Classroom Discussions

After listening to Mr John Hattie at the Festival of Education last weekend in Auckland, there were a lot of things that I picked up on about my own practice.
One of those things was this statistic :  "65% of teachers do not do classroom discussions" and this stuck with me as I am guilty of not doing this very often at all. This was one of the things that Mr Hattie listed as making a measurable impact to student progress in the classroom.

Things that do matter. In rank order #FestivalofEdNZ pic.twitter.com/3RCfcCadFq
— Karen Ferguson (@karen0968) March 21, 2014

This week I thought that I would give this activity some conscious effort and decided to start with my Level 1 group. On Monday, I got them all round the front of the class and we looked at a selection of movie posters that I have collected together into a Google Plus album.
They had to tell me about the following things :-

• What is the focus of attention?
• How has this element been made the focus of attention?
• How does your eye flow across the design?
• How has colour been used to good effect in the design?
• What style of lettering has been used and why?

Here are the posters that we looked at in this session.

Posters

To start with, they were a bit shy and I had to prod them individually to get them started.

Then it swung the other way, where they were talking over the top of each other and not listening too hard to what each other was saying. It was an ok start though, at least they weren't refusing to talk at all and they had an opinion we could discuss and compare.

Today ( Friday ), we gave it another try, and we sat round the front to discuss their own work as a whole group. They have done their design developments and are at the stage where they have to make decisions about what they are keeping and what they are not going to use for the final design. I thought it might be fun to do this as a class discussion, so they could listen to other people's opinions about their work.

They did this really well today and gave some quality feedback to each other. They gave feedback on the layout, the choice of pictures, the font and position of the main tittle and anything else that they thought was relevant to bring up.

Here are their design developments that we looked at today.

Level 1 Poster Design Development 2014

I am feeling the benefit of these discussions already, even though we are only 2 in to the process. It is giving me chance to listen to the students verbalise what they have been learning and get to know them a little more. It is good to see them have the confidence to discuss each other's work and give feedback that is useful to the others in the class.

I will definitely be doing more of this.

MIT14 ~ Where are we up to ?

This presentation describes briefly where the project is up to at the moment, 8 weeks in.
It has links out to Google Plus Communities that the students post in, the class site that they work from and links to student work. It ends with a Year 11 student talking about how he produces his work in DVC this year.
If you want to know more about the project, click the link on the last slide.



Here is the video from the end of the slide show...

 

Green Screening on iMovie 10

We have begun to organise ourselves for our next big budget TCTV production... ( ok, no budget is more like it ... )
One of the things that we need to do is some green screen action, so we decided to have a little trial go today. We had a try last year when we made the opening titles for our Doctor Who presentation for the Manaiakalani Film Festival.
All we had to do last time was to drop one clip on top of the other and a nice handy dandy little menu would pop up with useful things you could do, like green screen. This was on iMovie 9 and since then, I have got a new mac book and am using iMovie 10, but I haven't tried to use green screen yet.
I taped some green sugar paper to my board, cut out a print out of the Millennium Falcon and put it on a piece of rolled up green paper and we had a go. I was flying the Falcon while Dj manned the iPhone doing the recording.
A nice shot of a suitable space background was dropped into iMovie and then we tried to drag the Falcon footage on top of it. A very small list of options came up, but no juicy ones like side by side, or screen in screen, or green screen. Frustrating.

After much muttering and grumbling, I found this really useful video on YouTube.
Thank you Mr Mitch Davis - link to his YouTube channel here.




It basically boils down to placing the background footage on the timeline, with the green screened footage above it.

Once you have done that, then a new option appears on the adjust bar at the top. It is the one on the left. You can then choose this option and a drop down appears where you can choose from the more interesting options for editing, like green screen.

Here is our trial today. It is not very long but I am very happy with the outcome. It is definitely something we can do, I have learned something today and we have had a chat about how ere are going to improve it for the real filming.

Apple, you know I normally love you ( except for the standard apple mouse, but that is a whole other conversation ), but this was not the smoothest upgrade transition of a task that was once so easy. It took some shuffling about to find out how to do this today. hhmm.....

