Welcome to the comments, opinions and reflections of an 8th year Health, PE and OUED teacher. I have taught in Auckland, Adelaide and mid 2023 sees the move to Levin. Feel free to comment or contact me through Twitter, always keen to connect and share!
I cannot believe we've already been online teaching for 5 weeks (and home for nearly 7). But to be honest, despite missing the kids, I have really enjoyed the experience. I've got a newfound appreciation for face to face learning though, that's for sure! And I have absolutely hated staring at a screen answering myriad emails.
There have been so many positives of at home teaching though. I thought I would post some of the highlights for me during this period so far.
Creating rewindable video content for students
Setting at home challenges for my Ako class and watching the videos they've created 'together'
Students engaging/commenting in the chat box of Google Meet during video calls (I honestly think this learning environment has given the opportunity for more students to have a 'voice' than when we are in a standard classroom setting, it has been great to have people share, who usually don't speak!)
Seeing the creations from my Topic class (integrated)
Lino-it brainstorms with my Year 11s
A shared Google Slides resource my Year 12s all contributed to
Having 1:1 chats with my Year 13s about their internal (They were more organised than when we have these chats in class, as they feared awkward silences!)
As much as I'm looking forward to getting back to school, back into routine and back to connecting with colleagues and students, I've tried to take the positives out of online teaching. Hopefully only one more week to go, but I'm quite happy not having a commute and enjoy having an extra couple of hours sleep each morning!
Throughout this year, as previously posted about, I have been completing research to write a dissertation. Simplistically, I was investigating the potential for blogging within Year 11 PE. On Monday afternoon I handed in my 32 page dissertation and it felt amazing! The past two years have been intense teaching full time and studying part time, but I'm glad to get through. I learnt a lot about myself, my practice and technology within the classroom. If anyone would like to read it, you can access it here!
The staff at school were encouraged to reflect on the Manaiakalani cluster-wide pedagogy Learn, Create, Share, as well as the core of the cluster. I decided to write my reflections based on one of learners from my study, as this has been at the forefront of my mind. The study demonstrated the potential blogging has in education, particularly in specialised disciplines like PE. The students became more reflective, their literacy (traditional and digital) increased and there was more peer to peer teaching. When implementing blogging within my teaching and learning in the future, I need to provide a structure for students, ensure they understand the purpose of the blogging, and encourage students to provide further feedback and feedforward as comments on blogposts for their peers (evident from my research and literature).
Overall, it has been really difficult reading dozens of academic articles, writing late at night and including a pedagogical tool I only knew about from writing my own posts! But, my inquiry/dissertation has shown me how powerful writing blogs can be for learners, so I hope to include in future classes. In 2018, I am interested to explore literacy in Health and PE as my inquiry. I have noticed many of our NCEA assessments are evidence towards literacy credits, but some of the students struggle to write. Although their content may be correct, sometimes I struggle to read the students' assessments as they have poor spelling or grammar, or a lack of paragraphs. Therefore, although one hurdle and challenge is over, I am looking forward to more challenges next year!
I am currently feeling under the pump, like I'm barely keeping afloat. Not only have I been battling a head cold and it is the end of the term, I am trying to tackle my data for my dissertation. This post is a quick update with student feedback and major findings!
Across the whole class I was interested to know their opinions about blogging within PE, and how/if blogging effects their learning in PE. A quick Google Form showed interesting results. These graphs are a little off, because I asked students to complete the Form at the start of Term 2 and then again at the end of Term 2, so some students responses changed. However, they are good visuals for immediate feedback.
Students were given four questions, 1 representing disagree and 4 representing agree. After identifying their position on the scale, the students were asked to give a brief explanation for their position.
Enjoyment of blogging:
Half of the class enjoy blogging and half do not. What interested me was that the scale is heavily tipped towards enjoyment though. Some of the comments the students made were:
- "Because blogging is alright and it can help me for my assessment but it can get annoying at times if we do it too much."
