Innovative Learning Environments Expo 4: Bellaire Primary School
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Innovative Learning Environments Expo 4 Monday 25 October, 2010 at Crowne Plaza, Torquay Presentation transcript
Modification of existing environments Bellaire Primary School
Speaker 1: We’re in the category of modifying existing environments. Obviously we’re going to talk a lot about that but we’re sort of going to move into some other sort of areas with curriculum and also ICT but it sort of falls all under that banner. I think with those headings today that there’s a lot of cross over going on anyway, so we’re going to talk about our most recent journeys over the last couple of years and what’s happening this year as well. Sorry that it’s a Powerpoint. I guess it could have been a bit better than that but we’ll work with that first.
I’ve got the SMS set up on Amy’s laptop over there, I think, so feel free to chuck some questions at us via SMS but if you like to do the hands up thing we can do that and get the mic over to you because they want that for the podcast, I think. We’re going to start off talking about our Senior Learning Unit so Grade 5/6 area. The space was created through an existing space. They knocked down walls in one end of one of our corridors, which used to be three classrooms and a staff room and they also utilized a breezeway area, which I’ll show you in a minute and we moved in in late Term 3 2007. I was there for the whole build up of it. We moved in with 5 teachers, 118 students and you can see the list of the spaces that we had there. The Grade 5/6 kids from 2006 had some say in the way that the space was created. They had meetings with the school leadership team and they put up their ideas about what they would like their learning space to be; what would be the best learning environment for them to work in.
A couple of things that didn’t get through to the final hurdle was the swimming pool and the spa that they wanted in there. It didn’t quite get there but a few of the things… those 5 items listed there were basically things that the kids wanted; particularly the theatrette. They wanted a space where they could do some arts types of activities and things like different types of furniture. They were shown different types of furniture that they liked some of the stuff they saw; furniture where they could actually work in a collaborative way and things like bean bags and more laptops and that sort of stuff. We really went into that space in 2007 and it was sort of Term 4 really when we actually got going with a real student directed curriculum. We sort of threw everything out the window a little bit and for just that final Term 4 decided “Right, let’s have a crack and give the kids some choice,” and give us a bit of a challenge of what we might teach them, so it was a really ‘have a go’ attitude from the staff and students.
This is the space. I’ll talk about that a bit more in a minute. This is the space currently as it is in the 5/6 unit. The middle photo will, sort of, show where the corridor used to be; those two poles in the middle almost sort of where it used to be and there’s SMARTboards, Interactive White Boards in each area. You can see the Theatrette on the bottom left corner over here; that was an old boiler room, so great use of space there and over on the right there’s stairs going down there. If you haven’t been to Bellaire before, that is an old breezeway and toilets; we have heaps of male and female toilets so they basically sliced them in half and then filled in some of the breezeway and oops and I’ll just go – I’m hopeless at going back – and they sliced it in half and now that’s a new learning space down there so that’s fantastic, really innovative use of space, I thought, when we moved in.
Speaker 2: Okay, well with Bellaire having such a big focus on developing learning communities and with the SLU leading the way, I suppose, as one of the first areas to develop into a Flexible Learning Space with a learning community, we thought we’d talk about also the Middle Learning Unit, so for at Bellaire it’s the 3/4’s in the Middle Learning Unit and I guess this is where the developing the existing space was really interesting, so with the SLU was reasonably custom built with all the spaces that Rick just spoke about. With the Middle Learning Unit we’ve been really lucky this year to move into one of the new BER buildings but the journey for us began many, many years before actually being lucky enough to move into that space. So it did begin, as Rick said before, with the traditional classrooms either side and the corridor down the middle, so I guess one of the first challenges was to how to develop that traditional space into a learning community where students could work together and teachers could work together.
Well before I came to Bellaire the double classrooms actually had the wall knocked out, so I’m sure you would have seen that before in many schools. The wall had been knocked out and the concertina doors had been put in. During my time, I’m the leader of the Middle Learning Unit, one of the challenges and one of the first steps to modify the space was to develop that vision and culture to open the doors and begin team teaching as a learning community and as a team rather than being separate and ‘you’re down one end, you’re down the other, here’s my desk, here’s your desk, stay down there, we don’t want to look at each other’, so … opening the doors. So one of the very first steps to developing the space was to, as a team, having that shared vision of “Yes we want to team teach,” “Yes we want to build those connections,” in order to personalise the students’ learning and as a result, the doors were opened and that became the culture in the middle unit and teachers began team teaching across double grades.
One of the other interesting parts was, of course, that corridor space people often see as obviously corridor space but it’s a wasted space often in schools, and I guess to develop that corridor space at Bellaire we’ve modified it in, I guess, two main ways; the first way that we trialled it last year before moving into our beautiful new space was that we trialled it as learning space, so we opened up the doors between all the classrooms and students were actually able to learn out in the corridors so we don’t actually have bag hooks or anything in corridors. All the bag bays were moved to the end; we got lovely custom built bag bays where they could be stacked on top of each other, the hooks were all removed and we actually put whiteboards and banks of bean bags and made little learning corners within the learning space and that did work really, really well. There were some downfalls in that, in that it was difficult to supervise the whole corridor space so that was a little bit tricky.