Level 1 Feedback about using Google Plus Communities

I recorded my Level 1 students today, talking about what they thought about using the Google Plus Community within the group.

So far we have been using it for practice activities and to upload development work to receive class feedback. They are just about to start using this feedback to write the analysis notes of their own design developments.

Fiu




Josh and Fiu






Joseph and Aidan




Moana




It is good to hear from them that they are OK using the community and are not shy about sharing their work with each other.
What is interesting to hear is that they find it easier to give feedback on other's work than on their own.
"It is difficult for them to see their own mistakes"

What was good to hear from one of the students, was about his lack of understanding of what he was doing. He is one of the lower aSStle scores from last year in Year 10. He was nervous after the recording that I might be angry with him for saying that, but if that is how he is feeling then that is what I need to know! It is no good just saying what he thought I wanted to hear. I am so happy he was honest with me.
What I need to do is structure how to use the feedback to create bullet points of analysis for their own work. I have started a document of sentence starters, on a Google Document, but I am thinking now that I will produce these on cards that the students can have in front of them as they are analysing their work. The Google doc method could still be used if I structured the starters / questions / layout of it so that the students filled this in with the feedback that was put on their work.
After talking with the HOD English, structured sentence starters is the way to go with this.

On a practical note, this was really easy to do. I used the audio recording facility on my iPhone. I then emailed the files to myself. Logging into SoundCloud was really easy, I just clicked the log in with Google button to start the account. What is slightly disconcerting is, because I logged in with my Google account, it took the icon that I have on Google, so my weemee is HUGE on the screen for each recording when it is embedded. I have changed the embed option coming from SoundCloud on the first 3 of them and left the last one as the bigger embed to see the difference. I much prefer the smaller embedded player.

This was a very useful exercise with the students today and it has certainly got me thinking a LOT.

Add Ons for Google Docs

There has been a big thing on the net at the moment about the new add ons for Google Documents, so
I had to give some of them a go to see if I could use them within my DVC lessons.

Check out this Google video on how to install the add ons.



The first one I looked at was Twitter Curator.
This allows you to type in a search term or hash tag and it will search twitter for tweets about that for you. You can then browse them in the side bar and choose the ones you want to insert on your document. I like this choosing feature, as it means you don't have a document full of things you really don't want or are irrelevant.
I am looking forward to using this next month at the Gafe Summit in Auckland.
The document I used to try this out and analyse it as I did so is here...

The second one that I looked at today was TextHelp Study Skills.
This allows you to highlight text that you are reading through in different colours. If you choose your colours based on categories that you want to be grouped together, then the really good bit is that it will then group those coloured sections together in another document. This will save copying and pasting or retyping.
I am going to try this out with my Level 1 DVC class quite soon as they need to analyse collected texts about their chosen architect, so this will be a useful tool.
What I don't like about it is that it won't continue the same collection if you stop and go back to it later.
Hmm...something for them to work on.
Link to the documents here.

Playing with Screencasting using Snagit on my new Chromebook

I got my new Chromebook today. It is an Acer C720, the new model that the students are getting this year.
I am loving it already. Easy, fast, light weight.
One of the first things I had to try out was screen casting using the Snagit app from the Chrome web store.
I had seen it mentioned on Google Plus, so had to give it a try.

In the Chrome web store, there are two entries for Snagit, an app and and extension. You need to get both of them.

After you have got both of these, open the app and click on the settings wheel. You need to tick the "enable experimental features" option. Once you have done this, the input audio levels bar will be seen and if you make a noise, you will see this pick up the sound.

Now when you open the Snagit app, you will see this box. This will hold all of your screen captures and it has the button to start a new screen cast.

The first time that you do this, it will display a warning box that you need to enable a setting in chrome. It has a link to this so click on through to it. It will take you straight to the settings that need the enable option clicking.
Restart chrome and you are ready to go.
When you click on new screen recording now, it asks to share you screen, so choose yes.
You can then do everything on your screen that you want to record.

This box is down at the bottom left of your screen, and when you are doe, you click on stop.

When you have finished, it will display this box where you can review your recording and see if it is good enough. If you don't like it, just hit the cross to close it and you can start again.

