Today one of the staff who is working closely with me on the BYTES program asked me what it is that I want to do with the funding and CRT days that I have received for Digital Portfolios and for TPL. She got me thinking about exactly what it is that I would like to spend more time doing. It is easy when everything is so busy to forget to reflect and I think that I am at risk of that happening. I would like to have more time to work with the students on their Digital Portfolios one on one - if we are going to make this a worthwhile program and give them a product at the end that reflects their learning journey and their work in BYTES then it is important that they are given feedback and individual help and guidance on their portfolios in order to encourage that higher order thinking and reflection. In terms of making the project sustainable and looking at producing the best reflection over the long term, it is important that I am able to talk to the students to gauge where their strengths and weaknesses are with the project. I need to get their feedback on what they are enjoying/finding difficult/learning/not learning in order to make the necessary changes for next year.
In my typical style I am starting big - the whole of Year 9 is involved in our Digital Portfolio trial and this is one of the major issues for me in terms of managing the project. How do I get to all the students, keep them all on task, give them the sort of prompts that encourage reflection and learning in all students, when they all learn differently? My first challenge was to introduce the program. In those early stages my focus was on how to introduce the concept to the students, how to structure their work and how to get them all to the same level in terms of their ICT ability.
In this next phase, now that most students have started their portfolio and seem to be working quite well on it, is to refocus my energies on getting the focus for them back onto the content of the portfolio, rather on the set-up. I want to encourage evidence and reflection rather than just surface information. Whilst some students are doing this quite well, I think others need to have that one on one feedback to help them on their way.
Moving on from Digital Portfolios, but still related, I think that I need more time out of scheduled BYTES classes in order to go around to students and talk to them about the program and what they are doing in particular classes. I think that it is important to gather data from students about the program when they are actually working in it. At the moment I am teaching during half of the periods and so I am not free to do this. Perhaps I can use some of the TPL stuff to give me more time to pursue that avenue.
I think that it is important if we want the DP project, and BYTES on the whole to survive and thrive, this, being the trial year, is the year that we need to gather the most data about how to improve the program, what the students are enjoying or not and what the staff think needs to be done to really engage the students. Obviously this year we have had the issue of space - because our custom-designed MERC is not built yet and that is impacting on staffing and spaces and how we do things. The new building will make a big difference in terms of student and staff attitudes, teaching methods and facilities, and will see us truly team teaching for the first time.
Therefore I really want to work on further developing the curriculum, building in further choice and engagement for students and building in new opportunities for staff to relate to students on a different level.
I want to visit other schools and find out what it is that they are doing with their new spaces and their new curriculum - work out what is working and what is not - learn from their mistakes and their successes to enhance our own program. So I need to work out where I want to go and make that happen.
I want to spend more time doing this - writing and reflecting on exactly what it is that we are doing and what we are trying to achieve with DP's and BYTES. I want to spend more time reading and working out where to from here.
So now that I have worked out what it is that I think that I want the next challenge is how to see that it happens. To my trusty AP...
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