Arse Kicking and Shit-Storms: Stepping into the Arena

Watching "Brené Brown: the Call to Courage" on Netflix tonight has been an absolute privilege. It really resonated with me, particularly with where I'm at right now.

It's really easy to slip back and cruise when things feel a little chaotic and uncomfortable. When we are uncomfortable with our vulnerability, it's easy to default into sticking to your comfort zone and not taking risks.

Brené Brown talks about the fear of criticism. Do you engineer smallness in your life? We'veg all been there. You stick to the status quo and don’t take chances or don’t put yourself out there... because you don’t know whether you can withstand the criticism.

When we've put ourselves out there and regretted it, finding ourselves in a shame shitstorm (her term... I love this term!) you know, where you slip into hibernation, numbing ourselves with tv or a movie. Probably unhealthy foods etc... She reminds us that "it’s not the critic who counts". The credit belongs to the person who’s stepped up into the arena. The one who’s taking chances.

If you choose to be in the arena... You’re going to fall. You’re going to get your arse kicked. If you’re not in the arena, stepping out of your comfort zone then your opinion actually doesn’t count.

Each day when you get out of bed, say to yourself "Today I’ll choose courage over comfort".

Vulnerability is having the courage to show up when you don’t know the outcome. There are millions of cheap seats in the world. It’s not that you don’t give a shit about what anybody thinks, it’s that you don’t give a shit about what some people think. The people who make the list are the people who care about and love you not despite your imperfection and vulnerability but because of your imperfection and vulnerability.

How can you let yourself be loved if you don’t let yourself be seen. When you have thoughts running through your head during uncomfortable conversations, have the courage to say “The story I’m telling myself is...”

Vulnerability

It is often considered to be:

shame

Scarcity

fear

anxiety

uncertainty

But it also gives birth to:

love

belonging

joy

"The opposite of belonging is fitting in."

Belonging is speaking your truth. Being yourself... who you are.

Practice gratitude... Allow yourself to lean into joy.

Understanding what we can do better to "show up":

1. When you are grateful for what you have, you are able to understand the magnitude of what has been lost. It can be healing.
2. The ordinary things... the simple moments that you don't take notice of when they are happening. You miss them when they're no longer there and gone. We're quick to chase the extraordinary moments while just skipping over the ordinary.
3. Just do the joyful thing for the hell of it.

Work Vulnerability

empathy

trust

innovation

creativity

inclusivity/equity

hard conversations

feedback

problem-solving

ethical decision making

No vulnerability = no creativity.

No tolerance for failure = no innovation

We need to ensure we build a vulnerable culture. To not have the conversations because they make you uncomfortable is the definition of privilege. When we build cultures at work where there is zero tolerance for vulnerability, where perfectionism and armour are rewarded and necessary... you can’t have difficult productive conversations.


We spend more than half of our lives at work. You can’t have a joyful wholehearted life if you are miserable at work.

Brave leaders are never silent around hard things. 

Our job is to excavate the unsaid.

Vulnerability is defined as: uncertainty risk or emotional exposure. There is no courage without uncertainty or risk.

The Myths of vulnerability:

1. Vulnerability is weakness
2. I don’t do vulnerability
3. I can go it alone
4. You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability.
5. trust comes before vulnerability
6. Vulnerability is disclosure

You choose who has the right to share your story. Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. You don’t measure vulnerability by the amount of disclosure, you measure it by the amount of courage to show up.

Vulnerability is scary and it feels dangerous... but it’s not as scary and dangerous as getting to the end of our lives and saying “what if I would’ve shown up?” What if I would’ve said I love you?

Show up

Be seen

Answer the call to courage

Come off the blocks

Curiosity Unleashed

While trying to find the personal blog I began about a year ago, only for it to sit on the back burner... I stumbled across the blog I began 'way back when'.

