Digital Breakouts!

About a month or so ago, I made a digital breakout for Maori Language Week. I had been wanting to do one of these on my own for a while now, and there was an opportunity to do so, so I took it. I even wrote about it here. Though the children that tried the breakout at my school (well the ones that tried it initially) gave up very early on, I enjoyed the creation of the breakout so much, I decided to do another one for the New Zealand election which was the following week.

Sharing these two resources that I made on the New Zealand Primary Teachers' Facebook group got me lots of positive feedback - and lots of schools using them. I thought the logical thing would be to keep on making them, since I liked the act of creation and others liked using them.

 Basically a digital breakout is a Google Form embedded on a Google Site. The form has special data validation which stops users from submitting the form if what they enter doesn't match the criteria I set. Thus, I can create a digital lock. The form is embedded on a site, where clues and links to clues are also embedded. There is no exact science to how the clues work and I have had varying success on finding clues that are hard enough to keep learner interest, but not too hard that they frustrate everyone and, to quote one my learners, make them "rage."

 In future posts (and most likely at the New Zealand Ed Tech Team Google Summits as well as hopefully at ISTE 2018) I'm going to share how to make these more in depth. I'm currently designing a workshop for learners on this idea - which will start next week - so that will give me the chance to make it very clear. So for now, I'll leave the HOW I did it. What was very interesting to note (and I know I've spoken about Breakouts and BreakoutEDU before), was the evolution of how my learners approached the breakouts.

Initially, the learners gave up quite quickly when it was obvious they couldn't get things straight away. I've noticed this with a lot of the children in other settings, so I wasn't that surprised. On further attempts, some of the learners got really into it and worked hard to solve the clues (though some tried the guess all the numbers approach, which worked when the number was low, but not so much when it was high). They began to share what they got and work together. Then others picked up on what to look for. Suddenly, clues that I thought were too hard were getting solved rather quickly by the children. They were beginning to look at things in a new way, looking for those hidden patterns.

The last one we did as a whole habitat (Roughly 90 learners in four teams) was quite difficult. Most groups were unable to even get one clue, even with multiple hints. I guess what I need to do as I continue to create more, is to find a way to level them. Some are obviously harder than others. I probably should be collected data on the people who break out based on their ages, that way I could at least get an idea as to how difficult they are (the Diwali one, which caused my learners so much trouble was actually solved by quite a few others).

At any rate, the engagement level on these has been pretty high in my experience and with a lot of the feedback I've received from other educators across New Zealand. I'm looking to continue making these until I've exhausted all ideas (or I can sell them all and live off the interest on the profit). If you have any ideas for me that you want me to make, put them in the comments and I'll add it to my list. My learners have enjoyed helping me make these (though I'm pretty clever at not revealing the clues or locks to them) and they are loving it too!

Until then, have a look at the breakouts I've made. Try them. See if you can break out. Share them with your friends or your students. You won't regret the engagement that comes out of it!

Organizing an ILE (Part 1?)

So one of the things that has been very apparent in my first term and a bit anchored in a Habitat at Ormiston Primary is that organization is both key and very messy. The more innovative things you try, the harder it is to actually make them work because there are so many moving parts. Over the last few weeks we have introduced a lot of choice for our learners and a few issues have cropped up.

1. We want to make sure we know (and the learners know) where they are going and when without having to stop and call out every learner individually or write all 90 learners every day
2. We want to make sure that every learner actually does attend workshops (a common question we've had from educators who we've spoken to)
3. We didn't want chaos or to spend lots of time sorting it out.

So with some ingenuity (and lots of trial and error!) I've found something that is working (for now). This is a multi step process, but once it was up and working, it's actually quite quick to sort out.

The first step is that in our weekly meetings, my fellow learning coaches and I choose the workshops we are going to offer (based on a variety of factors, which could be its own blog post). After that is decided (usually during our Tuesday meeting) we then make up a Google Form with those choices:

Now comes the fun part.  Initially I had just sorted them out by alphabetizing the results. But that took more time than I wanted to spend, so I used the filter formula in Sheets to get from this:

to this:

I made a separate page for our literacy and our math workshops.

