Ramp it Up (or down)

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that the ping pong ball (or marble) will roll further because …

Steps

Insert picture of ramp here…

We rolled the balls down the ramp 3 times and measured how far they roled using a ruler, our feet, my hand, Steves brain, hy=

Results

Roll Marble Ping Pong Ball
1 7 6
2 4 9.9
3 8 10
Average 6 9

Conclusion

The hypothesis was incorrect/correct

why?

 

Paper Plane (example)

Remember to check the Categories and Tags (Science)

This is a quite detailed report but remember that all science experiments should be recorded in detail. The more detail and science, the more chance of hitting Legend. This report is at least a Pro level and at times a Legend but could use even more detail to really take it to the next level.

There are lots of areas for adding videos and pictures of your work. You could make it into a poster (I’ll show you how to do that next time).

Hypothesis (What I think will happen)

I think that the small/big plane will fly further because …

Background

In the background section include some simple facts you find online. You can also link in a Youtube video (just make sure it says what you want it too!).  

You can use my background for this blog. This wont always happen though.

 

The first paper plane was made around 200 years ago.

The longest distance ever flown by a paper plane was 88.1 metres.

There are four forces that act on the paper plane when it is flying.

  • Thrust, how fast it is pushed
  • Lift, how much wing area can be pushed up
  • Gravity, pulls the plane down
  • Drag, slows the plane down

This video shows some information about how paper planes fly. I thought that it does a great job explaining how to make a great paper plane.

Equipment

List everything you used that is needed to repeat the experiment. No need to rewrite, use this one.

  • A4 paper
  • A5 paper
  • Chalk
  • Metre stick

 

Steps (Method)

This is where you put in what you did.You do need to add your bit here as my plane is probably different from yours.

 

Here’s a video of me folding a paper plane (insert video here – you can talk on the video as well)

 

Or:

Here are a series of pictures showing how to fold the planes.

Fold paper in half

Fold the ends

Fold the ends a second time

Fold in half

Fold the wings out

We then drew a line with chalk to mark the starting line. Then we took turns throwing the two planes and marking (or taking pictures) or which flew further.

We repeated the throw 3 times.

Results (What we found out)

The big/small plane flew further.

(Insert video or pictures here)

Or..

We measure how far each plane travelled using a metre ruler. The results are shown on this table.

Attempt Big plane Small plane
1 5.6 2.3
2 1.8 3
3 4.6 1.6
Average distance 3.3 2.3

Conclusion (what it means)

This is where you look at your data and think WHY did that happen?

The big/small plane flew further than the other plane.

Why I think that the small/big plane flew further because it has .….

I did some research and found out that planes with bigger wings fly further because they can generate more lift. Here is a Youtube video explaining why. Especially at 5.30 where he talks about bigger wings generating lift.

 

This website also has a great explanation about wing sizes a nd lift. It also talks about birds which is our teachers favourite thing so I’ll get extra points for adding this!

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/301-wing-loading#:~:text=Wings%20generate%20lift%20due%20to,lift%20at%20any%20given%20speed.

What I would change

Here, write or make a video on how you would change your experiment if you had to do it again. Talk about the first time you did it when you didn’t make it a “Fair” test.

 

DFI – External Recognition Day

Not much to say today. The course was good and worth the commitment. I’ve learnt lots and definitely made significant improvements in my digital classroom setup. Looking forward to using and exploring ChatGPT and AI. Now need to teach on Thursdays!

Took (and passed) the Google Educator test. Wasn’t the easiest multiple choice test I’ve ever taken (though nothing will ever compare to the Immunology final at grad school – words I didn’t know exist were on that test, pretty sure they took pity on me and gave me a pass) and glad the Google test was open book and definitely needed to to some research on the fly.

Here’s my badge!

DFI – Week 8 – Computational thinking

  • What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Bored learners = not learners. TBH I knew this and I think any educator worth their salt will know it. But it’s worth remembering as empowered isn’t always the easiest option and when we are busy…

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

ChatGPT is killer. I’ve been putting off trying it but it’s scary. Will definitely use but it’s not perfect.

