Keynote speaker at the EdTechTeam Auckland Summit 2019 is Lisa Highfill. Best know for hyperdocs, she provided a thought provoking and inspiring start to this 2 day conference. Here are some random links and notes from her opening session.
“Miss, do you think it is finished?” “Do it till it’s done..”
Submit project via Form. Share with Sheets
Design tasks with low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls.
Bookbentos – an image with a book at the centre and items that were in the book or features are around the outside.
Just heard about #BookBentos from @lhighfill! Such a cool idea! @JuliePJones and @mrdearybury, check the hashtag out! The book cover goes in the center, and then students place items or artifacts that relate to the book around it! So much more engaging than a book report! pic.twitter.com/mq9rs2wuRX
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.
