The Trendies

The trend I have chosen to focus on is the increase in digital technology within the classroom, particularly on the 1-5 year timeline. 

The New Media Consortium (2017) report discusses a large number of trends, and one of the more interesting to me is the "Growing focus on measuring learning." They describe this trend as the 'exploration and evaluation of a wide variety of tools" and question whether the emphasis on the results gained monitoring students constantly actually leads to a reduction in achievement.

This is interesting to me as this has become one of my main focuses over the course of the mindlab. I actively try to use tools such as EdPuzzle and OneNote in the classroom and am currently invovled in an inquiry with one of my classes that is using devices exclusively in class and moving away from books all together. Their results will be highly interesting to me - and I have been using the 'immediate assessment' available in EdpPuzzle to gauge their understanding.

neuman (2016) discusses the potential negatives of placing the importance on data - praticularly in low-income environments, which is very relevant to my practice. She spends time discussing the negative effects of only guiding instruction based on data - the time taken away on individual, meaningful instruction. she argues that teachers need to move away from 'motivating' students with data alone, and  to be 'data informed' rather than 'data driven.'

In a more positive article about the importance of data based teaching, Sophie Edwards (2017) discusses the 'learning crisis' which the world bank believes is going unacknowledged by governments. They describe 'persistent gaps' between rich and poor students and emphasise the importance of removing these gaps - and to track how students are faring with solid data. I wonder how much of NCEA results are actually solid data. There are definitely students who leave high school with Level 2 and 3 NCEA that are far behind other students with the same qualification.

The Ministry of Education (2017) lists a range of tools that can help with data collection in the classroom. The website I link to focuses mostly on the importance of data collection in regards to teaching as inquiry, but there is a constant focus in schools on how students are faring. New tools are constantly being introduced, which allow teachers to drill down to see how students' credits and attendance link together. Our school has introduced a tool called ASSAY3 which allows an amazing amount of data visualisation - such as seeing how many of the students in each class passed the previous year.

As you can see above, I was able to see that 40 % of my class gained no credits in English the previous year, and a further 20% only passed 1 assessment. This brings up a potential problem with data-informed teaching - the ability to make negative assumptions about students. It would be easy to 'write this class off', and only focus on those who had passed before. On the other hand, the data helps motivate teachers to build these students' success and to realise that a 'traditional' programme of teaching may not work in this case. Data is a double-edged sword - but one that can lead to greatly improved outcomes if approzched correctly.

I will continue to use tools to guide my teaching but I believe the important thing in teaching is still relationships and will continue to try build these.

Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., Freeman, A., Hall Giesinger, C., and Ananthanarayanan, V. (2017). NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Brazil, Megan. (2017)Building and Leading a School Culture That Values Data-Informed Dialogue to Improve Student Learning The International Educator,. Available at : go.nmc.org/buille 

Ministry of Education (2017) Collecting evidence through inquiry. Available at http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Teaching-as-inquiry/Collecting-evidence