- "I gave a 2 because I don't think what we learn in one particular class needs to be blogged to the public for every topic or session of p.e we have."
- "I enjoy blogging because it help me to remember the things we've leant. I also enjoy blogging because I can get feedback from not only the teacher but also from my peers in the class."
Blogging supports learning:
I was pleased to see nearly two thirds of the students thought blogging was effective/helpful for their learning. Upon reflection, it would have been useful to have discussions with individual students about their comments, to determine what students specifically found effective/useful (or not).
- "It helps me be able to explain what we've learnt so far and how to present it to people".
- "Blogging has helped to support my learning in PE because when I am absent I can always check everyone's blog on what they've learnt when I was absent. Therefore I can catch up with the class and be up to date".
- "Because it can improve my writing".
Blogging is challenging:
I think this question may have been too broad for the students, suggested by the variety of their responses. If I was to redo the Form, I think I would break down the four sections with subquestions, to specify what students may have found challenging.
- "It's hard to see if I'm improving".
- "It can be hard when I want my writing to be a good piece of work and when we have a time frame to complete it in. I find it good challenging but not when I'm under pressure".
- "Sometimes blogging is challenging because there'll be times where I just don't know how to start my blog post, so I'm wasting time trying to know how to start my blog".
Blogging helps with feedback/feedforward
This graph positively surprised me, as majority of the students consider blogging to be helpful for progression of learning. On the flip side, there were also a large proportion of students who didn't think blogging supported their feedback and feedforward. One thing I am exploring a little is how to give effective feedback, a skill many of our students are developing. Then, how to use feedback to grow.
- "Because it gives people more ideas & to improve".
- "Because we can get feedback and feed forward from other people around the world, not just people in our class".
- "Not really because I don't read comments on my blog and no one really gives me feedback or feed-forward on what's on my blogs".
So where am I at now?
I am focussing on three specific students and their comments and blogposts. These are coincidentally the top academic students in my class (these are the students who gave consent for me to use their data for my studies). The major themes/findings of my intervention from these three students are; blogging helps me as their teacher to identify gaps in students' knowledge, over time students became more reflective within their posts, students began to integrate feedback into future posts, and in class discussions/peer teaching increased.
As previously posted, I attended a Health, PE, and Outdoor Ed conference last week. I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to present twice this year! Before starting presentation prep, I realised that I had never created my pepeha, so this was my first step. A pepeha is how you introduce yourself, related to the community you identify as home and your ancestors, spoken in Māori.
I worked alongside Whaea Melba, our HOD of Māori to create my pepeha, which was an awesome learning journey. I found out a lot about the history of the land I grew up on and more about my whakapapa (genealogy), and became incredibly interested in my family connections to and with the land. Melba asked me to write out my pepeha on popsicle sticks, cut up each word and then match the words to practice putting my pepeha together. I enjoyed this task as I was physically moving the words into place and practising how to say the words at the same time. After a few weeks of practising, I was excited to finally present my pepeha at conference!
My first presentation was with my friend and fellow HPE teacher, Mallory Bish. Mal and I moderate a Twitter chat (#NZBTchat) together, and have found Twitter to support our journeys as Beginning Teachers. See more about the chat here, and more about our BT journeys here. Unfortunately, our chats are very quiet currently, and we are struggling to recruit new BTs onto Twitter. So, we presented about the affordances of Twitter both professionally and personally in hope for newbies to join in. Please see our Google Slides presentation below, which also includes my pepeha. We also showed/taught the attendees two digital tools - Plickers (example here) and Lino-It (example here).