You can also choose a file name here, at the top where the date and time is as a placeholder name.

At the bottom, there is a share option and you get to choose from your Google drive or YouTube account.

Here is a quick one that I made to try it out. This is hosted on YouTube.

Here is a link to a site page where I embedded the video that I had saved into my Google Drive.

On the whole, I found this easy to do and the quality of the output was really good.
I have not tried this on any other device yet, so I don't know if the quality is different then, but I am pleased with the result today.
Very useful......

Sharing the Love ~ Junior Assessment

On my project pages for the junior students on my class Google site, I needed some way to link the assessment scheme for Technology to the tasks that the students were doing within the projects.
On the layout of this page, I had set it up with a left sidebar so that the assessment could be put in there to line up with the tasks. That left sidebar has sat there blank for a few weeks while I come up with a way to do tis that is not just a load of words that will confuse the students away from the project steps.

Today, I decided to make a series of buttons using Adobe illustrator, that will link the students to the assessment schedules that match with the task they have been asked to do.

I has already embedded the folder with the assessment schedules in it on the front page of the juniors section, so these documents were already open and available to the students, but they were not really going to that page unless told to, so I wanted this information more "in their face".
Link to this junior page here.
A How To on how to embed a folder from your Google drive onto your site here.

I made the buttons nice bright colours so the students could see them easily on the project page, but they are not the main focus. I left the design as simple initials of the assessments, using different colours for the different schedules so they could easily see the differences in assessment for each section.

These buttons are hyperlinked to the document outlining the assessment schedule for each one, so if a student wants to see what they are being assessed on for each task, it is there next to the instructions to be clicked on. They can see what they have to do to reach each curriculum level and what level they are working at.

Link to the Pop Up Book project page here, to see the plan in place.

Live Editing and Blogging with an iPad...

It was Year 8 open day at Tamaki College today, with all the Year 8 students in the surrounding intermediate schools coming for a college experience day.
As the person in charge of TCTV, the school blog site, I decided to try a first on the day, and shoot, edit, upload to YouTube and put onto the blog all from one of the school iPads throughout the day in a series of instalments. Previous to this, we have done all the editing etc on macs after the events, not during.
The boys doing the presenting were up for the challenge so we gave it a go.
The iPad already had what we needed installed, Safari and iMovie for iPad.

It all went smoothly. It was easy to shoot the video, with the sound coming through surprisingly well. Editing was ok on iMovie, although we could have done with some headphones or ear buds as there was always a lot of noise around while trying to do the editing. Transferring from iMovie straight up to the school YouTube account was generally smooth with one wrinkle when it decided to not play the game. At this point we ignored it, went and shot some more video and came back to it when it had stopped sulking.
The one fly in the ointment today was the inability to get the embed code for the uploaded videos from YouTube on the iPad. When we hit the share button, the embed option was there but it would not work.
So, we had to cheat a little on our original plan and take a chrome book around with us too so we could do that final stage of putting the video from YouTube onto the blog.

Visit TCTV here, if you want to see our efforts today.

The team.... John Campbell and Paul Henry apparently.... !! ( alias Samsom and Eli )

Using Google Plus Communities for Analysis Work

I have set up Google Plus Communities for all of my groups this year in a bid to address where I see the main weakness of the DVC course. We always seem to have trouble with the notes and analysis, both of the work of others and the work produced in the lesson.
This week, Level 1 and Level 2 groups have been using the communities quite a lot more.

Level 1

We are at the stage where they need to start producing layout ideas for their posters to show the work of an architect. Part of what they are assessed on is their understanding of and use design elements such as proportion, layout, white space, size, visual impact..etc ( Achievement standard here )
Their understanding of the architects work is covered in the preparation work and they are taught the skills needed to use appropriate techniques to produce the presentation
( in this case, we use Adobe Illustrator ).

I set up a google drawing with some set elements on it for them to manipulate.

Their instructions were as follows :-

Make a copy of the Google drawing shown here.
You have the following elements to layout on your page :-
1 picture needs to be bigger than the others
3 smaller pictures
The title
Some text (there are 2 blocks included here, you can split it up more if you want)

Move, rearrange, resize, change the font.....
Link your layout onto the Google Plus community for everyone to see and critique.

