Week 27: Broader Professional Context

This week we have been looking at global trends that are influencing/impacting education, suggesting how we might address these trends/issues within our learning community.

In exploring these ‘trends’ The NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition addresses the following questions:

What is on the five-year horizon for K-12 schools worldwide?
Which trends and technologies will drive educational change?
What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions?



Original Source:http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf

Two key trends jumped out as areas that we are well aware of in our school learning community and actively addressing;

• Shift from Students as Consumers to Creators
• Shift to Deeper Learning approaches

Shift from Students as Consumers to Creators

The Horizon Report asserts that “a shift is taking place in schools all over the world as learners are exploring subject matter through the act of creation rather than the consumption of content. A vast array of digital tools are available to support this transformation in K-12 education; indeed, the growing accessibility of mobile technologies is giving rise to a whole new level of comfort with producing media and prototypes” (p.14)

At our school we see this shift as a great opportunity to empower our students and build independent, innovative and highly resourceful learners. We are working towards our children having 1:1 access to iPads and are utilising them in ways that encourage them to design, creative, innovate and share their creations globally.

For example:

• Media team who use iMovie to produce a weekly news broadcast (student-led) via YouTube channel
• Interest Projects where students have the opportunity to share their learning using multimedia (Green Screening, Movies, Slideshows, Prezis, iBooks, Animations) and publish to a wider audience through reflective blogs
• Junior students are creating digital artifacts to communicate their learning with their parents viz the Seesaw app
• Our writers have the opportunity to publish their writing in the form of multi-touch digital books and potentially publish to iTunes Bookstore.

These are exciting opportunities for our students, made possible through the use of evolving technologies. We see it as important to expose our students to these opportunities, build their tool kit and most importantly develop the learner dispositions (Key Competencies) that will arm them for success in the future.

Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches

The Horizon report also highlights the importance of deeper learning approaches and teaching complex thinking. They state that "teaching coding in schools is a way to instill this kind of thinking in student as it combines deep Computer Science knowledge with creativity and problem solving” (p.32).

This year our school have taken the plunge and decided to explore the opportunities that ‘coding’ opens up for our students in terms of addressing the key competencies:

• Using Language, Symbols and Text
• Thinking - Creative, Critical, Reflective
• Relating to Others
• Participating and Contributing 
• Managing Self

Using www.code.org as our starting point, we established a ‘Coding Club’ - a group of Year 5-6 students who meet once a week to develop their coding skills and utilise a range of resources.

Although we have only been up and running for a few months, we are thrilled with how this group have developed in terms of their confidence, problem solving abilities, creative thinking and most of all excitement for learning!!

In terms of the development of complex thinking, we have discovered some fantastic resources made freely available to us online that have really helped us with our journey. An example is our use of the Pixel Floors resources that guided us through a Design Thinking approach to game design. Here is a short video clip of our students sharing that process:

The area of computer science and coding is still very new to us, but an area that we are keen to pursue further after seeing the impact it is having on our students!

References:

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Week 26: My Professional Community

For this week's reflection we are required to take a deeper look at our community of practice looking at organisational culture, changes that are occurring in our wider professional context and how we as a community are addressing them. The community that I will refer to here, is the school in which I work part time.

It was in fact the unique culture (heart) of school that attracted me to work there in the first place. For the past 5 years I have had some involvement with the school as an external PD facilitator. Although I worked across a wide range of schools, there was something about this school that stood out for me - and that was the ‘vibe’ that you had every time you entered through the gates. I could ‘feel’ a real sense of empowerment for the children - where everyone has something to offer. It was a place that fostered a strong sense of belonging and high aspirations. It was a place that had confidence in their students to experience success in the world - much like Mark Wilson’s TED talk around building a culture of success.

Exciting opportunities to learn were accessible to all students who entered through those gates - opportunities that were innovative and highly personalised through a Reggio-inspired philosophy of 8 Guiding Principles that were recently developed collectively by the team - best described by one of the school leaders here.

