Literacy Exercise and Practice with Year 11

 The department has been working with Marc Milford, out literacy expert, for a while now and we have all been making literacy posters for our classrooms so we are presenting a similar approach across the department.

Hinerau wrote a blog post about  the department process here

My original blog post when I worked with Marc on the poster for DVC

Here is my version of the Explanation Poster fro DVC - this went through moderation with Marc so all the posters in the department were showing the same things and skills.

I had printed off copies of the NZQA exemplars and the students had looked at them and seen the difference between N, A, M and E. It is not only the quality of the drawings but the depth of the written analysis as well.

This is also where I got the example to put on my Explanation Poster.

After reminding them today of what we had looked at on these exemplars I gave them out a small copy of the poster on the wall and we read through it and picked out the noun groups and why they were noun groups.

They then had to read through the blank example that I had put together for them and colour in the noun groups that they could find.

We did this as a group and called out the ones we found so we could all share and colour in together.

We then looked for modals / opinions and coloured them a different colour.

Then we looked for the verbs.

The class had a really good try at this today and worked well together.

The next activity is to read information given about materials and write a paragraph about a given picture of a chair.

We did not get really into this today but we sat around together and did a description of the chair before we did any of the reading.

We will then compare the next description they do when they have done their reading about materials and when they use the skills we practiced today.

This is all on the class site here.

Student Feedback on Support Videos

 

My inquiry is based around making the class site a much more supportive and multi modal environment for the students to use.  Blog post 1 here  Blog post 2 here  outlining how I see the inquiry problem.

Part of that recently was to make examples and support videos of the design brief process for my Year 12 students. I purposefully only did part of the process to see if there was any use for this support.

Link here to where this is on the class site - as of writing this blog post, I included support up to page 4 of the design brief document.

I have recently received feedback form two students from that class who are further ahead than the rest of the class.  

Student A was the first to get ahead of where I had included support. He comes to talk to me one to one a lot and we discuss together what he is working on at the time. I asked him if the support on the site had been helpful. He had used it but he still comes to me to talk one to one. Then I asked him if the support on the site was any good as he was talking to me a lot more than the rest of the class. Did I need to improve or change it to make it more useful. He does use the site but he really likes to talk one to one so he can go over his work in detail and get ongoing feedback so he knows he os on the right track.

Student B came to me this week as she had got as far as the support on the site had and was asking me where the next ones were. I asked here if she had been using the videos on the site up to now and she said she has been using all of them. She said they were really helpful. This student is very hard working and always likes to keep up to date with her work and she said the videos helped her with this. She is very self motivated and will work at home and email me regularly to check her work. 

When I look on YouTube, where I have uploaded the videos, there is definite evidence of the videos that I have made for the Year 12's so far this year being watched.

Tracking Achievement - Year 12 - When the first credits are entered.

 To help me to see if my intervention is having any measurable effect this year, I have been looking at the stats from previous years. I have already looked at when the credits were entered last year - Blog post here.

What I next wanted to check on was when the first credits for the students were entered into Kamar for NCEA Level 2 DVC.  This will indicate at what point in the year that the work was being completed.

I looked at the monthly spreadsheets that are generated by Mrs Moore over the last 4 years to see when the first credits appeared for the Year 12 students in DVC.

The students are doing really well considering that out of the 26 students, only 9 of them did NCEA Level 1 DVC last year.  Of those 9, 6 of them have got their first credits in already.