Inquiry 2023 - Baseline Testing

 My Inquiry group this year are my Year 11 Design and Visual Communication class. The focus of my inquiry is reading. 

Today, I did a baseline piece of reading and writing with them. I explained what we were doing and why

• A teacher has to inquire into something to improve over the year
• The thing that I had chosen was reading
• The reason I chose that is the work that is required to move from achieved to merit and excellence involves a lot of research, reading and writing and their design work.
• A baseline piece of work is required so we can see if any improvement is made over the year due to what the teacher is doing differently
• No help is given during this baseline piece of work so it shows what the students can do now, by themselves.

This is the piece of reading that I gave the students. I asked ChatGPT to give me information about stainless steel. They had to read it then give two summaries - one about how stainless steel would be good for their chair design and one where stainless steel would not be good for their chair design.

Here is the writing that the students did today based on the reading from this document. We wrote it by hand so they would not be able to use the internet for anything. They had about 20 minutes to do this.

3D Printed Cookie Cutters

My Year 7 class this tech rotation are having a go with Tinkercad to design and make some cookie cutters that we can use to make some sugar cookies in the kitchen.

They are not my class at the college, they come from a local intermediate for their Technology lessons. Luckily on Tinkercad, you can make classes so it is easy for them them to get into the class and start work. 

It also makes it easy for me as the teacher to see the work they have been doing as I have access to it on the dashboard.

I had set the work up onto my class site so I could include examples, information and videos.

Link to class site

I have made some example cookie cutters for the students to see the process and we worked through the first one as a class.

We worked through the first, basic design together last Friday so I thought I would print out those ones for them before they come back this Friday to try the more complex ones. We will then make the cookies with them on Friday next week.

Staff PLD - Reading Skills with Marc

 Following on from the department PLD with the school literacy specialist, Marc, we have had a whole school PLD session. Blog post from the department session here.

Today, Marc wanted us to choose a piece of writing that a junior class would have to read. I chose the method for making Teriyaki Chicken as that is what my Year 9 class are going to be doing this week.

Marc has spoken about using images and stimulus to understanding and jumpstarting any prior knowledge. 

Link to my document - I have given the words to link to the images, started the information transfer with a couple of examples and colour coded the work to link to all of the templates I have made for writing that use the SOLO structure. (the yellow and green sections where they are identifying and listing)

PLD - Understanding the PAT Results with Marc

Non Fiction Reading Skills

Link to document

Example - worked through with Marc using data transfer and summary techniques.

TOD - Planning for DVC NCEA Level 1 2024

 Today we were given time on Teacher only Day to plan for next year when the new NCEA Level 1 standards start.

Prior to the day, I had found some useful links and saved them onto Google Keep

Design and Visual Communication
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/technology/design-and-visual-communication?view=assessment

Materials and Processing Technologies
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/technology/materials-and-processing-technology?view=assessment

Electronics - Level 2 Unit Standards
https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/framework/explore/domain-full.do?frameworkId=278802

Understanding NCEA Changes
https://ncea.education.govt.nz/understanding-how-ncea-requirements-are-changing#:~:text=guidance%20as%20well.-,In%202024%3A,a%20new%2060%2Dcredit%20qualification

I has also prepared the standards into breakdown sheets similar to how I have them on my class site at the moment.

Year 11 2023 example - AS91067 - where it is on the class site

I always find making these sheets extremely useful as it makes sure that I am preparing work up to excellence level. As this is the case, I thought this would be a good thing to do with the new standards.

Here are the prepared documents.

DVC Level 1.1 9000 (internal)

DVC Level 1.2 9001 (internal)

DVC Level 1.3 9002 (external)

DVC Level 1.4 9003 (external)

Before I could start these, I looked at the 3 suggested course outlines that are on the website. I printed these off so that I could read them properly and decided to look in depth at two of them. 

Link to Annotated Course Outline 1

Link to Annotated Course Outline 2

My next steps are to choose one of the course outlines, make sure it is adapted and suited to me and my students and then fill in the standard breakdown sheets with the types of activities that we could do next year.

The course will consist of the two internal standards and one of the external standards for a total of 15 credits for the year. 

The students do 5 Level 1 courses over the year so this will give them a potential of 75 credits, where they will only need 60 to pass NCEA Level 1.