Link to the original here



The students had about 20 minutes to get a copy of the drawing,  work on their first layout idea and get the Google drawing linked in the Level 1 Google Plus community.
We then had a chat about the comments that they were going to make on each others work. Making a positive comment was easy, except just saying that part of the layout was "nice" was frowned upon and changed to reasons why they liked something.
We chose to call the second comment "helpful critique". With this one, they had to say how part of the layout could be improved, but in a supportive way.
As usual, no one really wanted to be first to start the comments, so I went first. I will only do that for this first time though. They need to fly solo.
I was pleased overall with the comments that were coming in about each others' work. They seemed to be looking at the work and using the things we had been discussing.

Check out the community on the link here, and see what they have been saying.

Level 2

The task for the level 2 group was to collect images that related to the Art Deco elements in the given grid. I chose to get them to do this on PicMonkey, as they are all familiar with this and could concentrate on the content.
They need to understand what makes Art Deco what it is in terms of the main elements that are key to the design era.
Being able to see each others collages as they were posted helped with their understanding, as other people use different images to illustrate the same word.

Part of what they have to do in order to gain a higher level of understanding in this project, is to compare Art Deco to another design era. Link to the achievement standard here.

I have posted up a Google slide show with 2 images of similar objects, and they have to choose which one is Art Deco from the two.

Here are their instructions....

~COMPARE~
Make a copy of the this Google slide....
On each slide, indicate which one you think is the Art Deco design out of the two.
Share your copy of the slide back here so we can all see your answers.~




They made a start on this today, so when they create their Compare and Contrast diagram between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, they will have a deeper understanding of what characteristics are key to Art Deco.

Check out the community on the link here, and see what they have been posting.

Things I am happy about during this process :-

• The students acceptance of posting in this way and for everyone to see it.
• It doesn't take too long, so it doesn't have to be the "only" thing that happens in a lesson.
• The ability for the students to learn from what the rest of the class post.
• The simple way that it all works together and they can just "post" without worrying too much 
• ( although one student will insist on posting publicly and forgetting to put it in the community )
• The students can look at what is here and use it to help them when they have to do analysis in their own project work.
• My Level 2 group is spread across 2 classes, so they can see what the others are doing and vice versa.

Putting Photos on Your Google Site using an iPad

I have been experimenting recently with putting multiple photographs on a Google site using an iPad. This was originally in response to a question I was trying to help with and then today I was asked to do a blog post about it to help others.
These are screen shots of the process I went through.
I have used a combination of the Google Drive app and the Chrome app, both of which are free.
Make sure that the photos you want to use are on the iPad.

I started by using the Google Drive app for the iPad.

Click on the + symbol on the top right and choose new folder. Then name your new folder.

Open your new folder from the drive list and click the + button again. This time choose to upload photos or videos.

It will ask to have access to your photos on your iPad.

Open the photo album choice and tick the photos you want to upload into the new folder.

Your nicely uploaded photo files will now be sitting nicely in their new folder.

Next, I used the Chrome app to work on my site.

Open the site page that you want to put the photo folder, and click on the pencil to edit the page.

On the insert menu, choose drive, then folder.

Tick the folder that you have just created and put pictures into.

Next, make sure you tick the option for the grid view. This way, you get a preview of your photos when the folder is embedded on the site page.

You embedded folder looks like a normal Google gadget when your page is in edit mode.

When you save your page, you can see the embedded folder with the photos that you uploaded. These photos are shown in thumbnail mode due to you ticking the grid choice.

Moving it Around....

On my timetable this year, I have my Level 1 group for a double period on Friday mornings. This week we have been using the apple suite in the Tech block to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator, but we can't do that on a Friday morning as it is being used by our lovely intermediate visitors for their Technology rotation.
This morning we were going to start looking at thumbnail sketching, how to do them and why you would use them. It is an extremely hot day today so we grabbed the bean bags and went over to the new covered outside area by the Marae. The Level 2 ladies were able to work on their netbooks to continue with their Art Deco work and the Level 1 group started producing their thumbnail sketch practice drawings.