I really enjoyed creating this presentation and running the session with Mal, as we have grown as professionals as well as grown closer as friends (check out our costumes below for the conference dinner - the characters from the movie Up!). We were also incredibly blessed to have been awarded together the PENZ award for 'Outstanding New Professional'! I feel so proud of our achievement, and incredibly thankful. I was nominated for the award by Celia Fleck for sharing on my blog and Twitter alongside the moderation of #NZBTchat. Until last Sunday night, I had never actually met Celia before, we had just read each other's blogs and interacted via Twitter - again showing the power of Twitter! So I feel so blown away she nominated me for this award without even knowing me. Please see Celia's blog here.
Other people who have been incredibly supportive of Mal and I, and the development of the chat are Rachael, Carl, Susie, Alex, Hayden, Myles, Hanchen, Stuart, Andrew and Paul. These people have been there every step of the way, and without their help, challenges and critiques we would not have continued to moderate our chat, nor would we have presented at conference! All but one of these people we 'met' through Twitter!
My second presentation was more of a show and tell session of my visible teaching and learning, followed by a Q&A. I showed how my students access my site to see their learning resources, and how my planning is also available for teachers. I also demonstrated some ways to use GAFE applications within teaching and learning, and then answered questions the attendees had about anything I do and know. Finally, I showed how Blogger (and blogging generally) can be used for the learning journeys of teachers and students. Reflecting on the session really highlighted to me how much I do know, and how much I have learnt throughout the MDTA programme over the past 18 months! Shoutout to Dorothy for getting me to where I am today, and continuing to push me to have the greatest knowledge possible. I also found the GAFE conference last holidays to be incredibly useful for educators of any experience with Googley things.
I loved giving back to the HPE community, and hopefully the attendees took away something to reflect on, implement into their practice or experiment with!
Recently in our RTLB sessions, we have been discussing OTRs: students opportunities to respond. OTRs are strategies teachers use in the classroom, to seek or prompt responses from students. Student responses provide opportunities for the teacher to gauge student understanding, and give specific feedback and feedforward.
We were provided with a short article (currently in draft from PB4L and about to be published) breaking down classroom engagement, specifically OTRs. The key points I took away from the reading are;
Students are engaged in activities that are new and exciting, and as a result difficult behaviour is likely to reduce. I am pleased, therefore, one of my goals this year is to learn about, and try to implement a variety of digital tools.
"Frequently, problem behaviours result from a mismatch between the environment and an individual's skills, strengths, or preferences (p. 23)" So, for instance, some of my students have low literacy skills/levels, which may be the cause of behavioural issues - a genuine lack of understanding. This relates back to a previous post about the importance of considering literacy strategies throughout teaching (irrespective of the subject).
Evidence has shown an increased student reading ability from the use of OTRs. Again, referencing the importance of literacy. See our literacy coordinator's blog here.
During our RTLB session today, we broke down some of the verbal and non-verbal responses used in our classes recently. Check out our ideas in the pictures above.
Verbal and non-verbal strategies were also discussed in depth in the reading, and provided me with some ideas to implement into the future. For example, we have mini-whiteboards in the department, which could be used in small groups to share ideas/opinions in class. Or, the use of response cards such as a traffic light system (red, orange and green cards to demonstrate understanding). A couple of tips the reading suggests when using response cards, is that there is a lively pace, specific feedback and a short time between questions.
Finally, I shared with the group some of the OTRs I use, or am learning about, that utilise technology (see Drawing with the links here). This was a great opportunity to share what I have picked up throughout the past 18 months on my MDTA journey! I am yet to try Nearpod and Mentimeter, and will be using Chelsea's blogposts (Nearpod, Mentimeter), to guide me. The others I have used in my practice and are continuing to develop.
I am looking forward to trying some of the OTR strategies I have learnt about in our RTLB sessions. One I am incredibly interested to learn about is peer teaching, as I think this could be very powerful in the classroom. I have discussed with Cheryl, our PCT facilitator the possibility of having a PCT session about peer teaching, and cannot wait to give it a go!