So, I guess, we moved from using it as just a learning space into perhaps what you would see now if you went down a traditional corridor space at Bellaire, would be half of it would be learning space perhaps, and the other half has often been transformed into a shared planning office space for staff. So taking those desks out of the classroom, making it a teaching and learning space and actually moving those desks into the corridor space, and you can see in some of our corridors at Bellaire, now this is actually a photo of the junior unit because we’re obviously in our new space but you can see there’s actually been a wall put in, which is something a little bit unusual I guess in this day and age that we’re knocking walls down, we actually put a wall in to create that space so that it’s a shared office space for the staff to, of course, have their desks, which is really important but also during their team planning time, they can be in their space and have that collaborative approach to planning.
Speaker 1: It gives, also, we’ve had some questions about like how do the kids and staff change, make that big change into going from a traditional classroom setting into that and already because it’s happening in the Prep unit and the junior unit who are still in a slightly traditional classroom, doing this is already giving them a bit of a leg up until the time maybe when they do move into a bigger space where it is more open and I was going to change that word ‘open’ to ‘flexible’ after hearing Grant this morning because it is a better word, he’s right, but I didn’t get a chance. So these are current photos. Amy said before that her and I are both working in the 3 /4 unit this year which is in our new BER building, which we only moved in at end of Term 3 didn’t we? So there’s actually seven grades in this space. It’s a really, really big space. You can see that at the top right corner. You could probably kick a 50m drop punt from one end to the other.
Speaker 2: They tried when we first moved in I can tell you. (inaudible 8.07).
Speaker 1: Once again, we had students with a bit of a say again in the way that they wanted the space. For example, a reading cube was something that they had a say in, a place to sort of have their books and also a place to read. It’s got a giant communal space in the middle here where we have our neighbourhood meetings with the whole unit, there’s a kitchen there, which is great. We’ve already had lots of science stuff happening around. You can fit a whole grade of about 26 around that big long table, which is excellent and also doubles as a mini kitchen area for staff too, there’s a little fridge and kettle and stuff; it’s great. There’s three wet areas and there’s a communal staff office with all the seven staff in it again. Like there is a communal office for the 5/6 unit as well and as I said we only moved in at the end of Term 3. Our unit is a little bit more structured for the kids than it is for the 5/6 kids and we’ll go into some more specifics at how that works in a minute. The kids do move around a little bit, especially their reading and writing is still a bit more structured than what it is for the 5/6’s. There’s lots of reasons for that. We’re going to talk with a couple of our students soon, in about the next 15 minutes on Skype hopefully about their experiences in the unit, so before we go into a lot of it so you can hear what they think.
Speaker 2: I think like as I said before the moving from the open environment that we created from an existing environment into here has been a perfect transition, so it’s been really, really useful and we’ve been able to mirror lots of these things within our school in other areas.
Speaker 1: Cool. So we’re jumping back now to the 5/6 unit. This is an example of a student timetable in the 5/6 unit. They each get their own personal timetable. I mean I could talk about this for a long time; I’ll try and skim over and apologise if some of it’s confusing. Monday works as a day where they don’t really have... it’s fixed Monday, so workshops are a bit like traditional lessons, I guess. They sign up to workshops, they can sign up to any sort of teacher and we find that some kids work better with some teachers, so they’re going to... maybe some might like to choose a workshop because of a teacher; some might like to choose it because of what they’re offering but they have a series of independent sessions, that’s what IS is here and the independent sessions is where they go on and work. They choose an area in the space where they’d like to work; they might be on a laptop or something like that and they work on a project that they’ve been given in the workshop. The reason why we have all workshops on a Monday is because it’s a good, it sort of sets them up for the week then so you don’t sort of have kids coming to you Tuesday and Wednesday, you still do now and then, but “I don’t know what I’m doing” because they’ve been set up for the week.
At the moment, this year maths is the only class where they don’t have an independent session; we used to but we just found it hard when they are working on a maths project with correction and things to keep up with it. That was one of the reasons. All their specialists happen on a Thursday and Friday and that’s when the team are released, most of the staff have planning time together in those hours there. I’ll talk more about the staff timetable in a minute but this is something that they take around with them, so they move around to each workshop with... a lot of them have and I’ve forgotten the word where all their books fit in.
Speaker 2: The bag rails? Oh the document folders.
Speaker 1: Yeah it’s like a document folder.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway their timetable is with them the whole time. This is an example of a staff timetable. It’s hard to see, I know. This is one of the hardest things to do and I heard Point Lonsdale talking about it before about … timetabling, there’s something that you’ve really got to look into first when you’re doing something like this. So if you could just look at one hour at 10 o’clock on a Monday you can see all the teachers that are taking a reading workshop and there’s 2 teachers taking a conferencing and I’ll talk about conferencing more in a minute.
A conference is where you have 15 minutes with a kid in your grade or home group each week so you get released to do that. So what would happen is if I was teaching, all these people might be teaching reading and let’s say I’m Steve here and I’m conferencing, the beauty of the SLU is that we have an extra teacher in there; so the school’s employed an extra teacher to be part of the Senior Learning Unit who takes all the workshops while that home group teacher is conferencing. So I might teach reading, writing and deep knowledge for a term but I might not teach maths and the extra teacher will take my maths group while I conference with my kids in that hour. It’s pretty full on but it seems to work. You fit about 4 kids into your conferencing hour. The yellow blocks here are the specialists and the kids move off to art. They have art, PE, ICT and what’s the fourth one, French LOTE.