Here we are working outside in the lovely cool shade.....
Link to the whole album here

They had to look at what was around them where they were sitting. Close up / mid range / far away.

The thumbnail boxes were not to be too big and the sketches had to be quick and loose, not too much detail.

Check out their sketches here. I have scanned them in and emailed them to myself and uploaded the files to a Google Plus album. I used Flickr in previous years to put the students work photographs on but I am having issues with the embedded album showing on the class Google site. We are using Google plus for communities this year, so going here for their photos too will be fine.

Next week they have to grab their own work out of this album and put it onto their own DVC Google site.

Here is mine to show them what to do as we did it today....

Using Google Drawings for Group Work

I had my year 10 class for DVC today and we are onto thinking about where they can get the best information about the technology project they are doing. We are designing pop up books for young children and the students need to get information from a variety of sources. My original intention was to do this thinking activity in small groups using an online app called Padlet. After using this at the end of last year and having a few issues with it not showing up on the Google site page after it was embedded, I changed my mind today and went for using Google drawings for the group work. ( all the class have their own Google sites to embed al their work onto for the project, so I didn't want them to have embedding issues ).
The class got themselves into groups very smoothly today, without any nagging from me, which was a good start. There is plenty of areas in my room so each group got a space to work in. One person in the group had to start the drawing and share it with the rest of their group and me. If group members have a device with them, work on that, or work on one of the class computers, or sit next to someone and tell them what to type!!...They all got online.
To get them started, we had a class discussion / shout out of some ideas. Once they were underway on the drawing, they got into the flow and all started adding ideas.
The revision history of the drawing is a great way of making sure that everyone in the group has contributed in some way to the discussion in the session.

What we need to do now is analyse what each group member has added. One way of doing this, and adding value to what they have done as it makes sure they read and evaluate what the others have put into the same document as them, is to highlight what they think is the best suggestion on the page and use "insert a comment" command to explain why they have chosen that idea to move foreword with. There is room on the worksheet (link here), for them to add up to 3 information sources that the group chooses to pursue. One of the things that students have to do in the higher levels of SOLO taxonomy is to analyse and choose from a variety of sources of information,  and this also takes them into the higher levels of achievement with the Technology assessment scheme. I am hoping that by doing this as a group activity to start with, they will gain experience and confidence for when they have to do this on their own.

Popular choices for research that were evident by chatting at the end of the lesson, were the library, the kindergarten next door to the school and the new entrants class in the school up the road. I'm feeling a relationship between them here ( a trip out of the class perhaps!! ). In their defence, they are very good suggestions, as it is combining all the good points of looking at existing material out there, talking to experts ( the teachers ) and to their clients 

( the children ). 

Here is their work, which I have saved out of Google drawings as image files.

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

Group 4

Group 5

Group 6

MIT 14 First Meeting

I had the pleasure today to be part of the MIT 14 team hosted by Telecom. We had out first meeting of the year in their FABULOUS down town headquarters.
The area that Lynne from The Telecom Foundation gave us for the day was lovely with lots of different areas for different things over the day. A very modern learning environment!!

We started the day with a look at what the research projects are that the group are undertaking this year.

With everyone having very different age ranges and are from different schools ( mostly ), the focus of the projects cover a range of areas. The link to everyone's inquiries is here. We had to read the inquiry intention of the person sitting 2 away and think of a "good" question for them to get them talking about their plans.

One of the things that came up in the conversation for me was how to track the progress of the Level 3 students that I have in my class who have not done the subject since they were in Year 10. With the Level 1 students, I can look at their Asstle results from the end of last year and for the Level 2 group, I can look at their DVC achievements from last year if they took it. This does not apply to most of my Level 3 group. How can I have a level start to compare them all from and know their abilities? A suggestion from Dorothy was to use their English NCEA results from the previous year as a guide to their reading and writing ability, as their analysis and note writing is what I am hoping to increase in my inquiry this year. ( DVC students are always surprised at the amount of writing and thinking there is in the subject !! ) I like this idea as it can also be used for the Level 2 students ( some of whom are new to the subject too ). So that is going on my to do list for next week, as will talking to their English teachers from last year.

