Week 25 - Act on your plan (Taking Action)

The action plan - Week 1 

How can the use of robotics and learning with collaborative groups, be used to promote student engagement and have a positive impact on mathematical outcomes?

• Inform senior management during a team meeting before school starts back
• We will inform students 
• Parents - newsletters 1:1 
• Student baseline data - number knowledge test

So far I have informed the senior management team during our team planning meeting prior to school starting. I have explained to the students that I am doing some research and I have collected baseline data through a number knowledge test which has been marked and shared with the students so they know what their starting point is, which relates to Tino Rangatiratanga - which enables students to know what their starting point is and what their next steps are. 
I have highlighted in green the questions they got incorrect and pink the questions they got correct to reinforce this concept.

What I have not done is inform the parents. I will endeavour to do this by the end of this week through the weekly newsletter as well as an individualised letter to the parents of the specific children I am targeting. 
I am also meeting with parents next Wednesday at Meet the Teacher evening. I will target specific parents to talk to about my research project. 

Step 2: Reflect on the actions

• How do you feel about the actions you have taken? 
• I feel that the management team is excited about the area that I have chosen - robotics and maths and improving student outcomes as it is a school wide goal. The students seemed indifferent about the idea of the research. I think this is because I haven't built a relationship with them. I also feel disappointed that I have overlooked informing the parents as whanau is such an important aspect. Katoa website

• What works as expectation and what doesn’t? And why? Building student/teacher relationships should be my first priority. (Ministry of Education, 2014)  I would normally never give students a math test in the first week of school. I would wait until I have built a relationship with the students and I know the students feel comfortable and safe in their environment. As a result collecting marking and analysing the baseline data has taken a lot longer to do than first thought. 
• I started with the first lesson using Beebots and discovered that 4 of them don't work and some of the batteries are flat and need replacing. Out of the 10 Beebots only half of them worked. So I had to rotate the groups which gave each group less play time to learn how to use the robot. 
• What should be done differently? How would you justify this? In the action plan when informing the parents I discussed using meet the teacher evening, newsletters and parent interviews as a way to communicate with parents, however on reflection I feel it would be more personal and build better relationships if I was to write a letter to each parent and discuss their child as an individual rather than as a member of a group. It is also a good way of getting to know the parents on a more personal level. I will also invite the parents in to have an informal chat regarding their child's progress and the process they are going through. Katoa website

Step 3: 
Looking at the Spiral of Inquiry and my original 'Hunch' I still believe that I can improve student outcomes in maths using robotics, however I feel it will take longer than the course dates to achieve and I will need to continue long after MindLab has finished to see real improvement. I also need to build relationships with my students as well as parent/whanau throughout each phase of the spiral of inquiry.

Ministry of Education. (2014, April 18). Setting the direction. Retrieved February 10, 2019, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Reviewing-your-curriculum/Setting-the-direction/Know-your-learners

Kaupapa Māori Research [Web log post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.katoa.net.nz/kaupapa-maori 

Week 26 - Reflect on Your Inquiry (Taking Action)

What?

It's week 2 and I am seriously behind where I should be on the Taking Action part of the Spiral of Inquiry. I have completed all the assessment tasks and put the children into heterogeneous collaborative groups based on the information I currently know about them. I have started taking 2 maths groups each day for 20 minutes to do explicit teaching of multiplication facts (as this was highlighted as a need from the assessment data collected last week) I have ensured that there is a target child in each group. Each group has 6-7 students at varying maths number knowledge stages.  The students who are not with me are expected to complete multiplication fact tasks that I have organised. Some are computer based, pen and paper and some involve practising what I have just shown them independently. 

Initially finding tasks that involve multiplication and robots was extremely difficult. I asked for help from a member of the Digital Circus. Although after looking through the resources if I was to use them it would start to encroach on other areas of learning and they were not multiplication based which is the area of need.  Therefore after discussions with my collaborative teaching partner were she discussed what she was teaching her children my question to her was " where is the multiplication learning in the task" Her reply was that "there actually wasn't any, however the followup or independent tasks were very multiplication based". I felt a little frustrated that although we had set our inquiry question to use robotics to improve mathematical outcomes there were no available resources. I even posted on the teacher facebook page asking if anyone had any ideas I could use to no avail. 

So What?

After further discussions with my colleagues and observing what the students could do without robots I modified some of the activities I was given and came up with my own ideas. Interestingly the activities that I created meant that the students could use either the Beebot or the Probots that the students actually seemed more interested in using.