For those of you interested, the formula was essentially this:

=filter('Form responses 1'!B:B,('Form responses 1'!D:D="Ideas"))

With Ideas being the name of the workshop. I've further simplified it by using this formula and only changing the headings as necessary.

=filter('Form responses 1'!B:B,('Form responses 1'!C:C=A2))

The A2 just references the top of the list. By separating these into lists it was very easy to cut and paste them into another document for displaying in the habitat:

The next trick was to make sure that our learners were able to look at these and know in advance where and when they needed to be. Having Apple TVs on all of our Habitat TVs proved to be a slight advantage. While I couldn't get our Google Slides to play sans device, I was able to use Flickr to create albums each day so that all the relevant information would cycle through the TVs throughout the day so that the information would always be accessible.

Each week, to save work, we "Copy to" the sheets we sort onto (eg. the Math Workshops) into the new Spreadsheet created for the new form.

But I wrote above that we also wanted to make sure we'd have all of our learners choosing workshops. One (clumsy) solution was for us to go in and check them one-by-one. But I don't like that and it takes a lot of time (and it's not visual).

So I did a bit of googling and found a very useful formula "on the line."

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A1,'Form responses 1'!B:B,0)),"Not Registered","Registered")

Essentially what this does is it checks the value in A1 (or A2, A3, A4, etc when you copy it in every line) and sees if it has turned up in Column B in the initial responses. So all I had to do was get a list of all of our 90 learners and put it in Column A and then copy this formula into all of Column B, add a quick conditional formatting (Green if it's Registered, Red if it's Not Registered) and this is what we get:

All but one of our learners have registered this week (and the one who hasn't is in Queenstown).

So that's how we're currently organizing our workshops. It seems like a lot, but once set up, it's very easily copied into a second, third, etc week. Hopefully this has been helpful. I'll make an attempt to share more of my organizational tips on here and if anyone has any ideas of how to improve this system, I'd love to hear from you!

Exploring Literacy and Coding

A while ago, I participated in a wonderful Twitter chat with #digitaledchat where we discussed what you could do with robots in class, such as Sphero. One of the things that came up was using them to create stories or videos by coding the robots as characters. I liked that idea so much, it got me to thinking quite a bit about how coding and literacy could be combined.

I've tried really hard to make my class a creative one, in which my learners are able to explore different ways of learning that are fun, creative and exciting. I want the children in my charge to wake up in the morning, excited to come to school and do their work (which they won't see as work). I have had many different ways of making stories and being creative (including Stop Motion and Digital Storybooks) so it wasn't a big step to try some new things. Here are three ways in which my learners used coding or computational thinking to create stories:

Choose Your Own Adventure Stories Using Google Forms

Many of us have read these books as children and this idea is definitely not a new one. You can use the "go to page based on answer" feature of multiple choice questions to direct readers to new pages based on their choices. When we first did this, I used Google Drawings to plan out the story (it can get very complicated if you have a lot of choices) but it isn't always necessary. A pair of my learners created this story earlier this year.

There are other ways of making stories like this, including Scratch.

Stories on Scratch

This idea came from CS-First.com where you can find a whole 8 lesson module on coding stories for code clubs, though if anyone has used Scratch Jr, that's basically what that app is for. The idea is simple: code the sprites to speak to each other and interact. As coding knowledge increases, so too does the complexity of the stories. This is definitely an area to explore for reluctant writers who happen to like coding (and I've noticed the majority of my learners are liking coding more and more everyday, some even attempting to code a Choose Your Own Adventure story).