And we had a really good leadership team. Our leadership team came to the party here and organised, I guess it’s a bit of a privilege, to organise that time so our staff, our 5/6 staff could have that planning time together and it’s all sort of blocked on those two days there. Yeah. Feel free to shoot some questions about that one. I think I’ve sort of covered everything about that. It might seem confusing but it does seem to work. Having that extra teacher really helps.
Trust licence. This is something that each of the 5/6 students get at the start of the year. It’s the front and the back. Trust licence is with them at all times. Most of the time they stick in their bag and it stays there and this is sort of their licence, I guess, to have all the privileges that they get being in the Senior Learning Unit. These values on the back come up, the students came up with these themselves with a little bit of help from the teachers of course at the start of the year, and the idea is that if they’re doing all the right things, I guess, it’s like any sort of behaviour procedure at any school that they get to have all these privileges. Now, if you sort of move through your behaviour plan, I guess, and it comes to a point where if they keep doing the wrong thing or they’re abusing those privileges that they lose their trust licence. If they lose their trust licence, it gets stuck on the wall in the teachers’ office; it’s actually right on our door, so when you walk out you know who’s lost their trust licence because they lose some key privileges and that’s where they don’t get to choose where they sit in independent sessions so either the teacher, the roving teacher who’s surveying that independent session has to tell them where to sit. They also lose the privilege of walking to specialists on their own.
We allow our 5/6 kids, a little bit like at high school, to go to specialists on their own and that’s sort of one of the privileges they get. They lose that, so most of the time the kids really want to earn this back if they ever do lose it. We’ve only really had maybe one or two students, I can only think off the top of my head one or two that... and there’s always those ones that it didn’t really apply to and you’re obviously going to go in some different ways to help them but the trust licence is a really big thing and particularly in those parent meetings that you have around interview time, the kids are talking about, “Well I’ve never lost my trust licence,” and “These are the things I get to do with my trust licence.” So yeah it’s been pretty powerful.
Speaker 2: Okay, one of the ways that we catered individual needs for students in the flexible learning spaces and all across the school is personalised learning goals, so this is an example here of the senior learning goals and you can see that there’s the reading, writing and more reading, sort of, extension reading from the back and students work towards these goals all throughout their workshops and they have the opportunity to conference and reflect and set their goals during some conferencing time with their teacher, as Rick spoke about, each week so when they conference with their teacher. And these goals actually are in place all across the school, so you can see that these are the middle learning unit ones, the ones that we use with the middle students and they have the same, sort of, flavour in that the students can choose or select or conference with their teacher to have an individual goal and it’s based on the individual learning needs so that they can be working towards something that is just right for them. And it also gives them that opportunity to be actively engaged in driving where their learning is going and where it should go next.
Speaker 1: And that language is starting at Prep and by the time they get in the older years it’s sort of well entrenched. We do maths – I mentioned maths before. Maths in the 5/6 and 3/4 unit happens a little bit differently. Just getting back to the Senior Learning Unit, the kids do get choice in their reading, writing and their deep knowledge sessions. They get some form of choice, so if we are covering narratives they might choose an adventure writing workshop or a mystery writing workshop but maths is the only subject you get where we haven’t got around to finding any way that they can have some choice. They might have some choice in maybe how they can learn about something that you’re doing, but basically they just get put in a workshop and we do that via a pre and a post test and before each topic area. It just looks a little bit like this and the start of that topic – this is fractions and decimals, the test is made via the VELS Progression Points, and then the kids at the moment are getting ability grouped and streamed for maths groups.
Speaker 2: This is probably something as well that we’ve had lots of trialling in terms of maths groups, as we said they’ve been grouped into ability groups based on their Pre and post tests but, I guess, lots of people, you would have noticed research suggesting and discussing streaming in maths and it’s something that we have tried. We’ve tried streaming or ability grouping all the way up to an extension level or we’ve also tried two extension groups and two mixed ability groups. At the moment, Rick and I... actually we work at opposite ends of our learning space and we both have students that need support, so we’ve actually decided to team teach and work together, so I guess maths groups is something that we’re trialling and still trying to refine.
Speaker 1: It’s too hard. Probably one of the biggest challenges with maths group has been that hierarchy starts and we’ve had sort of that problem with some parents that if students in an extension group, just by their results on their tests all year and then maybe they hit one topic, say fractions and decimals, where they don’t quite, their score, because we have to have a cut off, their score maybe puts them in the second highest maths group and there’s still that hierarchy’s been like a bit of an issue with some parents. They come and say it’s a bit like they’ve been dropped. I mean, I guess, that’s something you have to talk about with them and say that it’s just not all of a sudden you can’t do it.
Speaker 2: And in the same token if we change the configuration of the maths groups as well. If we go from having a low group or having mixed groups again they feel as though they don’t understand why they’ve changed group and it’s really just us changing the configuration of the maths groups as well.
Speaker 1: The deep knowledge and as I mentioned before it’s like our integrated units. The kids, sort of, have a say in how they whatever topic it is and how they’re going to complete a project, what type of technology they’re going to use and a really good example is actually this one about the Australian history. The 5/6’s recently had a big expo where all the parents came in and they had stalls everywhere and the whole term was them working on this individual projects, but somewhere along the way there’s little ones that they’re expected to complete after each workshop and they bring this document to their conference with their home group teacher and you sort of go through it together and say “What stage are you at with the project? Have you completed this weekly one?” So this is something that stays with them so at the start of the term they’ve had a bit of say and they know exactly what they have to complete for the term, so there’s no surprises.
