Session 7: Computational Thinking

WWW Discussion

Manpreet has created a Maths warm up using Google Forms. She kindly shared it with us and its a fabulous resource.

Google Forms Test

Connecting with Manaiakalani - Empowered

Slides

NZ Treasury has just released encouraging figures about the contribution of Manaiakalni to our communities. For every dollar invested into the children in this program they are seeing a return of $37.

Our children are starting school at 5 years of age with the skills and cognitive ability of a 3 year old.

32 million is the number of words a child needs to be exposed to, our children are starting school without this.

OMGTech - Viv

Slides

Bill Gates list of Top 10 breakthrough Technologies - small group discussion around these breakthrough technologies and if we feel these are going to have an impact on our world and that of our learners. We agreed that yes they will have an impact and that each breakthrough although has its merits and place in society, will also come with their own set of negative impacts. We reflected on past breakthroughs and that they may have originally been introduced as an advancement we have seen the negative impacts some of these have had on our society and world now, eg.plastic bags. 

Game changer documentary - vegan argument. 

Sort Me! A good activity to show children that all data can be sorted using algorithms and debugging. Algorithm activity - could be used in class - has to be an even number of people and half that for the number of rows. 

Skin Vision app - an app where you can load an image of moles and it will advise whether it is low risk or high risk and will even refer you to a specialist if its high risk. 

Who is making the decisions when programming these technologies? Does their set values match ours? eg. Trolley problem moral activity - self drive cars. 

Hour of code

A site with various different coding activities. Coding activities fall under mostly CDDT.

Kodable could be good for Kenny, Aarav etc.

Minecraft good for beginners.

Scratch - schools can receive a license to use Scratch, children will receive their scratch log in with their gmail accounts.

Teacher accounts - can set up class and student accounts to help track progress. 

Zombie Lights - basic electronics activity using basic resources.

Scratch Jr - starter cards which are a good starting point.

Binary code - base 2 numeral system. Working out the binary code for numerals.

Makey Makey - awesome conductive paint lesson on OMGTech wharenui, using conductive paint that children make and connect it to the makey makey to create art.

Instructables has a collection of Makey Makey lessons.

This was an overwhelming session - lots of things out of my comfort zone and experiences. But in saying that a really worthwhile session and I have come away with a lot of activities and ideas to try with the children and myself!

Session 6 - Dealing with Data

Manaiakalani Pedagogy - Visible

Visible Learning SLides

Learning should be visible to the learner all the time.

"Can you see it or can you not?"

John Hattie - Visible Learning

One aspect of visibility he doesn't delve into is: What does visibility look like in a digital world?

Feedback and Feed Forward: an important tool to help accelerate learning for the learner. We are using digital tools to do this too now.

Wanting whanau to be partners in the learning, be a part of the journey - making learning visible to whanau as well.

Learners who are successful are those who can navigate the teacher's mind. They also more often than not had parents who had had success in their educational life. Knew what they had to do to pass - if no one explains that to children how they are supposed to know this.

The Game of School: Steve H 

I do have some thoughts with this: are we then just teaching to the test? Are we encouraging the learners to dig deeper and develop a deeper understanding?

Hapara - parents can access the children's learning through the parents portal.

Manaiakalani Google Class on Air - cameras in the classroom

Blogger: Professional Blogs/Blog posts

As educators we need to be aware that we are not locking parents out of this learning journey - can be done digitally with the use of passwords and logins etc.

Google Forms

Google Forms Slides

You can create different pathways using forms by adding sections.

Settings - remove restrictions in the settings menu.

Presentation - tick shuffle questions order - shuffles the order of questions to ensure that everyone is working on different questions at the same time.

Responses - 

You can set a time for the form to be shut down.

*Select responses destination - responses can be sent to the same spreadsheet for example.

Possible uses for Google Forms:

Pick A Path Stories

I have completed a lot of forms but had never had the opportunity to create my own. A tool with endless possibilities and that could be used in s many different contexts. Shiralee and I spoke about using a form to gather information at the beginning of the year as a Getting to know you form. - set of questions and also"One thing I would like my teacher to know about me is...."Add questions asking about the children's cultures and then placemarking these on mymaps.

It could be also a useful tool to try and engage parents, gathering their ideas and suggestions about how they could be better engaged with classroom and school life, how they could contribute to their childs learning at home more effectively and about keeping informed and permission slips etc.

Google My Maps

My Maps slides

Place Marks - can customise colour and icons, add an image.

Class site - this is who we are - culture in our syndicate/ special places for families

Blog commenting - placemark blogs children have commented on - paste their comment in there too, so will have a map showing a collection of blog commented they have made.