Check out Curiosity Unleashed HERE

This is exactly what I needed right now. This is exactly why we as professionals blog. It gives us a window into how far we have come and the process we go through. I had forgotten so much of this part of the journey as it seemed to go by in a blur.

This blog was 5 years ago.
I was in a single cell class. My kids had individual desks which were identified in a painstakingly labour intensive in-depth consideration as to the seating plan!
Everything was completed in books.

I cannot fathom teaching in this way again. The fact that it was only 5 years ago... when it feels like a lifetime.

Reading it, I can remember the excitement and passion I had for the paradigm shift I was embarking on. I was stepping into an unknown world, where we were leading the charge for those around us. We had to make the mistakes ourselves to find out why some things needed to be done in certain ways.

For anyone who questions why they should have a professional blog... This is why!!!

Enabling Access by suping up sites

We explored how to maximise our class/subject sites to maximise visible teaching and learning.

Evaluating Class Sites:

We explored a selection of Class sites looking at the two key criteria of:

• Visual appeal - shop window!
• User experience - easy to locate ‘stuff’ (2/3 clicks)

considering what works well and what doesn't work well.

Colour checker - put a link to your site and it will analyse points to consider.

Visible Kaupapa

Making teaching and learning visible... essentially can you see it or not? We aren't necessarily talking about John Hattie's work as he takes it to a whole new level which becomes quite complicated. Manaiakalani simplifies this. It's visible not only to learners but to whanau too.

FAIL - so much of the learning journey has traditionally been hidden from the akonga. Dorothy likens it to an adult version of a maze where you can only see a little bit in front of you.

It used to be that those that succeeded were the ones able to read the teachers mind. Those who had an element of cultural capital. When success criteria are open and displayed it opens up the learning journey and makes it visibly accessible. We can take it a lot further still with the intentional use of digital tools. Every step of the journey should be visible.

When we say that the default is visible, what genuinely needs to be invisible or private?

Biodata (Date of birth etc), Health info, Behavioural data etc... sure, however what about assessment info? Five-year-olds know where they sit in relation to their peers. How precious do we need to be? We need to open our minds up about what genuinely must be kept private.

We've been using google sites to repurpose our learning since 1:1 classes began.

Making teaching visible removes the element of surprise for learners and whanau. It provides an advance warning as well as rewind ability afterwards.

Hapara's tagline is Making Teaching and Learning Visible. This is exactly what we are wanting to do. Effectively it enables us to be able to access the children's desk.

Hapara Parent Portal. DO our parents have the ability to access this?

Manaiakalani Google Class On Air

Stalk some teachers and see what it's like. At the end of this term, the applications for 2020 come online. Is this something we can get done down here? I'm seriously considering "stepping into the arena".

Visible Teaching as Inquiry

Having them open and visible across the clusters to access and learn from others, just like our learners. We stress the power of feedback and feedforward for our learners on their blogs. Do we do this ourselves with our own learning as professionals?

This connection only came about because they were visible online in a positive light for learning. A number of people argued that other communities were more impoverished/deserving, however, they didn't have a digital footprint.

Data shows that if a child is present over three years in a Manaiakalani School... the rate of gain in writing was twice that expected nationally. This means that these students on average made one more year's progress above the expected rate per year if they were there for three years.

A concern that when kids go digital, we lock parents out of our children's learning. Schools can create barrier systems to prevent ease of parents being able to find what they have been doing. By making everything visible and making it so that there is no problem with it being visible then we are keeping it open.

Leading Learning using a Google Site

An overview of setting up a class or subject site.

We need to consider the learners' pathways. It all needs to be connected so that kids find it easier to use when transitioning between classes and year levels.

When creating a new site... the first consideration is who are the learners? A site for Chromebook users is very different than a site that is for iPad users. Why are they using the site? What are the key things they are going to go to?

Think really carefully about Colour... you can you tools to pluck out colour from uniforms etc. Do the combinations make your eyes hurt? DO they look okay when viewed on different screens?

Consider Layout... how easy is it on your eye? There's a lot to be said for clutter-free.