So we’ll get down to conferencing. So each week, for example, each week of a term there might be one subject that you’re not teaching in the unit and that extra teacher in there that doesn’t have a home group takes your class for that hour and you conference with your home group kids, so you’ve given them a time for the week. You might say you’re at Tuesday at 10.30 and so it’s pretty hard to stay on time but that they come to you at that time with all their stuff and you go through what they’ve achieved for the week, not just the academic side of things but also the personal side of things. This short video gives you a bit of an idea on how we collate all the assessment because we use a shared assessment document.
Video: All information about the student is stored on an Excel database that can be accessed by all teachers within the Senior Learning Unit. It’s important to have this access because teachers need to record information about students who are in their workshop groups but not necessarily in their home group. When it comes time to write student reports, the home group teachers will have access to all the information that the different teachers have written about the student’s progress. At student conferences, teachers discuss the current roles and record information about evidence of achievement and if required, to set new goals. All the goals are coded and can easily be added to their student’s records. We’ve isolated about ‘advice given to students’ or ‘tasks that the students have undertaken to complete’. Information is added about reading, writing, maths, their deep knowledge unit or integrated curriculum and their personal project on their block. As well as personal information such as special events, special achievements or any other issues that need to be discussed. Speaker 1: Righto.
Speaker 2: I think this year in the Senior Learning Unit they’ve also recorded the student conferences on the students’ Netbooks or via another device and actually burnt these to CD’s and sent them home as part of the home/school connection as well. So those conferences are really powerful.
Speaker 1: Yeah and there’s a couple of students that their parents have Skype’d during the conference. There’s one that I know last year when I was in there, there was one student in another grade, each week their mum was at home and sat live on Skype while they did their 15 minute conference, so she knew exactly what they were doing, so that was pretty powerful happening each week. So that’s a shared document, so that all the teachers that I work with have access to my kids and vice versa. So if I, let’s say, Amy had one of my students in all her workshops and I didn’t have them at all, I can still go in there on that conference day and I should see things that Amy maybe... may have put in. Things like achievements or maybe something that we need to work on into that student’s assessment document. This year and last year, though, the teams are also exchanging report comments, so if you do have that student for a whole term then you write their maths... say for maths, then you write their paragraph for maths comment and I know Point Lonsdale were talking about that as well. And it seems as though it’s working at the moment but we can still tweak the way we do it but that’s as well as having that assessment document, you’re also passing on the report comment.
Speaker 2: And I think obviously the video showed the Senior Learning Unit and the assessment they do there and in the Middle Learning Unit obviously we’re learning from the steps that the Senior Learning Unit have taken and we’re branching into those sorts of things as well, and I guess as Rick was saying, the maths, maths groups, the maths assessment is probably the area that we’ve looked into most and we have a similar assessment document where the student results are recorded and I can access, if I wanted to, any of the students maths results out of the 180 children that we have in the Middle Learning Unit. I can access any of their results or comments if I wanted to and as Rick said we’re now writing report comments for students we’ve had for a full term.
Speaker 1: The conferencing is really powerful stuff. When I started doing it in 2007 I was only in my second year in the job and I remember thinking though, and I’m sure you can relate to this, at the end of some weeks you go “Gee I haven’t even, there’s that one student in my class, I’ve barely seen her this week, I’ve barely spoken to them just by chance,” and the conferencing gives you that opportunity to see them definitely. Even if you don’t have them in your workshops, you’ve seen them for that 15 minutes and it’s a really important time. Instead of having like a parent/teacher interview, we have a conference sort of midyear and at the start of the year so the parents come in and actually sit in on a slightly longer conference with the kids and you, with us.
Speaker 2: And, I guess, in terms of the rest of the school, that’s followed on with students at the interviews, which I’m sure lots of people are doing in their schools so that there is that home school partnership between all of the people and the stakeholders in the learning process.
Speaker 1: Before we move on to some other stuff, we’ll try and call the school and we’re going to speak to two 5/6 students, our school captains actually, because they haven’t had much of a job in the last term or so, so they need something to do, and also two students from the Middle Learning Unit as well. If you’ve got a couple of questions we’ll ask them. We haven’t told them to write a script or anything but if there’s anything you’d like to ask, send it forward when we’re talking to them and we’ll spend about 5 minutes.
Hi Georgie. Hi Kieran.
Student 1: Hi.
Student 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: Can you hear me?
Student 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can you hear me and can you see me?
Student 1: Yeah.
Student 2: Yeah we can see you.
Speaker 1: Unlucky. All right. How are you going?
Student 1: Good.
Student 2: Good thank you.
Speaker 1: Good. Okay. Well we’ve got lots of people in the audience guys. I’ll turn the laptop around in a minute so you can see them all but don’t be too nervous. We’re going to ask you a couple of questions. Is Macca and Meg there as well?
Student 1: No they’re not here yet.
Speaker 1: Cool. Well we’ll ask you guys. Well, this is Georgie on the left and Kieran. They’re in Grade 3 /4. Guys, first thing, and Georgie you can answer first and then Kieran can go after you. Just want to know what are some of the main differences... what are some of the main differences for you guys being in the MLU compared to being in a normal classroom, so your normal like a portable or something?
Student 1: Well there’s a lot more room and you can see when we have a classrooms and (inaudible 25.22) and...
