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Week 32: Changes in Practice and Future Plans

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As this experience comes to an end, and it’s time to reflect on where I started, what I have thought about/learned and where I am now. I have based my reflection on the Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model. What I believe my teaching style was very traditional.   This is to do with my length of service – a 1977 start. Traditionally, if students collaborated, it was seen as cheating, and would lead to classroom management issues as students chatted and were quickly off task. In 2017 as I headed into the Mind Lab course I took a punt and experimented with 20% time with my Year 10 students. My students loved it. In my mind 50% of the groups were successful and 50% were not. The unsuccessful was generally to do with the frustration with the software not working as expected rather than the students not participating as expected. The results of this action I believe is that we are back to two Year 10 Digital classes in 2018 as against one in 2017. The surveys held at
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Week 31: Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness

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A culturally responsive pedagogy understands where their students have come from. The teacher values the experiences the students bring to the classroom and uses the students experiences to build their learning. A culturally responsive pedagogy has five elements: 1.     Knowledge about cultural diversity 2.     Culturally integrated content in the      curriculum 3.     The development of the learning community 4.     Ability to communicate with culturally diverse students 5.       Culturally responsive delivery of instruction (Gay, 2001) The Education Teachers’ Council have developed a new code of ethics and this has an emphasis on teachers embedding in their pedagogy cultural responsiveness. I first learnt about culturally responsive pedagogy through a He Katahitanga Professional Development training in the 2,000’s. This information informed me about strategies I could use to block the ‘deficit’ theory of my ‘high priority’ learners and to improve the rela
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Week 30: Contemporary Trend in New Zealand or Internationally

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As a Digital Technologies teacher, the trend that is the most relevant to my practice is the uptake in Coding as Literacy and the changes the adoption of Digital Technology as a curriculum in England, Australia and New Zealand schools is making into our classrooms. I have become aware what the requirements of this curriculum and the need to develop an understanding of Coding for the past five years through the increase in opportunities for my students such as #SHE; Code Club; Computer Science Unplugged. The drivers of change in the rapid increase in knowledge I need to adopt in my teaching are Professor Tim Bell and his team at the University of Canterbury and Associate Professor Peter Andreae and his team at Victoria University. Their vision of providing the CS4HS (Computer Science for High Schools) conferences for Digital teachers has allowed us to adopt the new Digital Technology Curriculum (Hangarau Matihiko) with a relatively smooth transition. Tim Bell’s vision of
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Week 29 – Professional Online Social Networks

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Adopting social media has made more than a significant impact on my craft of teaching. It started with finding amazing teachers such as the Daring English Teacher: ( https://www.facebook.com/TheDaringEnglishTeacher/ ) who introduced me to Teachers Pay Teachers ( https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/ ). Descriptive: The NZACDITT mobilize forum has been extremely generous with dragging me into the 21 st Century and exposing me to the benefits of social media.   Through this means I discovered the Hobsonville Point Secondary school teacher’s blogs.   Gerard McManus http://oneteachersview.blogspot.co.nz/ ; Danielle Myburg http://missdtheteacher.blogspot.co.nz/ ; and others. This school has shaken up the New Zealand Secondary School traditions and has encouraged me to review my very traditional teaching style. This exposure has opened my eyes to changing the way I teach my students. By reviewing what other teachers have been doing, I have been able to experiment using ideas
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Week 28 Influence of Law and Ethics in Practice

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As we head towards BYOD in our school we have after much debate chosen to incorporate the cloud based software Microsoft 365 into the day to day lives of our staff and students so that after three years it is now the norm for all students and staff to log in at the beginning of the day and log out at the end of the day. This brings with it the dilemma of students being able to communicate with their teachers 24/7 if they so wish. In order, to keep this relationship professional as per ‘The Code of Professional Responsibility’ outlined in ‘Our Code, Our Standards I never sign an email to a student with my first name; I always use the address I require as a teacher. When I am commenting on their work within One Note I prefix it with my initials and the date. Any comments have a formality about them with no text language used, and I attempt to always spell check carefully. I keep these boundaries/systems in order to remain professional and keep the ‘line in the sand’ dist
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2018 Inquiries

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For 2018 I have two inquiry topics I am focussing on. The first with my Year 11 students I am aiming to improve the success rate of my NCEA Level 1 class by encouraging more working in groups and submitting group responses to assessments. and the second with my small class of Year 13 students. I am intending to open up the Year 13 programme so they can choose the topic they wish to research and the medium in which they develop their digital response. For example two boys are in a Young Enterprise team and they successfully dipped their toes in the water of Start-Up Enterprise and wish to continue with their company in 2018. Their decision is to find a technological product that they can develop for both their Year 13 Digital course and their Year 13 YES course. To support me in the development of my teaching practice I use 5 main areas: Colleguial discussions, both in my department, within school staff and within my Digital Technologies subject specialists. Twitter, has a group
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My Learning Journey

40 years is a long time to be teaching. Several jobs but one career. I have found that every 10 years there is a major change that I have to adapt to. From manual typewriters to electric typewriters, IBM golf balls, word processors, acorn computers, dos computers, windows operating systems in its various forms on various computers, to the point now I carry a very powerful computer in my pocket. Once we hit computers, School Certificate took a turn to the Framework and unit standards, then the move into Achievement Standards and the Framework for all subjects and no more percentage grades, no more just a pass, but Achieved, Merit and Excellence grading scheme. In the current cycle of 10 years there is a heavy emphasis on computer coding/programming and now 21st century learning. In order, to be three steps ahead of students I have had to continually upskill, sometimes on my own, sometimes with national roadshow professional development, sometimes from colleagues. Since the introduc
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