It's important to think about using a consistent font. Try not to use more than two. This goes for the things that you are embedding too. Google has begun to include Lexend fonts, which are meant to increase productivity. You can see that they are rather boring though...

The 3 click rule is very important. You should be able to get to anything within 3 clicks.

Purposeful Learning Tasks:

We need to consider how we can ramp up the learning task to utilise the tools available. It's not always "What can we do better?" but how can we redefine the way we are doing things to make it more purposeful and authentic.

For ERO etc, it's very easy to copy sites, so even if you are going to use the same site, it's a good idea to make a copy of it so that it archives everything nicely.

Feedback on our Group Sites

We provided a link to our class site. We received down and dirty feedback. Well... that was the theory. Everyone was actually rather kind. To be fair, many in the room are only starting out with their class sites, so a few kinks were still being ironed out. Ours, on the other hand, are humming as they should be. One of the things that have been frustrating me about mine is the clutter of rewindable learning. I had developed a bad habit of just "dumping" DLO's at the bottom f the page. They were there and rewindable, but the shop window was in disarray! Certainly not providing a visually appealing visual appearance to engage learners.

My feedback from the group was too "nice":

"It looks great. Thanks for sharing Mel."

"Well done Mel. I liked your simple layout and it is easy for children to use."

"Looks great Mel. I like the cleanness and few steps the kids have to go to."

There was nothing I could use to set a goal for my class site for the day. I needed to come up with three specific things I wanted to achieve on my site today. My focus is on User engagement.

• Cleaner pages 
• rewindable learning is clearly marked as per term.
• Less “busy-ness"
• I need it to be more engaging (insert magic wand of inspiration here)
• More “extra’s for expert” for kids to do at home.

I managed to clean a large portion up. It's much tidier and more user-friendly. I still need to be mindful of upping the engagement factor.

I finally got some links in there for literacy. I can just keep adding to this now... meaning kids have a place to go to when they are looking for "Homework" to do.

Sunshine Books:

Manaiakalani gets free copies of Sunshine books, to coincide with the online subscription. There are a huge wealth of resources out there to coincide with them.

Game changers:

Shift + Z - creates a ghost file in a different place.

100-word challenge: put a google form with a picture prompt in. You can then pull them off easily.
Google form: find me an interesting fact.

Devices

Today at DFI, our guest facilitator was Lenva, who works 4 days a week for Hapara and the other day for Manaiakalani.

We refer to Cybersmart rather than Cyber Safe to teach our kids how to live in the world rather than be scared in the world. We want our kids to know how to deal with things as they come up and how to keep their own footprint as clean as they can.
One of the most important aspects of the kaupapa is that it is visible. It's all transparent and open.

Smart Learners 

It's about being able to tackle different programmes and tackle different parts. Students learn the kawa of care, which is about teaching them to be responsible for their own device and who has access. It's crucial for the culture of looking after the tools for learning. Many assume that our learners know how to use the devices; however, they know how to use them in a different context. Often in a gaming "play/toy" context.

Smart Footprint. 

Term 2. The Create Term.
This is where our learners begin to be seen. What do they want people to know about you? How do you want people to see you?

Smart Relationships. 

Students interacting with the rest of the world. How do we speak on our (and others) blogs? If it's not positive, thoughtful or helpful then we are not going to say it. Authentic audiences and buddy class blogs encourage us to do this too.

Hapara - Making Learning Visible.

Hapara allows us to focus on teaching rather than technology. Hapara is not really about monitoring and filtering. It's about supporting the teaching. The focus browsing and Filter sessions are for those few individuals who need extra support.

Some key tools:

• Sharing: All unshared documents, even those in folders.
• All Docs: Every document created.
• The only thing you cant see is empty trash, because who really does that?
• Filter Session: The opposite to Focus session. You can identify the sites you don't want them to go to. 
• Comments: Shows all comments made and received by that student.

