our classes we give our students opportunities to take on leadership opportunities however big or small. Everybody gets the opportunity to be a class monitor or to put their hand up for duties around the school.  In our schools we define leadership around management units and hierarchal models. 

(Some thinking about this comes from Ann Lieberman's keynote at ULearn15 around everyone can be a leader!)

So why are we not translating what we do with students into our practices as professionals?  When we unpack our curriculum and our school values and beliefs are we neglecting to include ourselves in the equation?

Some food for thought... (also flick me any readings that relate to this please!!)