I looked at Helen's plan for her work and even though Helen's inquiry is very different to mine, as she is looking into embedding the key competencies within her teaching of her students, what I took away from her today was the use in the classroom of the specific language that you want the students to use. Helen had not been using the language of the key competencies long before her students were using it in conversations with her and each other. My students in Design and Visual Communication always need to use specific design language when they write their analysis notes with their work and the use of this is specifically required in a number of the Achievement Standards. We need to start using this language as part of the everyday things that they hear in the classroom / lesson, then it will not be such of a problem when they have to write using these words. The Google Plus communities that I have set up for each level will also help them to practice using these words to describe design in a no pressure / no assessment situation.

So...lots on my to do list after this meeting. And so it starts!!!

The Telecom building is GREAT!!

Always Wowed by the Stats on Flickr

It was a busy week for the school Flickr account with photographs going up from both the Year 9 settling in activities and the Powhiri.
What has amazed me is the number of hits the account has had over the weekend.
I feed the photographs through to TCTV, the school blog account and to a variety of social media ( Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook ).
I have noticed over the time that we have been using the Flickr account that more people are coming to Flickr directly. The students know that the photographs will be there, and we all know how much they love looking at them selves, so they go there directly after a school event has happened.

What has happened over the weekend though, has blown me away!
8,000???

It's all go...

It has been a busy first couple of days back.
I had all my seniors make Google sites last year to put all of their work onto. They shared their sites with me, which made my "my sites" page VERY long and difficult to find things in.
This year, the students have made all their sites open to the world and have emailed me the url link to their home page. I have made a table with the links to all of their sites on the Student Work tab on the DVC site. I can then navigate to their sites easily from here without it bogging down my sites page. This also makes them accessible to anyone else visiting the site to see what the students are working on.

The new to DVC students had to make the site, make all the tabs for the projects and put them on the horizontal navigation bar. They then copied the calendar from the DVC site onto their own Google calendar and embed it onto their homes pages.
Those who had a site from last year had to archive their pages into drop downs under a Level 1 or 2 tab and then make the new pages for this year's projects.

Here are links to the pages on the DVC site that will take you to the Student sites. They are not all there yet as they have not all completed the tasks and sent me the link. ( It is only day 2 back so I will let them off... )

Link to Junior sites
Link to Level 1 sites
Link to Level 2 sites
Link to Level 3 sites

What we did then was get sorted out on Google Plus.
My reason for using Google plus this year is mainly to support the students with the notes and analysis and the higher thinking skills that they need to access the higher levels of achievement.
My notes and links for this are here...

I think my students have had a bit of a shock at the pace of the last couple of days.
Get used to it!!!!.....

DVC NCEA Results...

So it is that time of year when the external results are out. It is a mixed bag for my classes this year, so I am a mixture of delighted, pleased, grumpy.

Level 1

I am delighted by the Level 1 results for Design and Visual Communication this year. All of the students produced work for one external assessment ( AS91063 ). This is all of the free hand sketching that they produce over all of their project work. ( standard details here ). It is good that the students have passed this assessment as the skills in this standard are needed for just about everything else that they draw at all three levels. As most of my Level 1 class have said that they are coming back to do Level 2, then they have a really good starting point for their sketching to continue onto the higher level.
The other external assessment (AS91064 ) is a technical drawing. ( standard details here ). We did this work in the October school holidays and it was a "volunteer only" standard. I automatically enrol all of the class into the other standards as the minimum for the course.
The internal standards were all achieved in the project work that the students complete over the year. Some of them were VERY last minute, but we got there in the end, after a bit of nagging.

Level 2

My target for this year was to improve the Level 2 results, as this is the second year through for the new aligned standards. Overall, I am happy with the improvement shown from last year. I only had 4 Level 2 students last year spread across two groups, so it was difficult to get a clear picture of how the new standards ere settling in. I am especially pleased with the improvement in AS91337. It is a much bigger group of students and we spent a lot of time using different techniques to produce their design ideas, both with drawing and modelling. The big improvement here was the note making and analysis that students have to do in this standard. We used Google docs to do a lot of this so that we could read, feedback, add to, change, as we went along. We also did whole class activities online to analyse work and use the correct design terms and language. I think that this gave the students a lot more confidence in what they were saying about their own design work.