Coding Robots to Tell a Story

This was the big idea from #digitaledchat that I have been waiting a while to try. We only have made one attempt at this, but it went, in my opinion really well. Some interested children joined me for a short brainstorming session. We came up with some characters and starting thinking about what their story was going to be about. Some other learners got interested and joined us at this point and the discussion started taking off. I backed off and let them sort things out. There were varying levels of coding abilities in the group and they were able to support each other. A lot of the story didn't really utilize coding knowledge, but it was a fantastic start. Again though, a little disappointed that these children won't get to try this again with me, but I'll keep on introducing these ideas to children and see how they develop.

The plan with this topic is to continue to explore it further, get children making more and more stories using their coding skills and then to share this in more depth next year (hopefully at GAFE & ISTE). So keep an eye out if you're interested as I think this is an exciting way to develop a plethora of skills amongst learners.

Mixed-Ability Reading - More Thoughts and Developments

I'm a few weeks into my changed reading program and it feels like a good time to share how it's gone. In talking with some colleagues it has become apparent what the particular challenges of mixed-ability groupings will be in this case.

One of the challenges suggested to me is that my more keen readers (or the ones who have been lucky enough to have had positive experiences with reading and have read a lot more) will want to read ahead and the less keen readers (or the ones who have not fully been supported yet) will take more time to read the pages. I'm addressing this problem by 1) reading with the readers who require a bit more support, helping them with decoding the more difficult words and my asking more questions to help them make sense of what they've read, 2) having the quicker readers come up with more questions to discuss - and to extend their thinking by improving the questions they have given - particularly with creating more open questions vs yes/no questions.

Last week I asked my students to give some feedback via a google form anonymously. For whatever reason, not all of my students filled it in, but I did get some helpful responses:

• All of my students said they liked or really liked the book they were reading
• When asked whether they want to keep doing reading this way, 46% said they prefer the novels, while 39% said they were happy either way. None said they wanted to change back.
• Though most students found the books were either easy or just right, there were a couple that thought the book was difficult (particularly those who chose The Witches, which is twice as long as the other books).

As the whole idea pertains to me, I'm finding ways to make the books more enjoyable for the students and to help them understand. We are coming up with good routines when it comes to working as a group (one of the groups has 9 students, which is somewhat of a challenge). Sharing of the chromebooks during discussions and getting all students involved is a problem that we are well on our way to solving. Students are working well in their groups when I'm not around for the most part - all groups are coming up with lots of questions independently and this is allowing us to discuss them AND to work on our questioning skills.

For a while, the SOLO maps became a bit too much, so we missed them for a week or two. Now that we've settled down with our questions, we are able to spend some time in our group discussions on them and this week has shown that we are understanding them a bit better - ideas are flowing, which is the whole point.

The students are really engaged during the time I give them to respond creatively, though most of the ideas tend to be draw a character or a place. Over time, and as I give them more chances to create and more experiences to draw from, I expect that they will have a variety of ways to respond to their reading.  It just takes time.

For a while, I was a bit worried that perhaps what I was doing was not the right way (I was certainly told that, implicitly and explicitly, by a few), but I'm seeing the students and there are way less issues with reading now than there were.

I've found some articles online that discuss some of the issues that we're facing:

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/grouping-students-who-struggle-reading
This has given me some insight into different ways to effectively group my students. Though I don't want to have fixed ability groups, I think there is some value in grouping students according to needs. This is something I will be exploring (and certainly am exploring with my math and writing instruction). It gives some strategies (some of which I am very familiar with) to help involve and engage all students in whole class settings.

http://www.casenex.com/casenet/pages/readings/differentiation/diffisisnot.htm
This one seems a bit like a rant, but I promise there is good information in here. It discusses what differentiation is NOT (and many of these practices I see on a regular basis) but also gives suggestions for what it is. One of the key focuses of the differentiation I'm trying to provide has to do with learning pathways and choice. Students can access the same material (in my case, the same books), but they look at them in different ways and have different understandings of them. Certainly, I am trying to give my students as much choice as possible (even on those days they just frustrate me by making horrible choices) so that their learning can be organic. One thing I need to sort out a bit better is having different modes of learning. Though I do think I do this, I probably need to mix things up a bit more (or maybe I'm doing this without explicitly trying to do it - who knows?).

