Helen's Professional Blog

  Yet again, another very busy but well-constructed session from the Research Team at Manaiakalani.  Vocabulary is the key to learning.  We kicked off by having a korero from Dorothy Burt on vocab growth being directly related to achievement.  Many of our learners start school on the back foot.  As schools, we have. the job of each child learning 8-10 new words a week, 700 a year and being able to use and understand these words in context.  We cannot leave the teaching of vocabulary and decoding to chance.  It needs to be planned for.  Students need to learn how to explore words - one exposure is not enough.  We need to raise children's (and our teachers) lexical bar and find the Goldilocks zone - just right to give some stretch and challenge to their learning.  There are four approaches to explicit vocabulary instruction.  These are: Build word consciousness Deliberate, robust teaching of words (affixes, base words, contexts) Skill...

Our awesome design team at Manaiakalani are working on designing a common practice reading model.  Although I am part of the pilot group who is critiquing and reviewing the content and experience I am completing this reflection as if I am a teacher - moreover, a newbie teacher. Our WHY for doing this is equity for learners, especially those from disadvantaged homes, to increase teacher effectiveness and accelerate learning outcomes.  We want to grow reader self-efficacy - to have a big push on learner engagement and motivation.   Today we had a mini dive and overview into the Manaiakalani Reading model.  We covered the background & findings from longitudinal research that led to this being developed.  The model is a cyclical plan that is ambitious and it begins with planning and finishes with sharing. In terms of building my capability and confidence in teaching reading, I now realise the importance of being ambitious in my planning.  I also need t...

 Like the silver fox that I have become, reinventing myself anew, it's time to drag this old blog and professional reflection methodology out of retirement - just in time for me to begin the Manaiakalani Reading DFI.

I haven't been on my blog for a while - not since completing my DFI last year.  My professional learning in 2019 was turbocharged & now in these troubled times of rahui during Covid-19 my newly acquired skills have come to the fore.  This week alone I have had online meetings with groups of principal colleagues, I've sat in on teachers having a google meet with their classes to set up learning for the day & I've also arranged a social session with teacher colleagues so that we can connect. This is stuff that seems so simple to me now.  I've also seen wonderful educators step up to share, collaborate & mentor others to improve their capability to deliver online learning.  It certainly makes me appreciate being in a collaborative profession that puts the well-being of it's learners at the heart of the matter. However, there is a dark side to this too.  More than ever, equity issues are revealing themselves.  Schools have students with no ac...

"Whew!" is all I can say!!! The Google Educator Level 1 exam was intense but, as the screenshot image above shows, I passed.  Completing the exam was two hours, 58 minutes and 33 seconds of intense concentration, intense completion of tasks and a bit of googling on the side to find out how to do tasks I couldn't automatically do.  The parts of the exam that got my blood pressure rising to places it should never go were:  creating You Tube playlists filtering data in descending order in Google Sheets  The final thing to stump me was performing tasks in the Google Omnibox.  What the #@%& is the Google Omni box?  I asked my facilitator & was promptly told to google it.  I thought to myself through gritted teeth 'What the #@%& do you think I've been doing for the last seven minutes!!' After reading and watching YouTube clips I discovered that the Google Omnibox is just the search bar - something I frequently use!!! Anyway, r...

Today I arrived a wee bit late after having flown back from a Manaiakalani Convenors' Meeting at Grey Main School in Greymouth.  Before boarding my plane from Wellington to Gizzy I completed the WWW in prep for today's session on Media & then flicked through Dorothy's slide deck on empowerment.  The whole Manaiakalani kaupapa of empowerment really resonated with me - especially when as a school leader I want education to empower not just our students but also our whanau - to give them rangatiratanga!! Being connected with digital technology, having visible learning & being ubiquitous (anytime, anywhere & global) empowers our tamariki.  This brings agency and also helps our students create their digital footprint and supports them to collaborate.  This is true for teachers too - utilising the kaupapa to empower them (us) too! I've had some new learning on using the Google Draw tool.  The wee animation above is an image I created on google draw...

Today we've had a deep, but very quick dive, into google forms, google maps and google sheets. I'm pretty comfortable with using google forms & have previously used this app.  I've recently made the shift to google sheets from excel & have been using basic features for my own purposes of data analysis.  My new learning today was pivot tables.  These will be useful for organising data in different ways - particularly if there are selected points of interest to analyse & interpret. I'd never used MyMaps before.  We completed some simple exercises of pinning locations, using the measuring tool & uploading data from a google form database to the map.  The teachers in our group may find a fun use for this with their classes.  As for me, maybe I'd use it for tracking or measuring personal travel.  Time will tell. Here's the map I created.  The pins show my DFI colleagues best holiday destinations.  I've also pinned my school. ...

Today's little ripper of a session was at Tonui Collab (formally Mindlab). We've had a great day exploring, hands-on, digital technologies. Our morning kicked off with Dave Winter, the Manaiakalani Programme Outreach Co-ordinator, presenting on the Visible component the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.  Visible learning through digital affordances opens the door of the classroom and the learner to whanau, professional colleagues and further afield if desired.  It also means that learning is re-windable.  Students can catch up if they've missed something or if they need to revisit learning.  Visibility of learning can be found in class and individual student blogs and through the google sites spaces that teachers set up for learning.  Students can find what they need for learning within a couple of clicks.  They can find exemplars of the learning, instructions, rubrics, information, learning tasks etc... (if the teacher has this set up for them).  Da...

Today we've had a deep dive into the Cyber Smart curriculum and have had a play on the different devices that our students use - Ipads & Chromebooks. Delving into the Cyber Smart curriculum has been very useful & I can now see how this links to the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. Also, as a principal who sometimes deals with hoha parents, I can better articulate what it means to be cyber smart & how this kaupapa,  & way of being (behaving in online environments) underpins the use of devices in teaching and learning.   Be Smart, Be Alert, Be Strong, Be Kind,  Be Awesome! Sandpit Time on Devices To be fair, a teacher TELA laptop is a hell of a lot nicer to use (drive) than a Chromebook but the Chromebooks are durable & well priced for our whanau.  We 'DFIers' went through learning a range of short cuts for using on chrome books.  I think that our student learners would very quickly learn to use these shortcuts to navigate themselv...