Workspaces. It can be embedded into the class site. Units can be visible to some students and not others. You can control what they see. They submit it back to the teacher.

Tamaki College is currently undertaking all of their NCEA exams within a focus browsing session and students submit their work upon completion.

Chromebooks

It was all about finding the best device for learning for EVERY young person.

Partnership

• Ownership of the Chromebook is a partnership. Often it becomes a family tool. Thus it is not only empowering students but whanau as well. They look after the device better if they own it, rather than when it's a school-owned device.
  

Participation

• Bringing the device to school every day charged.
• Because they are all using the same device, it empowers the teachers to work confidently with them.

Protection

• It should be seamless. Everything should just happen and be visible.
• The important things are behind the scenes.
• By teaching a Cybersmart curriculum then we are assisting students to make good choices about what to do when things go awry.

Its a really good idea to go through the Digital Dig so that you know how to assist students with workflow.

Check it out here

iPads

Apple Classroom works similar to Hapara, but for iPads.

It's vital that the routines are established right at the beginning. If they are established young, then they have them for life.

Visible Teaching and Learning

By embedding a link to your Explain Everything on a slide, you can put in easily on your slide.

To view on your Mac, download the Explain Everything Viewer (which sits in your Appa)

Screencastify

We created a Screencastify on how to use a tool. I took the opportunity to create one to share the differences between Onetab and Mini Toby, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago when covering Workflow. My learners use this easily and happily. As adults, I think we are often hesitant to record ourselves. There are so many uses for this tool.

Computational Thinking

Share - Tohatoha

We need to mindful that it's not just the great things that we share, but the reality too. Some times our perceived failures are the things that we learn most from. Sharing is what makes us human. Sharing our successes. Sharing our failures. F.A.I.L = First Attempt In Learning.

Youtube was born in April 2005. Social media spaces sprang up... Facebook... Bebo... Twitter... The taglines that they all chose to put with each space was "share your life" in some way shape or form. It opened up the world and the way that we share. 2005 brought speed and amplification to the way that we share.

Remind ourselves of our Manaiakalani goals. "Work with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning outcomes." - Raise Achievement outcomes.

Authentic audience... gone are the days of the audience being a teacher at night with a red pen in hand. Natasha from Hornby High is a student who blogged about Vans. She sent the post to Vans and they commented! She made an authentic connection!

This connectivity is within the realms of every individual who has access to the internet. We need to utilise it to excite and accelerate our learning. Our kids are often limited in the connections that they make in person. Some often don't go many places beyond home and school. This is their vehicle out!

Blogger

Blogger was chosen for a number of reasons. In the beginning, a number of options were explored. Blogger won hands down.

• Resembles the spaces our young people want to be on: While it may not be the coolest place that young people want to be, it functions very well to do all the things it needs to do.
• Able to provision this legally, systematically & securely. The board of Trustees is the legal owner of the student blog. The student is merely the author. This gets around the age constraints and legalities of the blog.
• NO new sign in required for GSuite users... no new list of usernames and password.
• Guarantee that there's a three check system. These are mechanisms for us managing the safety of our children online.
1. Blog posts and comments go to Hapara Teacher Dashboard for teachers to check.
2. The teacher who is responsible for that blog gets emails to notify them.
3. Gadget on the side of the class blog, that lists the class blogs. Make the setting so that the most recent post goes on top.

Cybersmart Curriculum

It's okay for students to be operating online, but they MUST be taught the cybersmart curriculum in order to ensure that they have a positive presence online. Providing an ability to connect with each other in a respectful way.

A lot of the other spaces are great. The benefit of Blogger is that it's within the google suite, so no further password or sign in is required. 

Share to finish learning

An eternal frustration, particularly in lower decile schools. It can encourage akonga to celebrate being "finished". They just move from one job to the other and then move onto the next without finishing one off properly. This can be a lifelong habit which transfers into their work habits post-school.