Attard (2012) warned that the use of robotics can in fact cause more of a disturbance and a hindrance which is exactly what I am experiencing because of the lack of resources. A lot of activities showing how to use robotics and  It's no wonder teachers don't use robotics when you have to create all learning tasks yourself! It becomes very time consuming.

Now What?

As a result of having to create my own learning tasks I really need to talk to the maths leaders in the school and see if they have any tasks that I can modify to meet the needs of my students. This will impact on my action plan because if I don't find more robotics resources I will be forced to use resources that don't include robots. 

Resources

Attard, C (2012) Teaching with Technology. Exploring the use of robotics to teach mathematics. APMC 12 (2)

Cluster Meeting

Milestone
Need to report this time on Goals 2 and 4. Will probably need to upload two stories to the VLN one is on Pauls stuff and the other on the parents and Whanau involvement.

Need to:
Look at what the goals are and what we have done.
Look at some of last years stories and what they look like.

Principals going to the Interface Expo in Taupo. It will assist them on infrastructure.

Look at this to see what different teachers need to be successful learners.

http://edtalks.org/video/supporting-integration-ict

We need to look at the different ways teachers learn and cater to them. Teachers need to have a vision - they need to see what ICT looks like in the classroom. They need to get out and visit classrooms.

Set up the learning environment differently. furnature, bean bags, tables,

Cluster plan is to share what we are doing in our schools and put on the VLN.

The e-Learning Planning Framework

Teaching and Learning - can be used for data to show where they started, then where they are at the end of the year. For staff to highlight. This maybe done in a staff meeting.

Vimeo - photo sharing on the blog

Blogging Licence - when they can :Use the language of success
correct language spellin and punctuation
Decide on relevant and interesting content
Proof read work independently
save posts as a draft first
show strong multimedia skills
image sound video embedding
Link to other sites
digital citizenship
Label posts
view and comment on other blogs
pasitive, relevant, constructive feedback.
Look at Point England for an example.

Can create one in Comic Life.

Starting within the class with peers. then around the school then globally.

Quality Comments.
Create a shared Google Doc on what good comments look like.

Learning Centre is a GOOGLE SITE

Making Quality Comments http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/2011/02/22/student-blogging-activity-3-beginner-teaching-quality-commenting/

Children sharing google docs with their kids. Parkvale do not share google docs with their parents because of the negative comments written on the childrens pages.

Has your workload increased : At the beginning of the year it was now it seems to have levelled out.

Timeline - Time toast : our class login is: k4hnps   password is: k4hnps
How to use time toast
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeYmDGohxUc

Get chn to say where they get photos from.

Maybe we could do this this way on our wiki?

Simbaloo is a webpage with all your links on it. it is visual and way easier to use than dilicious.
http://www.symbaloo.com/registerUser.do username is roomk4hnps... password is roomk4hnps


DIGIKIDS
Google Presentations

Magpie Digikids Blog - create Avatars - Introduce yourselves and write about what you are good at. WEEMEE
Snipping Tools 

Change dates of next digi kids - Monday Week 10 - 3 children.

Workshops

Maths Professional Development

This week with Dinah we made letters...

Leadership Week 8

Flipped Preparation - Applying the Assignment 1 Rubric

You will find it helpful to apply the Assignment 1 rubric to the following example Leadership 1 assignment example. Using the Leadership 1 rubric, what grade would you give it? What feedback/feedforward would you give the author? Add your grades to the form at tinyurl.com/TMLULeadership1

Note that this is NOT meant to be an exemplar. It has various strengths and weaknesses. It is deliberately shorter than a real assignment so it can be easily assessed.

Define your Audience

Ideo's (n.d.) Design Kit emphasises the importance of defining your audience when planning an innovation:

“Before you dig into your in-context research, it’s critical to know who you’re designing for. You’re bound to learn more once you’re in the field, but having an idea of your target audience’s needs, contexts, and history will help ensure that you start your research by asking smart questions. And don’t limit your thinking just to the people you’re designing for. You may need to consider governments, NGOs, other businesses, or competitors.”

This week will see how we might be able to understand our audience better by seeing how they might fit the innovation adoption cycle, and communicate with them better using digital leadership.

Educational Stakeholders

Student families, community member, practitioners policy makers, society at large.

