Sometimes teachers refer to BYOD as ‘Bring Your Own Distraction’. Certainly managing device use in a classroom presents some different challenges but in my view that is not a reason to avoid leveraging the potential of each student have a device. There is a really good post from Core Education on stragtegies to manage distraction in a 1 to 1 class – check it out here.
Some other tips:
Be more interesting that Instagram: if the learning is more engaging that other alternatives, you won’t have a problem with digital distractions.
Lead by example: if you are checking your email, online news, social media during the lesson then maybe you can’t expect students not to…
Over the last 4 years I have become really interested in anaylsing data in schools. So when I heard about the Data Champions conferences hosted by the Ministry of Education in Wellington I jumped at the opportunity. I managed to be accepted to present a short workshop on using data in transition from Year 8 to Year 9. So hear are my notes from this day long mini conference.
Nice view from the Ministry…
Craig Jones – Deputy Secretary
Current state of educational data in NZ
Mark Hooper – Deputy Rector OBHS
Wanting to avoid Y13 slide. To make the best predictive model, at the eariest stages, with the best interventions, monitored and measured for their effectives at the individual level.
“Our data tells us our stories” (in place of the normal previous years results speil.
Attendence and discipline used to be the main driver of interventions. Now they use a combination of a number of factors (Academic, report, attendance, pastoral).
They will use 4 years of this data to create a predictive model. Using support from University of Otago Stats department.
Tip – use Notes tab on Student Info to add detail from academic conferences.
6 weeks between report being written by the teacher to being delivered to the parent. Comment is out of date.
Custom reporting for KAMAR: Completed via a Google Form. Then can get an overview of progress in Key Competencies AND Numeracy, Literacy, Science capabilities, Social Skills.
Chris Casey – Data Scientst
“Dirty data done dirt cheap”
“There is nothing we can do using expesnive software that can’t be done using free software”
Andrew Jefferson – Tracking Junior Progress using KAMAR
Made a custom KAMAR report that compares two asssesments from different years. Link to instructions
Rowan Johanson – increase teacher roll completion and student attendance.
Get from KAMAR the attendance entry log. ‘Class Attendence Marked Audit Log’ report in KAMAR. Clean the data by removing cover teachers (attendence entered by another user) and sports days etc. Put in to Google Sheet and allow a bunch of filters etc.
Created a Department Dashboard and a Teacher Summary. Can compare department to department, teacher rankings…
Made change from 52% completion to 77% in two years.
Attendance interventions for students
Single export by Deans, then import into Google sheets, each form teacher given Form class Dashboard.
Jon Nash –Using Google Sheets to Improve Pastoral Tracking
Set up KAMAR export to Google sheets to track interventions/attendence etc.
Commands:
=query: treats the source as a database using SQL queries
=importrange
=index & match: like vlookup but more accurate
Can get a script a in KAMAR that exports to a location, then you can also get this to be imported into a Google sheet. Possibly with the Sheetgo Add-on?
Damian Campbell – Making Data Engaging
Have a theme e.g. Star Wars, Avengers, Lego. Talk about variation as well as averages. Greater variation with smaller sample size.
Billy Merchant – Data worth looking at
Attendance vs NCEA pass (<80% is a flag)
PAT to number of L1 Creadits (<3 is a flag)
Readiness to learn/key competencies (Less that 3.0/5.0 is a flag)
Add in Gender and Ethnicity and 3/5 flags gets intervention.
Timeline – changed ‘Mock exam’s’ to ‘NCEA Derived Grade Exams’ to raise the stakes.
Lesson ideas: introduce the topic of patterns in Maths using music patters. Have students play around with some of the tools then discuss how pleasing music is based on number patterns. Could also use to make an original soundtrack for a video or podcast.
Works best with a phone. The site gives you an ‘item’ (based on an emoji like a mouse, keyboard, thumbs up) to find with your camera. The AI recognises the correct item and you move on to the next emoji.
Lesson ideas: perhaps best left for Friday last lesson… Or work in 2s or 3s to encourage collaboration.
With the recent Christchurch terror attack I have been pondering on our responsibility as educators. After having some challenging conversations as a parent with my own son about watching the gunman’s video (it popped up in his Instagram feed as a ‘recommended link’….), I’m wondering if all our students here have had similar conversations at home. There are two main issues for me – the lack of tolerance and build up of hate that motivated the attacks, and the sharing of the livestreamed video on social media. Let’s look at the social media aspect first.
Some of the big Internet companies have come under scrutiny about the role their services play in the distribution of harmful material such as the shooters video. In fact NZ’s Privacy Commissioner stated in the aftermath that
“What we haven’t seen and what is of real disappointment to me, is any kind of acceptance of Facebook’s role, any sort of critical self reflection, any contrition, or response.”
While Facebook responded with a typical “We did the best we could” approach, the fact remains that their platform, along with others such as Instagram and Youtube help spread harmful material.
Facebook’s story of how quickly the video was spread is enlightening. From an estimated 200 users watching the live stream, to 4000 views before it was removed by Facebook, to over 1.5 million attempted uploads to Facebook within the first 24 hours (of which 1.3 million were blocked).
The video and associate manifesto is now classified as ‘Objectionable’ an as such now has a number of legal implications for sharing. There have been published accounts of individuals being charged with breaking this law but this seems more like example discipline with the proverbial cat already being let out of the bag.
So what responsibilities to the big Internet companies have. Do we rely on them to point our moral compass in the right direction? From this recent incident we can see that even if the big companies try to censor or remove hateful posts, the immediacy of sharing which is the foundation of social media can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So education, and particularly values education, becomes so much more important in this media rich age. And schools can play and important part.
In terms of the hate that apparently motivated this attack, I was particularly proud of how our country responded. Our Prime Minister has been lauded internationally for how she demonstrated her leadership (and even talk of a Nobel Peace Prize?!)
But it was not only our country’s politicians. On a very local level, the student leaders at my school organised a memorial with 50 empty chairs on our outdoor stage. Students had a chance to write a message on a post it and place it on one of the chairs.
The Tauranga Boys’ College memorial
I think schools still do have a responsibility to help point our young people’s moral compass in the right direction. While most schools, like my own, have a scheme of work somewhere that delivers digital citizenship lessons (in our school it is the PE department delivering an eight lesson unit to all the Y9s), I think we are all teachers of values. I found in my own practice that this event was is one of those teachable moments we should take advantage of. Even just have a chat with a few kids in your class, rather than some fully blown articulated lesson might make a difference. I found that students did want to talk about what happened, particularly the spread of the video.
Here are some links/resources that might be useful if you want to have some similar discussions with your students.
Feel free to share any others you have come across as a comment to this post.
Use Storyboardthat online or paper or Google Drawings or whatever… I used Keynote on the iPad (exported as a movie below so you can see my awesome sketches…)
Step 2 – Capture footage
I used Stop Motion on the iPad and a range of Lego characters to tell the story.
Step 3 – Add audio/titles/transitions
Using the iMovie app on the iPad, I added some of the sound effects, filters, title and transitions to produce the final cut.
Watch out Peter Jackson, this is the next big hit…
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