History in the Making

Do you feel like history is being written right before our eyes? I do. Everyday there is a significant development in every way. And while I am deeply ensconced in isolation and working at supporting teachers to deliver online learning, I am staying in touch with (official) sources of information.
My 3 go to's are...

• COVID-19 NZ Government site
• The Prime Minister's daily press conference 
• The Spinoff's COVID-19 page

So how is history written? I think we can write history. We don't need historians or academics to do it for us. And yes, I think they will publish books on this pandemic and the responses will be analysed ad infinitum, but I reckon we can write history just as well as them.

How? By documenting and curating our experiences and understandings we can write history.

Teachers are in a position that we have never been in before. We are having to deliver learning online - uncharted waters for everyone.

We need to write and write and write as this new reality unfolds. I entreated a group of teachers at a staff meeting last week to document what happens over the next 4 or more weeks. The group I was with all have professional learning blogs and this is the ideal platform for them to write, reflect and amplify their experience.

I have been motivated to write this blog post by another blogger - Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano aka:  Langwitches. Her blog post We are in the Midst of Making History really got me thinking about history and not leaving it to the academics to write. Her blog post has many questions that will prompt thinking. Let's get this down for posterity and chronicle our growth as educators, because I predict that out of this disruption will come change. 

So get writing...and be kind.

Blogging Tips: Labels

Labels for blogs are a must. They are effectively the index to your blog just as the blog archive is the table of contents.
Labels for student blogs should be curriculum areas such as reading, writing, maths, art, inquiry, technology, computational thinking etc. These labels should be added to the first blog post by the Blog Admin so that they are already listed for students to choose form. 
Students tend to put in all the main ideas in their labels and this defeats the purpose of labels which is to group blogs and make the posts searchable. 
At this week's DFI Kerry shared with us Blogging Tips: Labels and the gem in this was the table for labels for professional blogs.

STP1	Te Tiriti o Waitangi Partnership
STP2	Professional Learning
STP3	Professional Relationships
STP4	Learning-focused Culture
STP5	Design for Learning
STP6	Teaching

These are from the Standards for the Teaching Profession

Remote Learning is here

What a week this has been!
The announcement on Monday that we were going into a nation-wide lock down at midnight on Wednesday sent many into a spin.

There was panic buying nation-wide and widespread anxiety from parents about their children's educational future if they miss 4 weeks of school - which is actually 2 weeks because there are 2 weeks of holidays in the 4 week. But who knows if it will only be 4 weeks. It could be longer and we need to prepare for it to be longer.

Our Manaiakalani team were onto it a week before this announcement and delivered a doc title "Limit the Links" to all our schools.

We were preparing all that week before the Level 4 announcement was made. We connected with Principals to ensure they had read the "Limit the Links" doc and shared it to staff and that they realised what a lockdown could mean for their school.

Schools were closed effectively on Monday and teachers were to be at school preparing and teaching remotely. We supported schools on Tuesday and Wednesday face to face as much as we could. Most of the support I provided was about using Google Hangout Meet with learners. Lots of the sites just  needed a bit of tweaking in the schools I supported.

Our Manaiakalani Schools are well poised to deliver #remotelearning. Some schools could tick most items off the list immediately and in particular having a school site with links to class sites and blogs.
Take a look at some of the local schools and their set up for this...

• St Mary's Catholic Primary School - Gisborne
• Ormond School
• Campion College - Courses page

This means there is one portal to all sites and blogs in the school. Whānau only need to Google their child's school and can get to the leanring that their child can do remotely easily.

Click here to view all the schools in our local cluster.

DFI Day #2 Tairāwhiti Cohort

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Lenva presented the "Connecting with Manaiakalani" section today. I was riveted to her presentation. Even though we are immersed in the kaupapa of the Manaiakalani Programme, whenever I listen to one of the team talk about Learn Create Share I alway deepen my understanding of another facet/portion of our mahi.
The part that got me thinking more deeply was about amplifying teaching practice as giving and getting. I have just written 2 blog posts about this part of our term 1 staff meeting. I will go back to these posts and make sure that I have expressed with clarity amplification of effective practice.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Workflow and being efficient is hard to nail. Just when you think you have it sussed up pops another challenge - like screen recording in Quicktime. Today's Share | Tohatoha section was to be in a Hangout and record the conversation in 3's. One team recorded theirs but there was no sound. I had helped set up Quicktime for this group but forgot to check that the microphone was set to the internal mic before they started. Grrr!!! Sorry about that team!  It goes to show that practising with the tools and testing is necessary prior to any event.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Being able to record your screen is a critical skill to nail to make rewindable material for our learners.
Quicktime is something that I don't use frequently. I use Screencastify with learners in the classroom on Chromebooks and to make tutorials for teachers as the mp4 is automatically saved to Drive and can be shared from there.

Google Keep voice recording on a mobile phone is a fabulous addition to my toolkit.
For today's session I focused on voice recording in my phone app and was pleased that I had done so as there was a question from one of the participants today about using it for Te Reo Māori. This is a great way to record voice, download the mp3 from Keep on a laptop, save in Drive so it can then be inserted as audio into Google Slides. This feature would be so handy for inserting instructions into slides in my Cybersmart lessons. It would function like audio clips in Explain Everything where each slide can now have an instruction inserted for learners to rewind if they forget what to do. I need ot create a workflow diagram for this and share to the group.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Keep is such a great tool to have. It integrates with Google Apps so well. I use it lots on my phone. In my personal life I use Keep to save recipes! If I am disciplined as I use it and apply labels it is an efficient file of stuff that I like but don't get around to cooking. I really need to teach my retired husband how to use it. Now there's a challenge!