Now that I belong to this community, the unique school culture is even more evident and I can experience first hand the impact it has on the why, when and how learning takes place. It is now my responsibility to help contribute to our school culture by actively engaging with the Guiding Principles and using them to inform the decisions that I make in my teaching/facilitation. It is also my responsibility to help build that culture of success through the opportunities that I can provide for them. Drawing on my own expertise in the area of eLearning I can assist our community in utilising digital technologies in ways that align with and enhance our philosophy for learning. I can also utilise my professional learning networks to give our community global presence. For example - creating digital games for other kids around the world to play, publishing eBooks to iTunes, collaborative coding etc) - demonstrating to our students that anything is possible!

Our community of practice is responsive to the changes that are occurring in the Education profession. We recognise the impact that rapidly evolving digital technologies are having on society - and that the educational needs of our digital natives are very different to those of the generations that came before them. We have had to rethink the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ we teach. Currently we are moving to a more collaborative approach to teaching and learning and looking at ways in which we can nurture greater student agency and learner independence through our Guiding Principles.

We are also looking at how we can effectively use digital technologies to transform teaching and learning - utilising Ruben Peuntedura’s SAMR model (with consideration of TPCK) to guide us. This also means improving our student’s access to technology with a move to a 1:1 programme. This year we have offered a BYOD (iPad) programme but recognise that cost of the device is a major barrier for many of our families. We are currently looking at funding options for tackling this challenge and ways in which we can provide opportunities for our parents to up-skill and experience the (transformational) benefits that digital technologies can offer our community of learners.

Week 25: Communities of Practice

What is a Community of Practice?

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”

I really liked this ‘in a nutshell’ definition presented on Wenger-Trayner’s website and will use this as I reflect on my own communities of practice and the role I play within them.

What is the purpose and function of my practice?

First and foremost my practice lies in teaching primary aged students, however over the past 8 years this role has extended to the area of teacher professional development, specialising in the area of eLearning. This has now become my passion - through my work at eTime, supporting our students and teachers to heighten their awareness and build confidence and capability in using digital technologies to enhance and transform teaching and learning.

Who are my communities of practice and how do I contribute to them?

I am fortunate to engage in a number of communities of practice that include:

• My eTime colleagues who are passionate about providing PD to our schools. Our conversations deal a lot around reflecting and continuously developing, improving refining and redefining our approaches delivering PD to best meet the needs of our schools.
• My Bromley School colleagues who are passionate about making a difference for our Bromley children and whānau.  Although I have only recently joined the Bromley team part time, they have welcomed me into their community of practice, providing me with insight into their shared vision for their community and allowed me to join them in engaging in the interactions that Wenger-Trayner refers to - that include rich conversations and teacher inquiries into “doing what we do better”.
• My online communities of practice that include my Twitter professional learning network, Facebook groups, Google+ communities.  This has enabled me to connect with fellow educators.  I admit when I first signed up for these communities I was a bit of a stalker but have since come to the realisation that in order for these online communities to function well, I need to actively contribute - or as Wenger(2000) asserts there needs to be joint enterprise, mutual engagement and a shared repertoire of responses.

What is my specialist area of practice?

As mentioned above my specialist area would be that of eLearning - an aspect that contributes to Primary Education in the broader sense. My part time role as an eLearning facilitator affords me with the unique opportunity to collaborate with talented teachers across a range of schools, crafting innovative ideas to further improve teaching and learning.  I then get to take those experiences (learning) with me as I move on to work with others. In the broader sense it’s a bit like cross-pollination but the ideas are able to grow and continuously improve each time they are shared.

Recently, I have also been working part-time at Bromley School as an eLearning specialist teacher - which I love! My time at Bromley has allowed me to engage in a whole new community of practice where I can contribute my experience gained through my eTime role. It has also provided me practical opportunities to put ideas into action in working with my students - experience that I can then bring back to my eTime role!  A bit of a ‘win-win’ situation!

This also fits well with the Wenger-Trayner definition above - I am fortunate to be constantly engaging with groups of people, passionate teaching and learning and keen to explore the potential of eLearning to help teachers and students ‘do what we do better’. :)


Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.