Speaker 1: What about you, Kieran?
Student 2: Pretty much exactly the same and we get to have more space in our classroom, go straight out to the middle and yeah lots of different stuff. Got more space to move around in the classroom.
Speaker 1: Cool. Okay. What do you think some of the positive things are about working in an open space or a flexible space? Hi Marcel. My integration aide.
Speaker 2: And again.
Speaker 1: There’s 50 people looking at you, Marcel, right now. Student 3: (Inaudible 25.57).
Speaker 1: Might ask that again. Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: I know. He’s going to love that when we get back.
Speaker 1: I’ll ask that again guys. What are some of the really good things, the positive things about being in an open learning space or a big, big place like we are?
Student 1: Well I think it’s good that we can go in the other classrooms and we... it’s easy to do maths groups together and I like being in a big space because our other classroom was really small and we like having a big space, yeah.
Speaker 1: Cool. Nice answer. Kieran, you can tell us or try and tell us what are some things that you think we could improve with our MLU?
Student 2: Maybe next year or something but it won’t happen this year because maths groups do a whole MLU together and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yes. Cool. Anything else?
Student 2: Not really.
Speaker 1: I thought you might say to sack me. I’m glad you didn’t say that. Okay. What about just some of the things or like what’s the one thing for the both of you – you can both answer this one, what is the one thing that is the best thing about it, about the space, about working in a place like the MLU? What’s the most enjoyable thing?
Student 1: Well...
Speaker 1: I put you on the spot, I know. Do you want to go first, Kieran, while she’s thinking?
Student 2: Yeah. The best thing about it is probably been like maths groups we’ve got more space to move around and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you like the furniture? Do you like the furniture?
Student 2: Yeah.
Student 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What about you Georgie? What’s the best thing about it?
Student 1: I like that there’s more room to move around and (inaudible 28.15) and with maths not just space to go around and (inaudible 28.29).
Speaker 1: Cool. What do you think about the noise levels in there? Do you think they’re okay? Did you hear that? What do you think the noise is like in there? Is the noise a problem?
Student 2: Sometimes it’s a bit loud but other times it’s not.
Student 1: I think it’s better. I think it’s a bit distracting, the noise, and the other kids moving around a bit. Speaker 1: Cool. Anyone want to ask a question at all before we move on? No? I forgot to record this again too.
Speaker 2: That’s okay. Maybe the others will come on.
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: No other questions? No?
Speaker 1: Are Macca and Meg there or not?
Student 2: Yeah they’re in here.
Speaker 1: Thanks guys. Do you want to... Right at the end I’ll turn the laptop round so you can see how many people are listening but could you put Macca and Meg on quickly? Well done, guys. Fantastic.
Speaker 2: And I guess, while they’re moving, in terms of their maths groups and there’s more space we were before we moved into the new BER, we were in portables for a long while and for them to go from a portable classroom and where they’re used to sharing, being in 4 walls and then moving into that space it was mind boggling for some of them. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: Hi Meg. I can’t really see you. That’s better. They’re in a bit of shade, aren’t they? Guys we just asked similar questions just quickly to you guys because we’ve just told the audience about the SLU, Senior Learning Unit. What do you think and you can both answer this. What do you think are the main differences between working in a space like the SLU and a normal, sort of, old style classroom? Who’d like to go first?
Student 3: It’s a lot different because there’s a lot more people around and you get to work with different teachers. You don’t just get to work with one teacher in the classroom.
Speaker 1: Yes. What about you, Macca?
Student 4: Yeah it’s a lot different. You’ve got to be a lot more independent, I suppose, because you’re making up your own timetables and you’ve got to know where you’ve got to be and stuff.
Speaker 1: Great. Fantastic. What do you think are the positive things about working in a space like that instead of another type of classroom?
Student 3: Pardon me?
Speaker 1: What do you think are the positive things about working in an open space classroom like that?
Speaker 4: Yeah I think being able to work with different people and other teachers as well. Yeah.
Student 3: That’s pretty good.
Speaker 1: Meg, what do you base your workshop choices on? So do you choose if you like a teacher or do you choose like because you like a particular part of the workshop or what’s your normal criteria? Student 3: I generally pick a teacher that I enjoy working with and also if they’re doing a topic that I like to do.
Speaker 1: Cool. What are some things that you think could be improved about the SLU if we were going to try and improve things because you’ve got the guts to answer.
Student 3: The noise sometimes can be annoying. It’s okay sometimes, just… there might be some sessions when there’s, I don’t know, 100 kids in the SLU all doing, or even more than that, just all working and it can sometimes be a bit distracting.
Student 4: Because the independent sessions always vary to how many kids there is, so if you’re in a class that you might be learning (inaudible 32.22).
Speaker 1: Yeah good answer. Good one. Last thing. What’s the best thing about it? What’s the main thing that you enjoy the most? Both of you.
Student 3: I enjoy working with different teachers and then for the classes with lots of different people and all my friends and stuff.
Student 4: Yeah, I like the idea of being able to make our own timetables so we get to choose or have a say in what we learn and choose the teachers. And get to work with different people and I also like, other than that, a maths workshop depending on how we go in our tests, we’ll get to be able to put in our groups, so we’re not learning stuff that we’ve already learnt or if something is too hard, we’re put in groups just where we are and that’s a challenge and that’s the same with writing and reading as well, so we’ve got extension classes as well as normal classes.