On Monday night, Mal Bish and I had the opportunity to share our experiences as Beginning Teachers to student HPE teachers. Hayden Viles follows us on Twitter and #NZBTchat, the chat we moderate. He tutors AUT student teachers, and wanted us to share some of the realities of being a BT - the questions unanswered at university.
We felt so privileged to have this opportunity and to give back to the community! So we really gave everything we could think of, in the one hour time slot we were given. Although the presentation was not interactive at all, we felt successful walking away, as we were able to share many things we wish we knew about before getting our first jobs, 'tricks of the trade' Hayden suggested.
These are our presentation points, and we have also shared detailed descriptions and examples of the key points (i.e. our planning) with the student teachers.
Hayden gave us great feedback/feedforward in preparation for our PENZ conference presentation in two weeks time. Our presentation will be focused on our BT journey, as well as the affordance of Twitter for educators. Please see the main feedback points Hayden gave us in prep for our presentation in the infographic I created alongside.
Overall, we feel blessed to have this opportunity. We were encouraged to really reflect on our first 18 months of teaching and what we have struggled with. We wished we had of had the opportunity to have a Q&A session with 'real' BTs while we were at uni, as some of our lecturers had been out of teaching for a while. Finally, this presentation opportunity reinforced the power of Twitter, because we hadn't met Hayden until we showed up today! Please see Mal's blog reflection of our presentation!
This term in 11PE we have started our 'Move That Body' unit, exploring anatomy, biomechanics and exercise physiology. I really enjoy teaching these topics because I find the body so fascinating! We have just finished learning about the skeletal system, and have started to explore the musculoskeletal system.
I have tried to be creative with the activities we do, to ensure students are confident with the names of the bones (and eventually muscles). We have played Simon Says, played Anatomy Arcade (Whack-A-Bone and Poke-A-Muscle) and students created their own skeletons and labelled them. For this task, students were given free access to the store room and asked to create a skeleton and then label the bones on Google Drawing.
Please see three examples of student blogs sharing their skeletal systems: Autymn, Kori-Lee and Tyler.
As one of my goals this year is to increase my use of technology into my teaching, and recently I reflected the need to have more tech in PE, I have been looking around for some ideas. Anatomy particularly lends itself to some interactive websites including BioDigital. The students were given about 20 minutes to look around the body in the 3D human body and were incredibly engaged. As I did, the students were amazed how they could zoom inside the body, and take away/add different layers of the body. Biodigital allows the viewer to explore more than the muscles or the bones, which are the greatest focus in our units. I wish I had more time to explore other parts of the body, particularly the nervous system.
Virtual/Augmented Realities are becoming bigger in education, so I would like to try and become more familiar and confident with them, so I can include into my teaching. Last year Ashley explored Anatomy 4D and I also played with Google Expeditions at the GAFE conference in the holidays, both great VR tools. PE Geek also blogged about Anatomy 4D, encouraging me to include this interesting tool into my 11PE class for further revision, and an extension of learning. I am also looking forward to including a Google Expedition of what happens to the lungs from smoking cigarettes into my Exploring Substances unit in 10Health.
In Junior Health our unit is about our Hāuora and wellbeing, to learn and revise the four dimensions of the whare tapa wha. The focus of Year 10 is to begin to interrelate the four dimensions, as they all effect each other. I describe to my students the metaphor of a bulldozer knocking over the whare - as soon as one wall starts to crash, the others crash too (although this may not happen straight away, it will happen over time). This is our Health and wellbeing in a nutshell.
To revise the dimensions and think about what affects us, Year 10s are currently completing their own PowToons. As an example for the students I created the below PowToon. This activity encourages students to reflect on their wellbeing, and is formative/summative assessment for me to gauge student understanding (or lack of).
Check out some of the students work below. I will continue to add as more students complete their blog posts. (Sidenote - I am excited for students to start blogging again!).
The first unit of the year for Year 11PE is Self Management (SM). Students are learning about what self management is and why it is important, and we have now started to discuss some strategies students can use to increase their self management. Although I have not taught this unit before, so I am struggling a little to create engaging lessons, I think we are off to a good start!