My first ever use of a meme. Welcome to the 21st century! Is that a meme? It’s in the movie…

  • What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

Tinkercad was cool and I may look at using it when I do geometry. I think. Not sure my group liked my dog! Being in a high school, there are dedicated digital tech teachers. I don’t really have the license/time to teach coding (although I enjoy it) unless I come up with a way to justify it…

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

ChatGPT is a defo game changer. I normally spend ages crafting letters/emails. This will save a lot of time.

DFI Week 7 – Devices

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The logistics of ubiquitous learning makes sense. ~ 1/2 of my class are born overseas, so I typically have at least one visiting family for a good portion of the term. Having the ability for them to access the work from overseas is great. They haven’t yet! But maybe one day… Also, plenty of sickness/absences which also have access more so than in the past. I’ve used Classroom quite heavily previously and I think it’s a step up.

The Summer learning is great. Just need the buy in  and who can sign into it?

For some reason the “rewind” doesn’t really work for me from a semantics point of view. It didn’t in my orientation and it still doesn’t sit right with me. Probably just me. It just highlights the ubiquitous nature of the pedagogy I guess – I dislike the use of the word!

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Screen recording – need to use this more.

It was a great idea to learn the different functionality of Chromebooks. I’ve had a play with one but was a bit ignorant as to how different they actually are.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

I like the idea of Harpara workspaces. From an initial observation though, it seems like this is double dipping with Sites. What’s the point in having both? Doesn’t it just add another layer of things to monitor and make sure are up to date? Ultimately I think it’s more useful than Sites. Grr…

Digital Dig is definitely something I will think about using next term or more likely at the start of next year. I didn’t get all of the way through – spent a while working out that zoom and magnify are pretty much the same thing. also find bar isn’t something that Chrome seems to understand so I’m assuming that control f.

Here’s as far as I got.

Explain everything is pretty cool. Not sure if I will use it as there’s only so many choices and while it’s voice capture is cool, is it a deal breaker? Anyway here’s a very rough page with a very rough audio recording! Oh how I cring at my voice!

I made the shortest recording of a screen ever to explain a task (to be fair, I didn’t get to start working on it until the last 20 mins as all of my Google apps stopped working – took a while to work out what was going on). Windows has screen recording via the Gamebar. That’s on option. Instead I recorded a Google Meet session where I shared a tab (i.e. a slide show).- It worked OK. Could do without the picture of me but definitely an option. I’ll look at using the gamebar and comparing sometime. Apparently Windows 11 has a very nice recording feature. My laptop isn’t that up to date. My class mostly know how to do this already on their Chromebooks.

And the transcript – with minimal editing…

Darren Smalley: I don’t know going to work, but I’m going to try and basically make a very quick lesson. On a 24 hour. Or in this case, a 48 hour, digital footprint over the weekend. Let’s assume that it’s Monday and If you go to Google Sites page and go to the Wānanga page within that you will see that there is a slideshow. Click on the slideshow and make a copy. I then want you to think about all the places you went online to the weekend. Because I know you’re all I’m doing school work, obviously, and you can also look at your history on your Chromebook, which is to do that. You would hit Control H. I’m also think about places you went on your phone and social media. And I want you to trace your digital footprint around the island over the last 48 hours. So that’s from when you work on Saturday, essentially to now.

Darren Smalley:  And, but little icons and and copy and paste the footprints. So, control-c, control V, copy paste. And make your way around the island of all the places you visited over the weekend. This is what’s known as your digital footprint, and it’s the traces that you’ve left of yourself online. For the last 48 hours, give it a go.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I’m not sure.

DFI – Week 6 – Enabling Access

What’s on my mind?

Honestly, there was an awful lot of talking over the first 90 mins. Struggled to maintain focus. Wrote the beginning of a reflection I’ll use in another week..

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Make all learning visible.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Updated my Google Site from this:

to this:

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

  • Making more funky button for my Site, hopefully making it a bit more engaging.  Put everything on the Site. I tend to share via Harpara quite a bit and these don’t always get added to the site
  • Harpara workspace looks interesting. Really needed more than 5 mins to digest that. Hopefully will sign up to that next week.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

All work stuff this week.