Planning traveling routes - can select different modes of transport to and from destinations.

Use to teach scale - an area of class, then school, community, North Island?

Can share or embed your map into other documents or sites.

This is going to be another valuable tool that we can utilise in class. So many possibilities to be explored!

Google Sheets

Google Sheets Slides

A good tool for holding a collection of data and information.

Super Spreadsheets Trial Document

So you can see all data on one page - Click on column A

RWC 2019 is an authentic event happening at the moment that the children could be using sheets. Upload results etc.

Lots of learning about sheets today. Sheets has always been a tool that I found confusing, so I rarely created sheets and if I do use it it was a format created by someone else. This session was invaluable and although I learned alot I will still need to continue playing around with it.

Blogging

Children can get badges for posts and comments eg. for 50 posts, for 100 posts

Rather than a set blogging commenting time could the children make more reflective posts?

Reading for example - children could write an opinion piece on the text they have been reading.

Have conversational posts on class blogs, asking for their opinions, opening up conversations rather than formal pieces of writing. 

Another session with a whole lot of learning! I have come away with several things I want to try with the children.

We have decided to create a Google form for the children to complete next week about their cultures. We will then use this information to create a mymaps using placemarks to display all the cultures resent in Te Waka Ako.

I would like to use Robyn Anderson's case study in Maths. The children can collect data and analyse information from their personal blogs.  Why tdo hey think they had more posts in one month compared to another or comparing the amount from year to year. It will be an interesting activity for them to do and it would be intriguing to see the children's thoughts around this.

Analysing Blog Data

Session 5 - Leading learning - Enabling Class Sites

Connecting with Manaiakalani - Connected

Schools in Manaiakalani met for competition - sports days, speech competitions etc but they did not 'Connect' about learning.

Tuhi mai Tuhi Atu

A systematic organised way of making connections through blogging across the clusters. Groups are organised so class blogs are visited and commented on, can be done during Literacy sessions. It could be something we could look at being a part of again. Give the children more purpose behind blogging and commenting, be good for them to have people visiting and commenting at their work as we are still having problems with connecting parents and families onto blogs.

Exploring sites - link to slides

It was valuable having the opportunity to explore other class sites. 

Our own syndicate site - no dropdown of reading groups / Writing drop down is not across the top.

* Beginning of the year activity - children to create a tour video of the class site. A good resource for parents and family but will also show their understanding of the class site.

Stepping outside our own likes and preferences and thinking about what will be best for our learners.

Important to plan your page out first and everyone gets to share their ideas and collaborate. Use post-it notes, whiteboards, big sheets of paper etc.

Think about colour sets - can google colour palettes - blue and green colour palettes.

Creating timetables - rewindable video of the steps on the slides.

Explore

This was a time for us to share our own class sites with everyone and for other group members to give us feedback and tips. This was a very useful thing to do and Shiralee and I were able to set some goals of things we would like to work on and change on our Te Waka Ako site. 

Some useful tips we received were around issues such as the layout of our work in the different pages, having a differentiation between the different week's work. This was easily rectified by changing the background colour for the different weeks and adding a simple title such as "Term 4 Week 1" at the top of each section. We went through each subject page and did this. 

We decided that we would like to have a copy of our weekly timetable visible on our homepage. This will be great for the children to check in what they have on for the week. We can also add if any staff are out for things and little reminders for them. This will be a great tool for parents and families to access also.

Shiralee and I added a photo of the three of us to the homepage - we didn't want to have a blurb about each other, we wanted to keep it mainly about the children. We will also add a photo of Shamim and Bjorn, our teacher aides.

Working and exploring through other sites helped to identify a few things we need to put some thought into and work on later...

Children navigating their way through our site - how many times are they having to click to get to their work? Remember the 3 click rule!

We also noticed that some pages didn't have much loaded onto them, eg. Writing. So we need to cater for more opportunities for rewindable learning in this area. Maybe create slideshows around the genre we are working on at the moment for the children to refer back to. We seem to have provided for these opportunities in other areas but not Writing.

Quick Workshops

Image Carousel - on google sites. How to load up images using this. Shiralee and I thought we could use this on our homepage and add a carousel of images of the children from their different activities for that term.

Making site Buttons and Banners- when making them within google sites - one generic button type and you have to use the theme colours and all buttons will have the same colour.

Making buttons and banners using google drawings allows you to be more creative. 

This link Creating Site Buttons will take you to a google drawing with the steps.

Making Banners a useful tip I learned when making banners was resizing the canvas so that it will make it smaller or bigger when you add it to your site.

Don't forget to download as a PNG image!

Overall a really useful session and I feel like we made some practical modifications to our syndicate site.