Last week we began the intro to SM by students brainstorming on this Lino-it what they think SM looks like, feels like and sounds like. This started conversations which helped me to formatively assess student understanding as well as a reflection for students about what they know. I want to refer to this throughout the unit, to see if students can build on their brainstorm.
After this, we watched the below video and then discussed the marshmallow test and the ideas discussed throughout, and the relevance to their lives. I really enjoyed seeing the students nodding, watching the lightbulbs go off and hearing the 'hmmms' and 'ahhhs' as we discussed the importance of SM for their lives and careers.
To conclude our intro week, students put themselves into groups and I gave each student a scenario which may happen at school, then asked them to create a skit, acting out their response to that situation (e.g. an assignment is due tomorrow and it's a family birthday, working in a group of people you don't get along with). This also started interesting conversations about what positive self management looks like at school.
To review the ideas from last week, and start to begin thinking about strategies for SM, below was our lesson on Monday morning. Their major task was to pick one of the latter slides as a small group and define/explain one of the strategies, to share with the rest of the class. This helped to provide students with an intro to the strategies, which I have started to build on this week.
We have explored SMART goals and self control so far. Students have begun to identify the goals they would like to work towards, with the knowledge of SMART goals. Soon I will be introducing the students to their assessment, which is based around creating goals to improve their self management in physical activity.
After the introduction to and discussions around self control, see below, we then went and played netball. Aside from four students, the rest of the class thought we were simply playing netball for the fun of it, but there were key messages within the game. Before starting to play, I gave four students a card with a task to fulfils throughout the game, but they couldn't tell anyone else what their task was. The cards were; mutter under your breath, cheat, contact as often as you can, and disagree with the ref.
I was careful to choose students who I knew would act out their tasks well, without other students getting suspicious. This worked so well. I was able to see how people responded to the situations where we had blatant cheating, when someone was going out of their way to push their opponent, and someone told the referee his call was incorrect for example. Holistically, I was incredibly impressed by the self control the students showed, and their self management overall! This has made me so excited for the next few weeks in 11PE!
And I'm back! After a few weeks skiing in Japan, we got back into it today, starting our Summer School block course.
In preparation for the full on week, we were given nine readings to read and create thought provoking questions for prior to arrival. Each of us were then required to create an activity based on one of the readings, to share with our peers today.
I thought this was a great way to put the research into practice, pulling out some of the key ideas from the text. Particularly when it is beautiful outside and we are still in holiday mode, it has been really difficult taking in the texts, as they are quite long and full on. The activities today were a fantastic way to revise what we had already learnt and pick up some other bits and pieces others had taken away from their reading which we may have missed among some of the jargon.
I kicked off the day with my activity first. My article (Kirschner & Merrienboer, 2013) was really interesting, and I was thankful I easily thought of some activities. If you would like to read it, click here. Check out my basic lesson plan too.
I began with a simple game of Chinese Whispers in two small groups, and then the class came together to play. When they were in small groups, there was slight error from the first person to the last, but considerable error between the first and last person when the class were together as a whole. Similarly, there are many legends in education, which we have come to believe true, however, how does one know if that 'idea' is credible? Correct? Made up? Or if what we know it to be now, is even remotely related to the initial idea years ago? The article explores three apparent legends, which I created three small activities for.
The class was split into two groups via email, then given instructions in person. Group 1 had three questions to answer (see the screenshot of the Google Form) in two minutes. Group 2 answered the same questions, but needed to listen to music and engage in an online chat at the same time as answering them. As expected, generally the students who were multitasking (Group 2) had shorter answers than those in Group 1, as you can see below, because of the divided attention between three things. This does not mean to say their answers are of any less quality, however they were attempting to do multiple things at once, so spent less time answering the questions. Legend 1 suggests students are digital natives, thus always need digital technology, and because they have technology all the time, they are effective and efficient multitaskers. This simple activity suggested otherwise.