They all completed the work on the design era (AS91340) so the whole group achieved this standard, but it was at widely different times through the course. I think that this had an impact on the lighting project (AS91342), as they have to use the information gained from the design era to design their light. The slower ones were the non finishers of the lighting project. This is a definite target for this year - opportunities outside the class time to complete the design era work so this does not hold them back on the next part.

The bach project was a new one this year (AS91341) and replaced the poster from the previous year (AS91343). The bach project was a very popular one with the students, and we got to use online design tools (floorplanner.com and planner5D ). The main problem here was time and attendance. A much tighter grip must be taken this year on the progress through this project so the deadline target is met. This is the last project of the year, so there is nothing to be done about a deadline this late as the posting of the work away to Wellington is the next thing.

The technical drawing external (AS91338) was volunteer only like Level 1. We did the work in the October holidays and I had two boys taking up the challenge which was great.

Results 2013

Results 2012

Level 3

This has been the first year of the new standards and this is where the grumpy bit comes in.

I am not a happy bunny at all and there will be serious changes in how I do things with the Level 3 group this year. I need to reassess how I supported and approached the work last year, and work out where I can build on what we are doing in terms of :-

• skills - this is especially important for students who come with no prior work at Level 1 or 2
• use of the Google site for support and instruction out of the classroom
• use of Google docs for more collaborative work to support them
• the requirements of the external standards and making this clearer to the students

I have not included a screen shot of these results as it is makes me grumpy to look at them. 

Moving on....

I have been using the work we have been doing in the department on including SOLO taxonomy into our planning to develop one of my Level 1 project (see this here). I now need to work this planning and support into all of the the other project instructions on the Google site that I use for my class. 

The Level 2 students responded really well to the online designing that they produced for the bach project, so I need to include more of this in the design development stages of the work, at all levels. This also gives the added benefit of work being able to be produced at home, as they proved last year.

Overall, more group work will benefit all the students at various points during their project work, as this gives them more confidence in what they are doing with their own work. There are lots of opportunities and methods of doing this both using Google apps themselves and the large range of linked apps. 

Like I said... Yay and Yuck.... 

Extending Student Thinking in DVC

We have been doing a lot of work in the Technology department recently about looking at how we are using SOLO taxonomy to extend the thinking of our students.We aim to hit the new year running with a plan to get the most out of our students. We want them working more often in that top level of Extended Abstract. Link Here to pamhook.com about Solo Taxonomy.

So the question to me is, how can I extend the thinking of my students in DVC ( Design and Visual Communication, formerly know as Graphics ) up into the higher levels of SOLO while using the online learning environment that I have been creating for my students.

We started by thinking about how to get our junior students up to level 5 of the curriculum by using SOLO as the structure in order to do this.

• What could I do to support the students with the higher level of thinking skills that are needed?
• How can I use our online work to structure this?

As a department we were thinking about questions that we can apply to our project work to extend the students. My questions developed into something a little more like activities as I got a little carried away. Link here to the document I put together.

I then started to apply this to the project planning on the class Google site, on the junior page.

The project for my junior students is designing and making a pop up book for a young child.

The project link for this is here...

This was a good place for me to start this, as it was giving me lots of ideas of how this could support the Level 1 course and then so feed through to the Level 2 and 3 courses. 

Where the weaknesses are in these DVC NCEA courses is the student analysis of what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is this ability to analyse and then act on what they find that moves the achievement up into the merit and excellence levels. It also corresponds to the higher levels of SOLO as this is how NCEA structured their standards and assessments. If I can build some of this into the junior projects, then I can step them up from this if they choose DCV at NCEA. I very rarely have any issues with the standard of the drawn work from the students who choose DVC at Levels 1, 2 and 3 as they are talented students. The issues have always been the written element to the courses.