Certainly the results have not been affected terribly. I'm in the middle of another round of running records and more than half of my students will need to be retested so far. That's certainly good news - at least I'm not negatively affecting their reading!

GEGNZ Sparkshop!

This past Saturday, I attended the first (I think) ever GEGNZ Sparkshop at Ormiston Primary School. Over the last few weeks and months, I've slowly started becoming someone who shares a lot, and it seemed like a good idea to come to this prepared to share.

Smorgasbord
The conference (or rather, unconference) started with a smorgasbord of ideas that people voted on. I put two ideas in. The first was sharing mystery hangouts (or skypes, depending on where your loyalty lies) by myself. The second was a collaboration with Angela Lee on makerspaces and robots.

I was pretty much the first person to share and it was quite nerve-racking to go up first, especially since I was trying to sell what I was sharing. I spoke quickly and tried not to be too imposing. I think I do give off a very nervous air, but that's ok.  It was then a lot of sitting and listening to other people share their ideas before we voted.

When all was said and done, both of my ideas were booked into places to share. I figured they might be. I'm not being full of myself, but they were interesting things. Luckily I was in the last two sessions, so I had a chance to go check out another session while I fretted away.

Forms (Sarah Allen, from Riverhills)

My one and only session that I participated in the audience was based around using Google Forms. This is something that I've done a lot lately, so I figured I might get some new pointers (there's always something new to learn) or at the very minimum be able to contribute something.

Among other new ideas, we were introduced to Poll Everywhere, a very quick way to get feedback from students and to get them to share. Like other tools (padlet comes to mind) it has some specific uses, but it was also extremely useful in that it can embed into slides (unlike so many other things).

We discussed reasons for gathering student voice (none of which were really earth shattering, but it's important to note that I do think it's important for a variety of reasons - I wouldn't be focusing changing my practice towards increasing this if I didn't), and also wondered whether or not Kahoot! can do similar things (I'm going to try this at some point in the near future).

We discussed various other uses of forms and some add-ons to use. I particularly liked the add-ons Choice Eliminator and Email Confirmation (it may be called something else).

A random idea that came up in the discussion (I actually brought it up) was to use a form to make a choose your own adventure story. I actually got so excited about this that on Sunday I went home and started making an example so we can do it as a class in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to write about that.

MakerSpaces

Next up was my joint presentation with Angela. We shared a few makerspace ideas, but in the end, it was the robots that were the most popular. Several other attendees loved playing with my Dash and Dot (I may, in fact, be one of the only - if not the only - classrooms in New Zealand that have these robots). I think Wonder Workshop may owe me a bit because I'm pretty sure I've convinced some people to buy them. I'd like some more myself.

We did have a lot more out - Squishy Circuits and Makey Makeys. The circuits got some attention, but I was naturally drawn to the robots and I think a lot of people followed me. I guess people can easily get overwhelmed.

Mystery Hangouts

The crowd for my second presentation was much smaller (6 people) but it was nice to have an intimate setting. I briefly talked about how a mystery hangout works and then we practiced it. I quite enjoyed watching adults have a go at figuring out different strategies for guessing. I think I sold the idea to them though as at least one had already booked a call for the week coming up!

Here's the slideshow I shared during that presentation (in case anyone else wants to try it).

All in all it was a good day. I had lots of interesting conversations about coding and got to know some more people (though to be honest, it's getting to the point where a lot of people know and remember me, but I can't remember them - at least I'm pretty good with faces, but it could make for an awkward meeting in the future. If you're reading this, I have't forgotten you on purpose, I'm sorry).

I do enjoy this presenting thing, though I do sometimes feel like I don't actually know what I'm talking about (ok, I don't actually know) but I think that's part of it. I don't ever want to feel like the expert, but rather I want to constantly be learning an improving.

That being said, apparently I've been included on a proposal for part of the pre-conference things (I think?) at ULearn this year. Should be fun.