Group 1
Group 2
Everyone were then asked to push three things of different weights, with the same force. Very quickly, they could see that the greater the force applied to an object, the further it moved, but if the same force was applied to different weights, the lighter object would move further. I then told them this is related to Newton's 2nd Law of Motion: The Law of Acceleration. To follow up students watched the below clip from 0.33-1.05, explaining the law a little further. To conclude, and revise what they had just learnt, the class were asked to record a brief description in their own words of what Newton's 2nd Law is, and then listen to a peers recording. I followed up with some probing questions and explained the relevance to the three learning styles many are familiar with - legend 2; students can be categorised into kinaesthetic, auditory or visual learners. Because of this widespread belief, many teachers, myself included, attempt to include a variety of activities to cater for these learning styles, when in fact no one can be boxed into one style of learning.
Finally, I gave everyone two minutes to find as many songs as they could which included my name in the lyrics. As expected, a few immediately had the country or the state return from their search, many chose the first link returned in their search, and most had visited three or more websites. To my surprise no one knew about search functions in Google such as -country or "Georgia in lyrics", to control and reduce Google's response a little. This was perfect to highlight we all have different understandings of how to effectively and efficiently research, and this was something huge they didn't know. Therefore, our students must know little about how to research effectively. So, legend 3 emphasises students need to take control of their own learning and be self educators, but how can they do this if we aren't even knowledgeable on how to find answers to things we are unsure of?
We have four more days of summer school including a reading and then it is game on with planning next week. Really excited to see the kids!
Although it has been a long time coming, I finally have my Class On Air page complete! As I blogged about earlier, we were given the task to film a lesson and post the footage alongside our resources and reflections online.
This lesson was filmed about a month ago, but I have been super busy with the Jumpstart programme, so have only just completed the editing. I really enjoyed watching my class, especially as I had lots of different angles, because I was able to see things from different perspectives and notice things I did not during the lesson. We had set up a tripod and two laptops, as well as using our iPhones and my GoPro. This was also a double period, so I had hours and hours of footage to watch through afterward!
Even if others don't enjoy, or find this lesson helpful for them, I found the process great because I could observe myself. I have been able to reflect on a considerable amount throughout this process. Manaiakalani Class on Air is definitely something I may be interested to complete after finishing MDTA... Watch this space!
As posted earlier today was the annual Manaiakalani Film Festival! This provides the opportunity for all students and teachers in the Manaiakalani Film Festival to exhibit their movies on the big screens at Hoyts.
We, the MDTA, spent the day as helping hands for the running of the day, mostly ushering students into their seats and ensuring all are ready to go on time, as there was no waiting - the show must go on!
The hype and buzz from the kids was amazing, and incredibly infectious! The students were so happy, excited, positive and proud of themselves and their peers, which was so lovely to see. I need to encourage more created from TC!
I enjoyed having the opportunity to be involved with this day, not only to see the students, but also have a glimpse into what the other schools had created. I have already reflected on the day, and what I need to improve for next year. See the short films created here (about 100!), and my film here.
As the students in my film are on study leave for their exams, I did not expect them to come to the cinema and present their film. So, I asked two girls from my SOS class, and they did an amazing job! Check out their intro below. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys from my film showed up to watch though!
Looking forward to next year, especially as it is the 10 year celebration.
It feels like so long ago since this was filmed and created, but today is Manaiakalani Film Festival day! I am excited to see some of the other films that have been created throughout the cluster. Check out the fun afternoon we had, literally just dancing!
I would have loved to have had more time, as the editing is average and I am not 100% happy with the footage, but with an extremely busy timetable, I think this is a good first go. Bring on the challenge next year. If you would like to see more of the the films from the cluster, click here :) To see more from Tamaki College check out TCTVwhich includes my film here.