The process of 'Share to Learn' becoming a spiral is extremely important. Not only sharing to finish, but sharing to begin learning.

(Slide 18) "Positive thoughtful Helpful" - links to John Hattie and Feedback & Feedforward.

By embedding this language all the way through, it cements it and becomes a natural way of being. By embedding this it gives our kids a toolkit of how to behave, both online and offline.

We need to teach our kids some tricks to hook in their audience. You can't just be passive about sitting back and waiting for it all to happen.

Even reading and commenting on each other's blog has the ability to accelerate learning.

Every lingerer on a blog registers with googles algorithm. If you linger, it'll be noticed.

Kawana - OMGTech - He's the Course creator in the background.

Pam Fergusson Charitable Trust. She was a paraplegic who mortgaged her house to buy a computer because she saw that was the future. Her boys now are all computer programmers and run a multi-million dollar company.

Technology in the world we live in. It's about connections and who you know. Our kids need to have the ability to make connections.

Boston Dynamics Big Dog - ethics... it was funded by the military. It isn't just for war, but for rescues etc

Sophia the robot - Singing with Jimmy Fallon.

The algorithm adjusts within the song to match pitch. It has learned by itself. Sophia absorbed the knowledge. Can robotics be creative?

Skin Vision - $80/year. Consumer Institute wasn't positive about it, however, the more people who use it the better the algorithm gets. Getting a body scan for moles is around $200... Could become a new party trick?

Cost becomes a barrier.

Zephyr's Cora - Self-flying planes. 

Tech ethics...should we do it?

The new content covers two key areas, computational thinking and designing and developing digital outcomes. It has been designed to be flexible, so it can respond to new developments and technologies as they emerge.

In fact, when Hon Nikki Kaye announced the curriculum in June 2017, she said:

“Computational thinking is about understanding the computer science principles that underlie all digital technologies and learning how to develop instructions, such as programming, to control these technologies. 

Designing and developing digital outcomes is about understanding that digital systems and applications are created for humans by humans, and developing knowledge and skills in using different digital technologies to create digital content across a range of digital media. This part of the curriculum also includes learning about the electronic components and techniques used to design digital devices."

• Inquiry & Communication is the use
• Construction & Expression is the programming and create

Check out the glossary here.

Other stuff:

• cs unplugged - a huge resource of unplugged resources.
• Hour of Code. Limit to one hour or kids disconnect and check out
• toxicode and silently teacher: when they've moved on from hour of code.

Scratch

Kiatakatu.ac.nz

Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko

Digital Readiness - It’s worth having a look at. You can complete a self-review, to guage where you are at with implementing the new digital curriculum. It has great resources for you to upskill or be informed.

I completed the online self-review tool to see where I was at, as a leader.

Makey Makeys 

Cardboard Stumblebot

A-MA-ZING! Today was fantastic! I now feel like I've had a range of tools and ideas unleashed, but I've been able to have the sandpit time with them to successfully take them back into the classroom. I can see where a range of what we did today should be introduced to our akonga! It also involves critical literacy in that we are challenging our learners to consider the ethics of G-Tech and where things are heading, rather than being passive consumers of things that they are told about or introduced to.

I've already been on AliExpress and purchased a 3D pen, with filament! 

DFI 3

Hanging out with Dorothy:

Create... Hanga - It's all about the HOOK!

• How do we as teachers ramp it up in the classroom?

You can check out some research around this here: We Teach Who We Are: Creativity in the Lives and Practices of Accomplished Teachers by Danah Henriksen & Punya Mishra

"The Lifelong Kindergarten Group" - A world of Playfully Creative People..."

• This may be beneficial for our Te Ara Whakatau team to check out, particularly regarding Play-based learning?

The goal is to have no learner missing out on the opportunity to create within their learning journey.
It's time again to focus on Teacher Creativity. We need to be celebrating this within our Kura as well as wider.

The heART of the matter talks to the learners as adults as they describe what it was like to learn in this way.

