Spark-MIT Term 3 Meeting

It's great being back, these people are inspiring. The conversations are thought provoking and being here is always a pleasure! 

First of all we were asked to think about the Holy Grail - If everything in our inquiry went exactly to plan what would it look like? For my inquiry it would be all students achieving National Standard in Numeracy. Students sharing learning on their blogs and being able to comment and discuss what they have posted. 

Thinking about your inquiry and thinking flexibly - Is there an element that you could change or apply the SCAMPER model to?

My thinking was that maybe I could integrate Cyber Smart with Numeracy - get data from a range of ages - let the teachers take on the learn part while I support the create and share side of things? It is so important to teach interacting in a positive way online. This will help support both my inquiry and the Cyber Smart curriculum.

We then moved on to...

The Presentation…. 

6 minutes - Key note 

20 seconds per slide 20slides 

Re-craft to make it fit 

We talked about keynote and how to use it for this purpose! Dorothy then shared with us her own keynote. It was really helpful to see her modelling this for us. Sometimes seeing something happening is the best way to understand it! 

We discussed: 

What are you going to say in 6 minutes? Tell a story through one learner or one teacher?

Impact - what is it that you want to say? 

Tell through Data? Learner? Human Being. 

e.g. Karen Belt - this is James… this was his writing at the beginning of the year… etc. Fantastic model of what we should be looking at - we all decided that this would be at excellence level haha something to aim for!!! 

I am working through what I want to say and how I want to say it! Watch this space! ULearn is fast approaching! 

Fantastic Numeracy PD

Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of sitting in on some of a Numeracy PD session run by Jo Knox. This was really exciting for two main reasons: 
#1. I love Numeracy 
#2 It fits my Spark-MIT inquiry! 
I arrived when the small groups were discussing measurement in non-standard units. They had a photocopy of a hand and were discussing how to measure it. 

The question was then asked - if this is the giant's hand, how tall is the giant? (What an awesome idea - I thought to myself!) This was such a rich and engaging task - we discussed a wide range of math: measurement, averaging, statistics, ratios, number, units. 
Then Jo read a section from the BFG - what a way to tie in literacy and math! It was about determining what they would need for the Queen's Dinner for the giant. "If the average human is 6ft and the giant is 24ft then the difference would be x4. Therefore if the average chair was 2ft it would have to be 8ft for the giant!" (#awesome #maththisfun #loveit) 
I later found that this was a unit from nzmath called Giant Mystery. 

We were then asked to look at page 13-14 of Effective Pedagogy in Mathematics and discuss whether we felt that this was a worthwhile task or what a worthwhile task would look like. Of course, the general consensus was that the task was open, engaging, involved thinking skills, included challenge and encouraged us to think mathematically. Therefore, the task was worthwhile! 

The thing I liked the most about the session was how enthusiastic and engaged all the staff were. The tasks Jo used engaged everyone, across all levels and made proportions and rations fun! 
Thank you so much for letting me be a part of your PD Point England and thank you Jo for inspiring teachers to make math enjoyable for all! 

Reflecting on where to next for me and my inquiry - I think I need to add a tab for rich and open math tasks on my sharebase - give one, get one.... Yes! 

A Problem Shared is a Problem Halved!

Over the past few months I have been looking and thinking about different ways to create a shared resource for Numeracy. I am sure that teachers all over NZ are creating very awesome online google resources for Numeracy! So let's make our jobs easier and SHARE!!! 

I started with a Stage 4 blog - being a visual learner myself it helps me to be able to see the resource... but this is harder to get others buy in and adding to! The whole purpose is to get a resource that can help spread the work load... 

I found some interesting links by looking at Rowena Clemence's 2016 Inquiry. Her inquiry was looking into sheets for students to have exemplar's of what is expected at each level. This is kind of similar, apart from it would be having a range of resources on the same subject. 

It really made sense after looking at Angela Moala's 2017 Inquiry and speaking with her, Mark Maddren and Dorothy Burt over emails that a sheet would be the best way to go. So I changed it up and made a copy of the already created Multi-text data base for explain everythings, and multimodal readings! Thank you in advance for helping with the set up of this document Angela! You can see these in the Share Databases Drawing (Give 1 Get 1) on this Leaders of Learning Website! 

I have embed it below! Let me know what you think!