Speaker 1: Yeah cool. All right, guys. Thanks very much. If Kieran and Georgie are still there I’ll try and turn the laptop around so you can see how many people are here just quickly and they can maybe wave because that might be a bit of a kick for you, without destroying any of the leads here.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: Give the others a bit of a wave. All right. Great.
Speaker 2: Now they really have gone. Well, I guess one of the ....
Speaker 1: Well done guys.
Student 4: See you.
Speaker 2: One of the tips that we have, I guess, as moving into these flexible learning spaces, I know that was one of the things we were asked to talk to you today, what were some of the tips and what were some of the challenges. And I guess as school leader that has moved a team through some significant change, one of the first things for me that I would pass on is that small steps has been the most important part about making sure that you’re not trying to do everything at once and that building all those different things that we’ve talked about today in one at a time. And I think that things that go with that as well is that, and I’m sure other speakers have spoken about this today, is that developing that shared vision amongst a team and also amongst a school, so that everyone is committed to the journey that you are on, and whether that be team teaching, which was our very first small step or whether it be collaborating on workshop activities that shared vision and cohesive team is so, so important when moving into one of these spaces.
The other thing is for people who are changing their environments to perhaps more flexible learning spaces or moving into one of the new BER buildings, that for us as a team, preparation was the key, so as I said before we actually got moved out into little portables, into the old portables while we were waiting for our building to be finished and we obviously didn’t just sit in our little portables and wait for our building to be finished and then worry about the change, we spent a lot of time, years, like the two years preceding moving into this space, we spent time preparing for a change like this. Even down to small things like timetabling maths workshops at the same time even when we were in the portables, so that when we moved into the new space, that it was routine and it was regular for students and it was regular for teachers. And I think that as the students say, they did mention noise but that’s something that we tried to prepare for, obviously putting 180 students in a flexible learning space is very different to portable classrooms, and I don’t think there’s anything to say that it isn’t, but preparing students in that literacy time, which we have our reading and writing block in the morning, we do expect that the students will have that lower noise level so that all students have the opportunity to concentrate on what they’re doing, whereas we timetable maths all at the same time so that there is that room and that flexibility to play a maths game or to have something a little bit more noisy going on whether it’s a SMARTboard activity or something happening so that we reduce those things beforehand. And I think as I said, preparing for those things before you move or preparing for those things as you make small changes is probably the best tip that I can give to school leaders and team leaders that are moving people through significant change in their school.
Speaker 1: Cool. Let’s just touch on a few things. There’s heaps of stuff about ICT that we can touch on. Just want to touch on a couple of things that maybe relate to changing a classroom environment. There’s just a list of things that we use in the school. One of the things that we did in the Senior Learning Unit in the last couple of years is the Senior Years Puzzler blog. It’s a different way of blogging but to me this was a really nice example of bringing, sort of, a community together in a big space like that. Oops, so I’ll just find the link for you. The idea of the Puzzler initially just started with me, just with my own grade, popping up just a riddle each week or some sort of maths problem or something just on the board for the kids to work out and it took off a bit and the kids really got into it.
Then I sort of thought well let’s put it online maybe, and make it some sort of maybe a competition, so weekly I used to put up on a Sunday night at home, most Sundays, I’d put up maybe two quiz questions, two riddles and maybe like a mystery picture and the idea was that the kids would go onto the blog, a lot of our kids had had experience with blogging so they knew what was going on, they knew how to leave a comment, so during the week and most of it would happen in their own time at home, they would go on and have a go at the riddles and submit their answer to the blog. The answers wouldn’t be revealed until Friday, so I would withhold them until Friday so the kids were like, “But if I go on and someone else goes on they’ll copy my answer,” and it’s like, “No they won’t because they can’t see it.”
So on Friday we used to get together at lunch eating time, while the kids were having their lunch, in our neighbourhood meeting area, in front of one of the interactive white boards and get the blog up and we’d release the answers for the week. And it became a real huge event. It was called “Find Out Friday” and the kids named that. We had a naming competition. They called it “Find Out Friday” and we would release the answers and it was great because some of the beautiful things were that some kids were into it so much that they had been waiting on Sunday night online for the new puzzle to go up and if I didn’t put it up because I was away or something, I’d get into trouble. There’d be lots of comments saying that but they’d be waiting there and sometimes you could see the difference like there might have been one kid that went on Sunday night at 8 o’clock, got the right answer, and someone went on at 8.01, that’s when they submitted theirs and they got the right answer and you could actually see the difference in times. All those sorts of things were really exciting.
We had our Voki, our Puzzler Punk. If you haven’t seen Voki, it’s just like an avatar, a really nice avatar to welcome people to your blog and that’s all he did and then we thought we’d do something a little bit different with him and he went on my journeys around the world and we put him in backgrounds with the Opera House behind him and things like that so he had a trivia question “Where am I this week?” and so the kids were able to go on and leave their comments, create their own characters and leave comments to the Puzzler Punk. So all that sort of stuff, so really, really great stuff. The nice thing about it was that it was a community time because it wasn’t for everyone, so the kids that maybe didn’t have an internet connection or weren’t really into it would still be really keen to come to Find Out Friday to see the questions that day and have a go at the answers themselves, so it wasn’t just for the kids who had been on the blog during the week so it was a really, really cool thing. So that’s, sort of, one example of I guess helping to foster that community spirit and giving the kids a little bit more, I don’t know, purpose and engagement of why they are working in a space like this.