Week 5 – DFI – Collaborate Sites

  • What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

  • How to engage and inspire learning?
  • Multi-modal learning – personalised – same as UDL.
  • UDL – universal design for learning
    • need to provide multiple forms of information – text, audio, video etc…
    • engagement – what are we putting in place to motivate learners – strengths, interests, cultural identity etc…
    • I missed the 2nd part.
    • T-shaped literacy skills – levelled texts on the same subject – sort of what I’m attempting only more structured.
  • Can I present learning in a more engaging way? Yes I can make it look more engaging.
  • I really want to redo my site to look less Sitey! Some examples are great but what I really want to do is take the time to integrate different curricular strands into one overarching theme for example in 5 week blocks. Conveniently this is week 5 so if I pull my finger out I can do this!

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

  • Google Sites.
    • Most of my work to share with the class is on slides. I think using Sites more and having the visual impact and layout planned to enhance the usability and levels that will be a huge step forward.
    • Building confidence with Google Sites.

  • What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

  • Multi-modal planning – I think this is good and can be combined with strand integration – baby steps Darren. Here’s a start linking in with Social Sciences below. For one reading group though this is quite a lot of work (1 hour+). That’d be a good four hours planning for SS maybe 2-3 weeks worth of work), it’s not finished and still needs polishing and tbh may be too hard – though it’s a L4 text and I have L4/5 readers who I would expect to be able to do this.

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

  • Not sure tbh.

DFI Week 4 – Dealing with Data

  • What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

  • I’m feeling cynical today and this might not be my most detailed post.
  • I personally don’t use social media (SM) for sharing. I wonder if this is an autism thing (I’m not diagnosed but runs in the family and I’d be surprised if I’m not somewhere on the scale, I think most PhDs are!) as I’m not at all fussed about the world knowing what I’m up to and I don’t really want to know what they had for dinner. There is some evidence that SM is used primarily for entertainment purposes by the autistic community and for social connections by non-autistic. I think I can relate to that. It seems that half of social media just feeds into narcissism. Nothing quite like the buzz of getting 100s of likes on a post – it’s an addiction I don’t need (on the rare occasions I do post something creative, I look for the likes!) and in the grand scheme of things is it something we should be promoting? SM is the cause for many of the disputes we have at school (at least 50% – anecdotal evidence), I guess the advantage of blogs is that they don’t have a big audience so the likes/comments are more likely to be meaningful (I’m sure there are much better researched answers than this – it’s not my expertise and I certainly have no intention on writing a masters thesis on it, so I’ll leave the deep thinking to those who know best). Bit of a braindumpy purposeless kind of rant… sorry about that.

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

  • Need to get better with feedback on Blogs and looking at other blogs. For the students development and mine. Use Harpara to review comments – dashboard.
  • Sheets – save as filter view (quite handy – maybe – edit: I tried using this during the week for some analysis – it was OK but found it a bit clunky – if you could save the filter as a new tab, that might help…FIX IT GOOGLE!).
  • Sheets – =google translate is killer for translating into māori.
  • Sheets – Conditional formatting for highlighting assessment data – I use this but not for this purpose, there’s a cool pseudo-heatmap feature which is killer and a time saver – best thing I’ve found so far – should show someone as it wasn’t covered and is super-cool.

  • What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

  • Blogging book reviews, recipes etc…
  • Forms – use Mote (extension) for audio.
  • Forms – make it a quiz – can lock it so cannot research the answer.
  • Teach the class how to make a form – Social Science.
  • Analysing data from a student blog. Cool activity for the class – though 1/2 my class are new to the country so insufficient data.
  • This is a very simple barchart of some blogging data. TBH I didn’t put much effort into it as not really keen on data entry for the sake of it  – DFI
  • My Maps
  • I think the coolest thing on may maps is importing data/locations from Sheets and therefore Forms. This is something we can do next week.
  • Here’s my very rough holiday map

  • What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

  • See above for holiday map.

DFI Week 3 – Media

What’s on my mind this week? This is a bit of a ramble through my unorganised mind – apologies.

AI and Chat GPT. First up I need to explore this and learn more about it. It seems it’s here to stay and how it’s going to change things in ways we have not conceived of yet. From having it write songs in deceased artists voices and styles – a new Freddie Mercury song! The music industry must be in panic mode about the implications.