Why Blogs?

This question comes up all the time in our work as facilitators with The Manaiakalani Programme.

So why do we choose Blogger as the platform for Share | Tohatoha? 

Many years ago I visited Pt England School and saw the way blogging was used with learners. On return to my school I got stuck in and get students blogging. We followed a lot of the guidelines on Edublogs and joined in with their challenges. We also joined Quad Blogging and interacted with schools in USA and UK. It was fun especially when we had a competition to see who could get visitors to their blog form different countries and who could get the most visitors.

I read the Langwitches blog by Silvia Tolisano and she is a strong advocate of blogging. Not just blogging by learners but she advocates for teachers to blog FOR their students.

My main reason for learners to blog is the way a whole bunch of skills come together such as writing skills, reading skills, metacognition skills and reflection skills to name a few.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PCpNZhaoK8tUZDcoDByLkW-650-80.jpeg

Sharing by blogging is core to what we do in The Manaiakalani Programme. We have systems and processes to develop blogging with teachers and students and are able to provision this legally, systematically, and securely under the GSuite owned by each school's BoT so they can share with purpose.

So why should we blog?  I firmly believe that blogging gives the quietest learners a voice, a place to document their learning and to connect with others.

Amplifying our Practise - Giving to others

Continuing on from my previous post about getting from others - here is the second part about giving to others.

When you learn, teach. When you get, give - Maya Angelou

So my question is - how do you give to others? And for that matter - how do I give to others?

Lots of share in our own settings with colleagues. I know that once we became a Google Domain at my previous job that we were able to create and file and share easily. We did not have to re-invent the wheel and that made us really efficient in the admin side of our job which hopefully, left us time and energy for the real part of the job - teaching! Because we all understood each other and knew the context of your teaching we also had the confidence to share with each other. So sharing is easy in our own settings.

Sharing outside our own settings is enabled by the ubiquitousness of digital technologies. We have platforms that we can share and once we are active on these platforms we can get from others. 

Locally we have a Facebook group to share stuff that we find useful. Join us and share the good stuff you have. We also have a Google + community for out Tairāwhiti cluster to share good stuff.

Are you on Twitter? If you are pop your Twitter handle in the comments so I can follow you. You can find me on Twitter @GigagalGizzy.

Is there anything holding you back from sharing which could include documenting your learning? I sense a real lack of confidence and purpose in teachers when talking to them about sharing on a professional learning blog. This could be for many reasons including  a lack of time or technology. Self-confidence can also be a limiting factor and/or worrying about bragging, judgement, or not feeling worthy enough etc. If we lived in USA we would probably be shouting it from the rooftops - or form the laptop screen. IS this a cultural thing? Or is it something else? I need to ask teachers directly instead of making assumptions.   

My job as a facilitator is about giving to others. And yes - I get paid for it, but I believe the work of The Manaiakalani Programme Outreach has meant that more teachers have access to quality PLD in digital fluency that will mean better outcomes for the learners in our local schools. Apart for that I am able to immerse myself in my technology and use Chromebooks and iPads with learners all day, every day. 

Amplifying our Practice - Getting from others

As we plan for our term 1 staff meetings with a Learn | Ako focus, I am reflecting on offerings from  other educators on the WWW as they amplify their practice.

We live in a digital landscape which makes sharing and requesting very easy. With digital resources we can share and help each other.

When you learn, teach. When you get, give - Maya Angelou

There is a plethora of sites with digital offerings right across the curriculum spectrum. Buy oh! how do you sift through offerings such as "50 of the Best Chrome Extensions for Teachers". I really don't have time to sift through these.

I do like lists like this on in a Sheet from Eric Curts where you can use the control + F  function to search the Sheet and get to what you want.

Locally we have a Facebook group to share stuff that we find useful. Join us and share the good stuff you have. We also have a Google + community for out Tairāwhiti cluster to share good stuff.

I have a long list of educators around the world that I glean all kinds of information from. This ranges from global education issues to specific Google sites that provide information about Google Apps. I subscribe to their blogs, follow them on Twitter and listen to podcasts and ma thankful for the material they provide for us all to use. Who do you follow or subscribe to?

Once you tame your twitter feed this is a a place to go to. Hashtags help sort the material. List of edu #hashtags are available as a place to start. I use TweetDeck to help organise Twitter Feeds. I would be lost with out this.

Once we discover a source of material we then need to Cybersmart and use our critical thinking and literacies to determine whether the material is useful, reliable and/or applicable to our context.

One found you will then need a curation tool so you can find it when you need it. I use Google Keep, OneTab Chrome extension, Toby Mini Chrome extension and Bookmarks in Chrome mainly.

In our term 1 staff meetings we have been exploring Manaiakalani Class on Air episodes. If you want to see real teachers in action in real classrooms then this is the pace for you to go. The teachers document an extended plan which allows you to get inside their head and see how they have planned and reflected on lessons they teach and video for us to watch and learn from. This Sheet lists all episodes. Hint: use the tabs at the bottom to explore categories and cntrl+F to find specific search terms. This shared resource really does amplify teaching practice.