Zoe's Teaching Standards Site

 On Monday 10th August I travelled to Alex for a Digital Technologies meeting with the other lead teachers of DT from Maniototo and Roxburgh Area Schools. Anne Keneally was facilitating the meeting from CORE Education.  The day was a great chance to get together with Anne, Katrina and Adelle in person after having our weekly Zoom meetings. Throughout the day we went over the Progress Outcomes for Computational Thinking (CT) and Designing and Developing Digital Outcomes (DDDO). This was useful to give me some ideas about where to start with the LAS staff. It was also good for us to break down the language in the progress outcomes too.  After this we had a lot of playing time with different devices to see how we could use these in our classrooms in an authentic context. I really enjoyed the Bee-Bots and found that using the maps gave a more authentic context for the classroom. 

On the 5th August my class had the annual netball tournament in Balclutha against schools from South Otago. The whole class attended and we had 3 teams playing. I managed a team which was great. The team I took got better as the day went on and they played with great sportsmanship. 

Recently I have taken on the lead teacher role of Digital Technology here at LAS where I will guide the staff through the new progress outcomes and how we can use digital technology in our classrooms.  Meetings have been an hour long and we have been having one meeting a week. Anne has led these meetings. In the first meeting I felt very out of my depth and had no real idea what I was supposed to be doing. Each zoom meeting we have had since I have learned more and felt far more comfortable and aware of what I need to be doing.  Since our day in Alex I have implemented a lot of my learning into my classroom practice and have also led a staff meeting on DT.  Zoom meetings we have had this term have been on:  22nd July, 28th July, 6th August, 3rd September, 9th September, 23rd September.

                                On the 5th March Pauline and I travelled to Dunedin to attend the first ALL Workshop for the year. This was a great chance to refresh our minds about the ALL programme and also meet with other teachers and schools near us that are also running ALL.  Since then I have attended several Zoom meetings with Lauren Latimer who is our mentor teacher for ALL. The first one was with Pauline and Gillian as well and just a catch up really about what ALL was going to look like now after Covid.  I have also attended three online workshops that were also run by Lauren. The first one was about motivation and engagement, the second was an online forum to catch up and the third one was about learner pathways. All of these workshops were beneficial and I will be able to use some of the new learning in my ALL sessions next term. 

Today I had an inquiry catch up zoom meeting with Anne Kenneally from Core Education. This was very beneficial because she helped me understand what I needed to do next. She also helped create a template for me to use with the class to set goals for writing.  These are the notes  that we took throughout the meeting. 

           From the 15th April - 18th May we were teaching online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a huge learning opportunity for teachers, parents and students.  In the beginning it was hard to know how much work to set the children. I really didn't want to add anymore stress to students and their families. Each week I added a little bit more to the activities to ease them back into work.  Having a weekly zoom meeting with the class was good to be able to catch up with those who could make it onto the call and see what they'd been up to. I liked having something to do on the zoom call so we did things like a scavenger hunt, kahoots, scattergories and something special to me which the class said they enjoyed.  Each week I tried to have a creative activity to do so that it wasn't all online. This was the weekly project. These were based around things that were happening in the world, ANZAC, Mother's Day and Solar System.  Answering...

On Monday and Tuesday this week we held our Parent/Teacher conferences. These were earlier than usual as we wanted to get some feedback from parents (and students) about how things went over the lock-down period. These conferences were replaced by the mid year report that we would usually be writing at this time. I had 19 out of 25 parent meetings which was pretty good in most of them the students were also there. All of the conferences went well and it was great to hear what parents had discovered from their time helping kids with their distance learning.