The education sector needs to adapt and embrace asap. There’s no point in blocking AI as it’s going to be integral to the ākonga’s future (school, work, life). So how are we going to adapt? I have no idea. My 14 year old uses it to write many of his assignments (sometimes he edits and sometimes not). A university professor I know runs their questions through AI to see if it can answer them. I feel we should be teaching how to use it responsibly, safely and exploring it’s potential. let’s face it, the ākonga’s minds are more flexible and open to new things.

From the surface, it seems that AI suppresses creativity/learning, and for some, that’s likely going to be the case – why learn this when AI can do the work for me. This is where we need to tap into AI for it ability to promote creativity. I would never have thought it could be used to produce a new Drake song (it’s pretty good and I’m not even much of a Drake fan – tbh I couldn’t tell you one of his songs). So AI can be used for creativity, I’m just not sure how yet. I’m sure there are some amazing minds working on this. With the ubiquitous presence of the internet and information available to anyone, anywhere, education should already be moving away from teaching facts (that’s not to say that facts aren’t important, but there’s no point having a student rote learn; for example, the periodic table, the dates that William Shakespeare lived/died etc… – hopefully no one actually expects students to know that). So it’s about tapping into AI to promote creativity

It’s a daunting but exciting time to be teaching!

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

  • See above for what I was thinking during the Creative part of the session.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

  • I think using Google Draw with my call and teaching them how easy it is to use will be a good start.
  • My use of Slides was pretty good though I have a mental block about using extensions. It seems that given time and popularity, useful extensions are integrated at some point.
  • Here’s a slide I made to use when I am Dean in the not too distant future. I might adjust the colour scheme at some point as the font may not stand out.  The audio is just a test – in part to remind me that it’s easy to do and I should add it more frequently. That said, I like the font colour. I guess I could grab a colour from the riroriro if I want to be somewhat fancy.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

  • I hadn’t considered using Youtube playlists as a way to share information. Seems like a good idea.
  • Google Draw – why haven’t I used it before? Definitely need to upskill in this app and get my students using this instead of their beloved Canva which is OK but the advantage of Draw is it’s integration into the Google Suite I(feel like I have sold my soul to Google!).
    • Can resize images really easily – remember this as have to relearn every time I have to do it!
  • Google Slides – I use this a lot for planning, sharing assignments with ākonga etc… so am pretty comfortable with it. The animation seems like stop motion animation with the slides on autoplay. I guess that’s really what most animation really is.
  • Slido seems a cool way to engage audience.
  • Mote for voice recording and adding to Slides.
  • Also this online voice recorder was super easy.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

  • Some cool tips for working on a new CV. Not that I’ll get itchy feet for a few years since new job and happy!

DFI – Workflow

Week 2.

Learn – Ako

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

  • New Zealand has a very flexible curriculum compared to many other countries. I’ve been in it for 8 years and I guess it’s a ‘high trust’ model. Positives of this are that it allows teachers to be CREATIVE and experiment and try new things and practices. The downside of an open curriculum is that sometimes this doesn’t work, every school is jumping on the latest band wagon (that they’ve heard may work). There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of guidance from the MOE on HOW teaching should be done. The last draft of the literacy curriculum looked to be even less structured (thought it to be very weak tbh), the mathematics draft looked to be more thought out and structured. Maniaikalani has great research behind it and clearly the format works. So why aren’t more schools (i.e. higher decile)/the ministry adopting it (maybe there are but not wholesale)?
  • Digital tools should be used to amplify, enhance (augment) learning and not be simply a substitute for non-digital.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

  • Google Keep – another to do/list app. One of those things I’ll start using and then stop. Might be worth considering using when Dean.
    • The collaboration tool could be useful – assuming they are also using Keep.
    • Grab the text function could be useful.
    • Audio to text in a recording could be good.
    • Sidebar when doc is open.
    • I sometimes wonder if people spend more time organising stuff (files, emails, lists, etc…) than actually working.
  • Gmail – happy with my settings and use the search engine. No need to filter/label etc…
    • Unsend time – tbh no. Might give a false sense of security. I always think about whether I should send an email before I do.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

  • This was very much a “how to make my work life more efficient” session and as such there weren’t heaps of things to share with my class. However, I can share how to embed a video into their blog.

  • Also, if we ever go into lockdown again, I can do some ha

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Google Keep will be a welcome addition to help organise goings on with my whanau etc…