Your audience for innovations in your practice will be relevant educational stakeholder. Zion (2009) outlines the general categories within which these stakeholders may fall: “When one looks at the system of education, several levels of people served by that system emerge – students, families, community members, practitioners, policy-makers, society at large. Therefore, at varying levels, for effective change within the educational system reform efforts must incorporate or build on the beliefs, values, vision, and needs of each of these stakeholders.”

The Leadership 1 assignments asks you to "develop a plan for leading the early adopters and early majority of your main stakeholders on the innovation adoption curve". So, once you have identified your stakeholder group(s) you need to also think about which members of those groups fall into which categories of innovation adopter. Note that these groups are not the same; one stakeholder group could potentially contain people of every adopter type.

Rogers’ adoption of Innovation Adoption Lifecycle

The figure below (which is the work of Pnautilus and licensed under Creative Commons) shows the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle, which indicates the suggested percentages of adopters in each category.

Potential adopters have been determined to have traits that affect their likelihood to adopt an innovation. Many individual personality traits have been explored for their impacts on adoption, but with little agreement. Ability and motivation, which vary between situations (unlike personality traits), have a large impact on a potential adopter's likelihood to adopt an innovation. Unsurprisingly, potential adopters who are motivated to adopt an innovation are likely to make the adjustments needed to adopt it.

Rogers (1962) outlines several strategies in order to help an innovation reach this stage, including when an innovation is adopted by a highly respected individual within a social network and creating an instinctive desire for a specific innovation. Another strategy includes injecting an innovation into a group of individuals who would readily use that technology, as well as providing positive reactions and benefits for early adopters.

Innovators, Early Adopters and Early Majority

According to Rogers (2002), whereas innovators are cosmopolites, early adopters are localites. This adopter category, more than any other, has the highest degree of opinion leadership in most systems. Potential adopters look to early adopters for advice and information about an innovation.

Robinson (2009) has summarised Rogers' ideas of the Diffusion of Innovations and he suggests that when working with early adopters one should

• Offer strong face-to-face support for a limited number of early adopters to trial the new idea.
• Study the trials carefully to discover how to make the idea more convenient, low cost and marketable.
• Reward their egos e.g. with media coverage.
• Promote them as fashion leaders (beginning with the cultish end of the media market).
• Recruit and train some as peer educators.
• Maintain relationships with regular feedback.

Robinson describes the early majority as pragmatists, comfortable with moderately progressive ideas, but won’t act without solid proof of benefits. They are followers who are influenced by mainstream fashions and wary of fads. Majorities are cost sensitive and risk averse. They are looking for simple, proven, better ways of doing what they already do. They require guaranteed off-the-shelf performance, minimum disruption, minimum commitment of time, minimum learning, and either cost neutrality or rapid payback periods and they hate complexity.

Stakeholder Groups

Identify your main stakeholders. Analyse which ones are relevant for this change initiative. How do you consciously identify your early adopters? Who do you need to lead (in different stakeholder groups) so that they and others will follow? Mainly focus on profiling your early adopters and early majority within the main stakeholder groups and how you’ll lead them.

Dream big - Start small. Set yourself up for success! 

Digital Leadership

According to Scheninger (2014) establishing direction, influencing others, initiating sustainable change through the access to information, and establishing relationships in order to anticipate change is pivotal to school success in the future. He outlines 7 pillars of digital leadership, The first three of these are in the area of external links and visibility, and highly related to the use of digital tools,

1. Communication
2. Public relations
3. Branding
4. Student engagement / learning
5. Professional growth / development
6. Re-envisioning learning spaces and environments
7. Opportunity

Jelly Beans In The Jar

How many jelly beans in this jar? Do not discuss your answer with anyone else until everyone has answered. Answer by adding your guess into this form: tinyurl.com/TMLJellyBean

Next time we will reveal the results.

Modern Learning Environments 19-9-2015

Modern learning practices

What is something you love doing?

What is something you do that scare you?

What's the difference 

- attitude?

- Determination?

- Frequency?

Chance of influencing others?

Reimagine the learning experiences for your children

Giving people autonomy over what they do is more productive than rewarding for outcomes.

Learning advisor

Ask them

Managing your time design teacher workshops

Approach to a task

Brain breaks

Flipped learning

Opt In learning

Choosing own context

Home learning

What opportunities do your students have to master things that they are passionate about?

PINS 

Passon based learning

Project based learning

What can we do as teachers to make the most of these opportunities

Planning my learning

Must do

Can do

Jo boller

Planning

Vision

Stimulating inclusive learning environments which empowers students to contribute confidently and responsibly in our changing world.

