Fostering Lifelong (e)Learning in Staff

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Tom Adams

Earlier this year I profiled Ms Donna Jones from the English Department. One aspect of that profile was a mention of her embarking on a Postgraduate Certificate in Applied Practice (Digital and Collaborative Learning). She is the first staff member at the college to be enrolled in this qualification, so as she nears course completion, it is a perfect time to catch up with her regarding her progress.

Collaboration with colleagues

One of the most pleasing aspects of the course for Donna has been the ability to collaborate with colleagues from a variety of different schools, and teachers of other year levels. These opportunities for collaboration are an important aspect of educational postgraduate study like this, as Donna describes:

‘It has given me a much clearer understanding of the big picture educational landscape across Canterbury. Engaging with teachers from all sectors has been both enlightening and inspiring.’

A second aspect of the course that Donna has particularly enjoyed is the hands-on time that is spent learning through technology. Donna has thoroughly enjoyed working with stop-motion, robotics, and AR. This increased awareness has manifest in a new-found interest in the potential of concepts such as gamification to help raise engagement and achievement in her English classes.

Finally, she has gained a greater understanding of the theories of leadership, particularly Transformational Leadership in 21st Century Learning.

Applying Learning in the Classroom

Students making stop motion

Whenever staff attend Professional Development courses, one measure of success of the applicability of that development, is the impact that the new learning has on classroom practice. One particularly pleasing aspect of Ms Jones’ participation in the course is the immediate applicability of her new learning.

She has already been able to develop different ways of assessing existing concepts. An example of this is the use of stop motion as a way of assessing understanding of theme within a novel study. She has recently done preliminary work to investigate the use of an ‘Escape Room’ with Year 9 students which complements her implementation of a cross-curriculum project solving real-world problems; used last year.

‘The course has been a reality check and reminder that if we as teachers don’t engage with 21st Century technology and integrate these into ou programmes, we are not providing students with the correct preparation for their future. The pace of change in classroom technology is both exciting and frightening.’

Climbing the SAMR Ladder with Google Earth

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Tom Adams

Last term I blogged about the planned use of the SAMR scale in my Year 13 Geography class. The teaching of this unit took place in the final weeks of that term, so now is an opportune moment to reflect and update the progress of this unit.

The planning of the unit reflected my desire to account for, and more fully utilise, the extra teaching time that should be released to me due to my Substitution of note taking in class, for the delivery of class notes using OneNote. Last year, my first year using OneNote, I reflected that I was not satisfied with the amount of extra teaching I was able to do to help my students apply the understanding of the material presented in class. I simply could not adequately account for that time.

Basic Unit structure using the SAMR ladder

As part of my planning of the unit, there were specific tasks that I incorporated in order to help student apply the new knowledge, rather than copy it down.

Using Google Earth to Identify Spatial Patterns

One of the most engaging tasks within this unit was using Google Earth to create a resource that identified the spatial patterns that Tourism Development has created in our Geographic Environment; Queenstown. As you know, Google Earth is awesome.

In our case we were interested in the spatial variations in the locations of visitor accommodations; specifically Hotels, Motels, Backpackers and Luxury Lodges, and attractions; both allocentric and psychocentric. A more ‘traditional’ approach would be to have students develop a paper map resource with the specific examples accurately mapped; in fact this approach may well form part of an answer that a number of my students choose to complete during their November NCEA examination. However, by doing a similar task using the Placemark feature of Google Earth, students can create a resource that is much more adaptive and maliable.

Spatial Variation in location of Accommodation

The students found the completion of this task engaging and motivating. After an initial period when a few of them wondered what the purpose of the task was, it quickly became evident to them the power of the layered approach of the data. When it came to discussing and recording the detailed reasons why the spatial patterns existed the students were easily able to create links between the location of accommodation or attractions, and the topography and infrastructure of Queenstown particularly.

The final aspect of the task was adding this summary understanding to the map. This was done by adding a final layer of Placemarks and entering our summary information to the map. Upon completion the placemarks could easily be exported, saved, and shared as a single .KMZ file.

Sharing the Learning

A pleasing aspect of the task was the enthusiasm of the other Year 13 Geography Teachers at St Andrew’s College inviting me into their classes to replicate the task. These students were also fully engaged in the task, and the feedback from these staff was extremely positive. It was great to see a wide range of students, with extremely varying levels of experience with technology, being able to articulate the benefits of the task structure. Hopefully we will see reinforced student understanding of this content when it comes to my revision program for their upcoming examinations!