It wasn't National Standards that killed it, it just slowly wilted away. Let's go back to it! Focus on the front half of the curriculum as well as the back half.

Exploring Create in the Manaiakalani Programme open doc. This is fascinating to look at, particularly after our own clusters journey to unpack what Learn, Create and Share actually mean. It's great being able to look at this knowing how many brains have pooled to create this shared understanding. It's also something that I feel we need to refer back to in order to continue to be on the same page.

This image, created by Karen Ferguson from Tamaki College, which sums up what it means to Create in our Manaiakalani pedagogy.

Manaiakalani Foundation goal: to "motivate our learners to engage with the curriculum"... Are our kids actually being encouraged and lured into engaging with the curriculum? Or are they being expected to engage?

We need our kids to be Creators of content. If they are not being challenged to engage, then they become consumers of content. Passively surfing the net etc. It's "learn, create, share", not "learn, go google, share". (Brilliant quote from Mark Maddren)

Purposely creating the opportunity for creativity and learning.

Often the learning hook starts with the opportunity to create, then they have to go away and do the learning.

We need to pull it back to the purpose:

Motivate our learners to ENGAGE with the curriculum

The 6 C's of education in the 21st Century.

Creativity is key. Nobody wants to employ somebody that just knows how to tap in to find existing info, they want employees that can generate ideas and thinking.

Ken Robertson was an actor before he was an activist in creativity.

SISOMO

Kevin Roberts from Saachi and Saachi (A Kiwi who was CEO Worldwide) Sight/Sound/Motion.
If you want people to buy-in you need to touch their hearts. To do that you need to use these 3 ingredients.  SISOMO creates innovation and imagination as well.

Cool Hacks

Slides - if you are stuck in "present" mode, you can delete the end of the url to see the speaker notes. Likewise, if you are sharing something, put "/copy" on the end and it will force them to make a copy.

Multi Modal

Engaging "The Hook"

Our challenge is that our learners are immersed in a world where everything around them is competing to engage them and we have to be able to hook them in the same way. We need to hook our kids in, at the beginning, so that they think "Oh wow, I really want to get into this". Pt England use Immersion Assembly's to hook their learners. 

Initially, the technology alone engages, but the novelty wears off. It still needs to be what we are actually doing as teachers.

"Once you've hooked them, teach them!" - WFRC

Sometimes we have to gift them with the prior knowledge so that they can access the inferential knowledge. 

(Links to wide and deep)

Chrissie Butler - UDL

Breaking down the barrier of it being the same old same old, but with a different cover.

Acknowledge that people are different in order to provide for the different ways that individual learners are going to perceive the information. We need to be mo=indful that the variety supports the students, rather than narrowing their perimeters. We need to create a default where there is lots of variabilities. choice over accessing content as well as choice over task.

Creating Multi-Modal Resources

I created this resource, ready for next weeks literacy class. It is now not only in our Uru Manuka Shared Resource Folder, but shared with our Te Ara Tuhura Cluster also. These connections are massive in terms of moving forward. It reminded me of the journey we have been on these past 5 years. I remember way back when...  we were having to start from scratch and it felt like we were reinventing the wheel. Once we began to collaborate, within our schools and cluster, life got a whole lot easier. We openly chat about different things we "borrow" from each other. I feel doing this helps drive our practice forward, as we improve on them while using.

Google Sites

We created a sandpit site (along with a sandpit site folder) to just experiment with. Here is mine.

Using Google Drawing, we created a site header of our own. (1000x250 pixels). We downloaded it as a png and then upload it.

Buttons: 250x250 pixels. To make it a specific shape, you go up to the arrow beside the crop "mask image" and select a shape. I had forgotten to download my button drawing as a PNG image, therefore I wasn't able to easily create the link. 

I experimented with creating an image carousel to showcase photos.

My question around the homepage is what content should be on there, as I have gone away from using buttons to link to the pages. They use the tabs at the top.