Values

Authentic learning

Relationships

Collaboration

Personalised learning

Innovative practice

Big concepts

Inventive thinking

Digital age literacy

Effective communication

Timetable - paper or computer

Ncrel

Learning phases

Week 25 Taking Action

Activity 1: Create a reflective entry in which you reflect on what you have done so far to take action.

How can the use of robotics and learning with collaborative groups, be used to promote student engagement and have a positive impact on mathematical outcomes?

The action plan - Week 1 

• Inform senior management during a team meeting before school starts back
• We will inform students 
• Parents - newsletters 1:1 
• Student baseline data - number knowledge test

So far I have informed the senior management team during our team planning meeting prior to school starting. I have explained to the students that I am doing some research and I have collected baseline data through a number knowledge test which has been marked and shared with the students so they know what their starting point is, which relates to Tino Rangatiratanga - which enables students to know what their starting point is and what their next steps are. 
I have highlighted in green the questions they got incorrect and pink the questions they got correct to reinforce this concept.

What I have not done is inform the parents. I will endeavour to do this by the end of this week through the weekly newsletter as well as an individualised letter to the parents of the specific children I am targeting. 
I am also meeting with parents next Wednesday at Meet the Teacher evening. I will target specific parents to talk to about my research project. 

Step 2: Reflect on the actions

It can be exciting when you bring changes to your practice and you may expect others to wholeheartedly embrace them, however, acting on the new strategies might be not as easy. Things might not happen as you expect or the reaction of the people who are involved is not what you want.

In this step, use the following questions to guide your thoughts

• How do you feel about the actions you have taken? 
• I feel that the management team is excited about the area thatI have chosen - robotics and maths and improving student outcomes as it is a school wide goal. The students seemed indifferent about the idea of the research. I think this is because I haven't built a relationship with them. I also feel disappointed that I have over looked informing the parents as whanau is such an important aspect. Katoa website

• What works as expectation and what doesn’t? And why? Building student/teacher relationships should be my first priority. (Ministry of Education, 2014)  I would normally never give students a math test in the first week of school. I would wait until I have built a relationship with the students and I know the students feel comfortable and safe in their environment. As a result collecting marking and analysing the baseline data has taken a lot longer to do than first thought. 
• I started with the first lesson using Beebots and discovered that 4 of them don't work and some of the batteries are flat and need replacing. Out of the 10 Beebots only half of them worked. So I had to rotate the groups which gave each group less play time to learn how to use the robot. 
• What should be done differently? How would you justify this? In the action plan when informing the parents I discussed using meet the teacher evening, newsletters and parent interviews as a way to communicate with parents, however on reflection I feel it would be more personal and build better relationships if I was to write a letter to each parent and discuss their child as an individual rather than as a member of a group. It is also a good way of getting to know the parents on a more personal level. I will also invite the parents in to have an informal chat regarding their childs progress and the process they are going through. Katoa website

Step 3: Examine your reflection in relation to other phases of the Spiral of Inquiry and within wider frameworks/theories

Looking at the Spiral of Inquiry and my original 'Hunch' I still believe that I can improve student outcomes in maths using robotics, however I feel it will take longer than the course dates to achieve and I will need to continue long after MindLab has finished to see real improvement. 

SkillsTeamHullUni (2014) in the Reflective Writing video (1:03-1:14) suggest that when you reflect on the action(s), “don’t concentrate on the actions in isolation, you need to take a metaphorical step backwards to see them in the context of other events and other learning”.

It is, therefore, necessary for you to look at what you have done in the context of other phases in your inquiry and wider frameworks/theories. For example, how has the Learn phase, in which you consider the ethical issues of your inquiry, helped you to mitigate the possible intrusion of the inquiry in student learning. Or, for Develop a Hunch phase (examine the resources), does the literature provide you with ideas about how to act? What does it say? How do they play out in practice? What needs to be changed? Or what leadership style/theory have you employed when you take action(s)? In what ways did it help you to take action?

In this step, it important to support your reflection with relevant resources, for example, references of literature around your inquiry topic or references of leadership theories.

Now add notes to your reflective entry.

If your reflective journal is in the form of a blog, either hyperlink the resources or have in-text citation together with a reference list at the end.

Ministry of Education. (2014, April 18). Setting the direction. Retrieved February 10, 2019, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Reviewing-your-curriculum/Setting-the-direction/Know-your-learners

Kaupapa Māori Research [Web log post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.katoa.net.nz/kaupapa-maori