Speaker 2: And I think the presentation that I went to last time there was some discussion about when you’re working in an open or a flexible learning space like the ones that we do, establishing students’ sense of identity and ownership over the space, so no longer is it “This is my classroom and my tiny little space that I work in” that we’re trying to foster that sense of, “This is my learning space and I’m proud of it,” and “This is my community that I work in,” and I think the online resources that we use really help that. And we also have, as we’ve spoken briefly about that before, we also have neighbourhood meetings and things like that to really foster that sense of togetherness and that everyone owns the space and everyone is responsible for the space.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I said that I put it up but after a while the kids were really involved too, so this is an example. Macy had drawn her own mystery pick, so the kids started to sort of take it over themselves so the workload for me really wasn’t that much in the end. Another interesting one, and I’m glossing over these, but that’s meant to be me so it’s not, was Edmodo. Anyone heard of Edmodo in here? A couple of people, yeah. We’re using that this year in the 3/4 space, so I’m not particularly using it. For those that don’t know Edmodo is what it looks like, it’s a screen grab. It’s a cross, sort of, between a safe Facebook and Twitter. It’s made for schools. It’s fantastic and I guess if we’re looking at our heading, the Modification of Existing Environments, to me this plays a part because the classroom leaves the traditional classroom with Edmodo. I’ve got all my kids signed up to it. They submit all their homework via Edmodo. They can write messages to me. I’m online a fair bit at night but they are communicating themselves. It’s a private space. It’s not like Facebook where people can ask you for your friendship or anything like that, so I guess it takes care of some of those privacy things that people might be worried about. You can do all sorts of things like put reminders on there. I’ll just play a bit of this short video. It just gives you a bit of an idea because we are pushing for time, of just some of the things that our kids have done this year using Edmodo.
Video playing: So you can just send a note and if you put a reply it just filters straight under the original note like that.
We send out notes at the start of the year and things just telling parents all about it and had a parent information night just to tell them a bit about it to show that they knew.
I like that one. That was a funny one while I was away.
So the kids are starting to take real ownership of it, writing things like reminders about ‘bring your sneakers tomorrow’. It’s just one of those spaces where we don’t worry too much about things like spelling. We don’t pull kids up on that. I find that if the first thing you said was “You spelt that word wrong”, it might put them off doing it because we want to encourage them to be online because that’s where things are going.
So we studied the planets in Term 2, so we had as well as the stuff we’re doing at school, we had all this learning going on at home, which these examples show, of kids having conversations about what they were learning outside of school.
So it’s a really simple thing to use Edmodo. If you have an iRiver it’s so easy. It’s very user friendly. Lots of schools around the globe are using it, so you can connect with other schools. As I said, I’ve nearly got all my kids posting their homework on it, not all. Obvi- ously you’ve got some who don’t have internet connection and some that we just haven’t quite got them on board yet. I had one student that said they couldn’t hand in their home- work on Edmodo and she told me that by actually going into Edmodo, signing in, writing me a direct message and saying “I can’t do my homework on Edmodo,” and I spoke to her the next day and I said “I think you can, I really think you can.” Made all that effort to write that message to me.
Speaker 2: And I guess in saying that also we involved the kids a lot with the setting up of Edmodo and we didn’t say to the kids “Here’s Edmodo and you’re doing your homework on it.” We spent a lot of time getting them engaged and I guess hooking them into the space and then we did do some student voice activities in terms of how they feel about doing their homework on Edmodo and, as Rick said, the large majority of them were really keen to get on and I’ve got students in my rooms, hard to engage little boys particularly, and they love doing their homework on Edmodo so, yeah it’s magnificent.
Speaker 1: And you have all those expectation talks about like what’s good practice communicating online at the start of the year and, you know, you’ve already got kids setting the right example on there, which is really good. I mean we say they can sort of chat on there because you can keep writing replies underneath but if they really just want to have a chat about other stuff we sort of say use, if they’re already online they’re probably using Facebook and they’re probably using MSN and all that sort of stuff, so I sort of say if you want to talk some different stuff then go onto those things but yeah. It’s a...
Speaker 2: I guess one of the other advantages is that I have students who have gone on holidays, they’ve gone overseas or things like that, they can actually communicate with their class members and still feel connected to their learning group. I have a little girl that’s in Queensland at the moment for maybe 4 or 5 weeks and she’s posting her diary that you might have ordinarily done in a notebook on Edmodo and the students can go in from her class or from the learning space and actually check out her photos and write replies, ask questions and so they still have that conversation going even though she’s in Queensland for 4 weeks. She doesn’t lose connection with us, we don’t lose connection with her and it’s a great way for her to be keeping up with her learning as well. Speaker 1: And you can assess on there as well. You can leave comments and all that sort of stuff. Like you can give kids a grade if you’re doing a project like that. We can talk about that for ages but we’ll keep going. We’ve only got 10 minutes, so we’ll probably have to leave some time for maybe some questions so we’ll just flip through … there’s lots of other stuff. I’ll give you some links at the end to that stuff where we’ve done and where I’ve got examples of Edmodo and lots of the other things we’ve done with movie making and podcasting and all that sort of stuff on our blogs. Where to next? We’re continuing to build the home/school relationships. Edmodo has helped as mainly a student communication tool. It was interesting in every interview I had with parents this year I asked them about Edmodo and some of them were involved a lot, some said, “Oh yeah I’ve heard that they’re on it, they just go on the computer and I just let them go,” and others still didn’t know, so it’s sort of interesting. I’m thinking of ways of getting parents involved on an online space at the moment for the start of next year.