On the junior site page, I have tried to structure the support to help their thinking by :-

• asking a lot of leading questions that link back to what they have just been learning
• giving them key words and ideas that they can use 
• using group work in the junior school to collect, collate and structure research work
• presenting back findings to the class in a method of their choice to get peer support
• worksheets that lead them to collect and analyse specific information from a variety of sources, and structuring them to be able to use that information to form conclusions and make decisions

I have then tried to apply this thinking to the first project that my Level 1 students do, which is produce a poster to promote the work of an architect.

AS91069 - Promote an organised body of design work to an audience using visual communication techniques. This is worth 4 internally assessed credits.

As there are also 4 literacy credits attached to this internal assessment, it is really important that the students write the information for the poster themselves and not just do a copy and paste job from the internet.

The students also have to analyse what visual communication techniques they have used, what is the most effective and why.

There is a link to this project page here...

I have made a screen cast to show how I have changed my Level 1 project to support the students with their work. I hope that this will lead them to be able to complete their work to a much deeper level of analysis and understanding, so enabling them access to the higher levels of achievement.

So....moving on....

I am determined that next year will not be a repeat of this one in terms of the posting nightmare that went on. ( see my previous blog post ).

To those ends, I have spoken to the school's Principal's Nominee about the procedure for contacting NZQA about this issue and what we can do with it. She is going to speak to the School Relationship Manager and go over the points that I have sent to her. They will then give us a direction and contact point that we can go to.


Here are the points that I feel are important to get across :-

• All DVC students produce an online Google site for their research, notes, analysis and photographs of mock-ups, testing and models.
• They produce their design ideas on paper with traditional media.
• Design development work done in 3D as models is photographed and presented on their Google sites.
• Design development work created using online applications is presented on their Google sites as embedded objects or screen shots of the work produced.
• This year, in order to be able to hit the submission requirements, everything had to be printed off from these sites, which was a very long job using lots of paper for coloured print outs.
• We need to be able to just send the drawings and sketchbooks that have been produced using traditional drawing media and everything else needs to stay online, with links to the student online Google sites being sent to the examiners in order for them to see the rest of the project work. The drawings are then still seen in the context of a whole project, and the analysis notes that go with them are there to be viewed.

So, I hope to be able to report progress on this.
We shall see.

NCEA external posting not a lot of fun this year.....

Ok, so it is never the most fun time during the year, getting the Level 1, 2 and 3 DVC work together and parcelled up to send away to be externally marked. ( Design and Visual Communication, that used to be called Graphics ). It is a case of leave me alone and don't talk to me and any offers of help are brushed off. I turn into mrs grumpy pants for a couple of days while it gets sorted out.

This year, I made a start on Friday as the day had moved forward from its normal Wednesday slot to Tuesday, and I know it always takes me about a day and a half to do it all. 

My HUGE gripe this year though is having to print out all the students research work, photographs of models and analysis notes that they had done on GAFE products  and embedded on their class sites.

It took a good two and a half hours of my day today printing off a big pile of work onto paper just so it could be posted to Wellington as part of the projects that the students have done. 

I agree that the examiners should see the actual drawings on paper that the students have produced, as scans and photographs of them do not do them justice, so they should be posted. No problem or argument there, but where is the sense in printing all that stuff today, and trust me there was a PILE of it, when all I had to do was print a list of shortened URLs on one piece of paper for each examiner, where they can go online and see the students Google sites with  all their work on. 

Come on NZQA, the students are wiping the floor with you in terms of working in the 21st century. I am sure all your examiners must have access to computers and the internet. Surely? Why can't the way the students work be the way they are marked and assessed too?

Ok, rant over. I have had a REALY busy day today, made worse by not being able to get on Chrome on the school desktop with my log on and Internet Explorer being such rubbish with GAFE products ( no, it wouldn't print from IE, stupid thing ). After having a mild meltdown, I ended up on some one else's desktop log on and my chrome log. Makes no sense but it worked and the printing commenced. 

Please, NZQA, sort ya life out.

Here is a link to the portfolio submission instructions.
Everything has to be able to go in the bag they send, as a portfolio.
I am going to contact them and start a dialogue about being able to supply links to Google sites for some of the project work. Wish me luck....