Online Voting For Student Leaders

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Sam McNeill

The aim of this blog is always to share some of the things going on with technology at St Andrew’s College and, wherever possible, provide some ideas and inspirations for other schools as well. Some of these innovations take considerable planning and resources such as our work with PowerBI for Educational Analytics, whereas others like this post about online voting are relatively simple.

Recently, the College’s new Head of Senior College Mr John Ruge approached me about moving Prefect voting to an online system. Immediately, there were some questions around how to do his securely and fairly. Paramount in my thinking was ensuring:

Results were anonymous
Students and staff could only vote once
Restrictions could be placed on the number of potential Prefects one could vote for
Time limits could be enforced for when voting stopped.

A number of people recommended using something like Google Forms or Office365 Forms, both of which are excellent products when used for what they were designed for. The major limitation, however, was there is no way to ensure the voting would be both anonymous and limited to one vote per person. I decided to cast my net a little wider and utilise the excellent Techies For Schools NZ Google Group as well as the Australian MITIE Forum and see if I could crowdsource some alternatives. Some of these included:

http://www.simplyvoting.com/
http://qualtrics.com/
Using Google Forms with students to enter their NSN to uniquely identify them for only voting once, and then using a basic MD5 hash to “anonymize” the identifier but still allow for unique responses.
http://www.surveymonkey.net/

It was the latter that caught my attention because it was suggested that using some of the more advanced features around emailing would achieve my main aims of anonymity and restrictions to one vote per person.

SurveyMonkey Setup For Prefect Voting:

We used a basic MS-Query to extract student and staff email addresses and first/last names from Synergetic, our Student Management System. We then loaded these into a CSV file with the first row indicating the header fields:

We needed to analyse votes from three different groups of people:

Secondary School Teaching Staff
Current Year 13 Prefects
Current Year 12 Students

Consequently, we decided to make three identical surveys, but have the different groups above loaded into separate CSV files. Upon setting these up in SurveyMonkey we needed to select “Send by Email” to ensure unique links generated for each voter, rather than a generic link that could be forwarded to people outside the intended voters, or used more than once by the same person:

Choosing “Send by Email” was a key part of achieving the defined aims of online voting.

When choosing “Send by Email” you are invited to submit users from a range of sources and we used the CSV file we had already generated:

You are then able to compose an HTML message to the voter that is sent by SurveyMonkey based off the information from the CSV:

Note the salutation: the use of variables [FirstName] and [LastName] will personalise each email based off the information from the CSV already loaded into SurveyMonkey

Numerous additional variables can be set, some of which we made use of because of our aims included:

Changes: Respondents can change their answers on any survey page until they complete the survey (alternatively you can allow no changes at all, right through to changes after it’s been submitted but before the cut off date
Anonymous Responses: exclude ALL respondent information (names, email addresses, IP addresses, and custom data) from your survey results (we chose this, but you can collect all of the above information if you wished)
Cutoff Date & Time: This was important to ensure timely voting:

The end result, when sent, provided a really smart looking HTML email that encouraged staff and students to vote for 2017 Prefect Leaders:

Note the personalised salutation, the HTML “Vote Now” button and the footer indicating the URL is unique to the recipient.

When votes are opened you can track in real time the number of votes completed, as well as email opens and partial votes, for example:

One of the final tweaks I learnt through this process was how to limit or restrict the number of choices a voter could make from a multi-choice question. This was significant as voters were allowed to select up to twenty student names from the long list of candidates. There were some help instructions available, but the key areas to check were in the options of the multi-choice question:

Note that:

For this to work “Require an Answer to This Question” is ticked
You choose “at most” for number of choices if you want voters to be able to select up to but not exceeding a number of candidates
You can customise the error message if a voter chooses more than the allowed number of candidates when voting.

With voting completed, it was easy to export as a PDF the graphs showing the candidates with the most votes and allow the leadership team to analyse the data. Now that we know we can generate personalised, single-use and anonymous voting systems through SurveyMonkey I can anticipate we will use this in other areas as well.

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Innovative & Engaging e-Learning from St Andrew's College

Monthly Archives: August 2016