Speaker 2: Because it’s challenging those parent perceptions of what education looks like as well I think and we’ve talked a lot about that today but changing what parents see as learning and sometimes parents don’t always see Edmodo as learning, so that’s something we’re moving into next. I guess something that we’ve looked at is, of course, the Student Learning Data and this is our attitudinal data, so you can see that there is improvement across the board in terms of our student opinion survey and this is the updated data that we have, including our 2010 data. So you can see that above state mean and upward trends across the board there and I guess that’s a clear way for you to have a quick look as well, so we find that moving into these flexible learning spaces we really are seeing success in terms of student attitudes to coming to school, but also in our VELS and NAPLAN data we’re also seeing improvements in student learning outcomes and, I guess, as a result of the engagement in the spaces.
Speaker 1: Because the data was showing, before we built the SLU, that student morale and engagement was really low particularly with the boys. These are just a list of things. I won’t go through them all but just communicating with the local community. Some of them we do do. Some don’t work so well. It was interesting last year we had a parent information night about cyber safety and about things like using Edmodo and there were more staff there than parents. I won’t even say the numbers. It was pretty scary. I mean there’s still lots of different ways you’ve got to try and engage other parts of the community but this year we’ve certainly seen with expo nights and parent experts, I know some of the junior grades are getting lots of parent experts in, whatever expertise they have to talk to the students.
Speakers 2: I think one of the successes that we have had with our expo nights or information nights is, as Rick said, in the past we have had a little bit of trouble getting parents into the school to hear about some of the things, with low numbers in terms of information nights but we have been finding that if we ask students to present their learning or present something that they have been doing, we do get a higher turnout of numbers, which is often a more effective way to have a conversation with the community and engage our parents in what we’re actually doing. So that’s, I guess, student voice but also sort of a bit of a tricky way to get the parents to come in as well.
Speaker 1: Just a couple of links there that the two, the second and the third one are just some ones sort of where backup with the theories of where a lot of the work was based on at Bellaire. The top one is the one where I had my Edmodo stuff. Just a lot of the things I’ve done and some of the people in my team have done with ICT, so go there if you want to find more and just our contact details as well. I think lunch is at 1 so we’ve just got 5 minutes or a bit less maybe for any questions.
Speaker 2: Are there any questions that people would like to ask?
Speaker 1: Great. Too easy.
Speaker 2: Easy questions to answer.
Question: I’ve just got a question on Edmodo. Do you ever find that there’s like issues with bullying or anything on that?
Speaker 1: That’s a really good question.
Speaker 2: Well the teachers who... we all have a middle unit space and we also have a class space and all those comments can be seen by teachers and they do come up instantly but I actually can go in and access absolutely everything that the students post up there. So I’m actually the creator of the space and I can also, like I am a part of the space, so there’s no way that students can actually write anything on our class space or our unit space without a staff member being able to access it. So I guess that prevents students from going onto doing that because they know that it’ll be able to be seen but also everything that they put up there, their name is attached to so there’s sort of no way of them doing something anonymously, yeah.
Speaker 1: There’s been a couple of things that Edmodo have put in where you sign up as a teacher and you get the privileges and the students sign up as students, so the students actually can’t send an individual message to one of your class mates, which is probably the only thing that maybe some students don’t... so you can only send messages to a space, if that makes sense, but the teacher, the privilege you get with the teacher is that you can send direct messages to the students. I guess that’s why we say if they want to send a direct message to their mate that they use a different (inaudible 50.51).
Speaker 2: So I guess it’s like posting to a wall like Facebook or something like that so that everybody can actually see it.
Speaker 1: But you can send a direct message to your teacher if you want, if you need to ask them something that you don’t want your class mates to see.
Question: What different things do you do with the ICT stuff?
Speaker 1: Well we do movie making as well. Like we have certain shows that we do each week that we put on our blog. We do podcasts. There’s heaps of stuff on those two links that I gave you there. We’ve collaborated with schools from different countries. We’ve done like little maths projects with a couple of schools from New Zealand this year.
Speaker 2: We’ve just recently got a... we’ve refurbished a little television studio at the school so that’s something that the movie making side of things has been... become quite popular and is a great way for students to present their ideas.
Speaker 1: And yeah. I’m getting hungry. I’m going blank.
Question: I’m just interested whether you’re going to continue with Edmodo and all of these contact sites with the Ultranet or is the Ultranet’ s going to morph them? Speaker 1: Yeah, sort of, in that transition phase at the moment and sort of thinking about it. I mean I’ve put a couple of wikis and blogs that I do and I’ve linked them into the Ultranet and other than that I haven’t done a lot yet but I think I’d still like to keep something like Edmodo going.
Speaker 2: I think you can link it. As Rick said, you can link it into the Ultranet because it is quite unique in terms of what you can actually do on there in it being like a social networking kind of or online learning space. I guess it is a little bit different to the Ultranet from what we can see so far, anyway.
Speaker 1: I think I mean I haven’t done heaps on the Ultranet yet but so far all I would see doing is just making a link on one of the pages through to Edmodo so if they’re on the Ultranet they can still get through to Edmodo from there unless I see something better in that system that is making me want to do something different. Yeah.