EOY evaluation of student progress -PDA

Due to technical issues accessing existing bookings for YouseeU and making new bookings in the system in Term 3 I had to move away from relying on YouseeU as the main mechanism of student contact. We tried Google Hangouts a couple of times, but some students had tech issues with their webcam and preferred to type rather than speak - they seemed to be a bit put off by the fact that people other than me could see and hear them.

I used text messages to book in good times to phone my LA students, which worked well with Seyah, Lydia, Denise and Sophie. I continue to have trouble getting in contact with Victor and his Mum - emails, texts and FB messenger contacts are not responded to. Phone calls are intermittently answered and Warren (our LT) seems to have better luck with this family, so I have been passing on messages via Warren for each time he visits.

Sophie's reader-writer funding has made huge differences to the amount of work Sophie has completed and submitted; and she has attended several STAR courses (I acted as reader-writer for her Barista written assessment, and the Hairdressing tutor did the same for Sophie - I had made contact with the tutor to explain Sophie's situation). Has now gained L1 Lit & Num and is planning to go to Polytech next year for a Beauty/Hair course

Denise & her Mum & I arranged the best day to phone (Thursday mornings) and Mum & I reviewed Denise's work output for the week and made recommendations for the next week. Denise will be studying Beauty therapy with an online provider next year.

Seyah was very busy with her casual ECE work so often texted back that she was working that day and could I phone on a different day, which worked for us most of the time. She has now completed the last Mx assessment needed to get L1 Num and over the finish line for 80 credits. No longer an "orange" student on my LA classlist.

Lydia did not always attend YouseeU sessions, and is happy to talk on the phone or check in at the start and end of the week via text (my trial for T4). Does not appear to have added any credits to her ROA this year; has acknowledged that procrastination is a problem for her.

Victor reluctantly attended one YouseeU session (missed the first couple - no apologies or acknowledgement that he had received/seen the invitation with the meeting link) and typed brief, usually monosyllabic answers to any questions I posed to him directly. I have occasionally managed to get a response when I send a facebook messenger message, but it's not 100% reliable. If I can get answer when I phone the family Mum will speak for Victor and he will not talk to me. Has gained 6 credits this year.

I've sent out a google form to the LA's who had attended one of the Putaruru advisory sessions (as my first point of establishing a good working relationship with them)

I've posted news items using My Korowai intermittently - such as the "Kia Mahana mai koe" image here, in an effort to stay in touch with my LAs using the news function on My Korowai, but there was limited response to this type of contact.

Student progress - linked to PDA enquiry

End of term 2 results:
4 students are making progress towards gaining more credits. Sophie, Denise, Lydia, Seyah.
2 students (paper-based) are not. Whekoi & Kayla (Kayla sent something in this year, but had started working on this topic in 2017). I am really struggling to think of other ways of engaging these students. Letters, phone calls, posting work out does not seem to work. Even having our LT visit does not appear to make much difference to work return rates - his reports are positive but the students don't do much outside of these visit times.
1 student (Victor) is intermittently working online but appears to escape notice of his supervisor - apparently flicks on to another screen when supervisor checks. This is one of the students I am intending to increase my frequency of contact with next term, and will be asking his supervisor (Mum) if we are really the best place for Victor to be studying with - will share screen shots of engagement data for My Te Kura to assist conversation with all students.

Results to date:

		ALL SOURCES
	LIT AS	LIT US	NUM AS	NUM US	L1	L2	L3+
Seyah	20	10	8	3	68	3	0
Kayla	18	0	0	10	37	15	0
Denise	10	0	11	0	30	9	0
Sophie	0	3	0	0	7	13	8
Lydia	0	0	7	0	17	0	0
Victor	3	0	7	0	15	0	0
Whekoi	0	3	0	0	14	0	0
			TK assessed - prog to date
	LIT AS	LIT US	NUM AS	NUM US	L1	L2	L3+
Seyah	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Kayla	0	0	0	0	0	3	0
Denise	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Sophie	0	3	0	0	3	0	0
Lydia	0	0	0	0	10	0	0
Victor	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Whekoi	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

In addition to actions described for Term 3 I will also be sending out a survey (completed anonymously if desired) to my LAs about using YouseeU and My Te Kura. I will be seeking feedback on which aspects the students find useful, or not, and why.

Inquiry catch-up conversations: my thoughts

I am going to record my reflections and progress in this blog format.

So far:
I have managed to get every student in my LA group who has technology to participate in a YouseeU session at least once. Exceptions - 2 students who have paper-based work exemptions and do not work online. I have a prompt question or 1 action/new feature online to show the students each time we have a session. e.g. news items on My Korowai, a prompt about one thing that could be done before the end of day on Friday, a self-reflection question - are they happy with their progress so far?

What isn't going so well:
Student motivation/engagement getting the more reluctant participants to turn up to the YouseeU session. 1 is busy with casual relief work at local ECE centres and this plus her commitment to church youth group events (several sessions per week) appears to be more of a priority than school work (was sitting on NR1 on Friday this week - now on NR2 despite having told me she would get the work completed and handed in). The other is avoiding work and our LT is of the opinion that this student is deceiving his supervisor by switching back to school work screens (away from online gaming sites) whenever the supervisor checks his work (which is quite infrequent).
There is an additional issue that the My Korowai process is quite cumbersome for students to amend/record their term goals and information and then share + upload into dropbox. I look forward to seeing how our new streamlined system of MTK/Google platform co-operation allows the number of steps to be reduced in this process.
I posted out a goal-setting sheet to one of my non-online students, along with a return envelope. It has not been completed or sent back to me. I'm going to consult with my TL are where to next with this student.

What am I doing next:
Continue onwards - be persistent with the YouseeU sessions, and visit the Putaruru advisory once or twice in Term 3 to keep the working relationships going. Investigate the poorly motivated student's situations - what are their barriers? what can they (and/or their supervisors) do to help themselves? I'm going to emphasise the concept of self-management; I am not the mama bird that gives them worms every time they go Cheep Cheep. Thinking more along the lines of "teach a man to fish vs. give the man a fish" ethos.

• Use every means possible to get in touch with my students, weekly, with a progress report and general chit chat about what has been happening for them.
• Attend 1 or 2 advisory sessions next term so we can work on their targets/goals and update these in their Google Doc.
• Trial Skype with interested students.
• Trial Video/voice calling using FB messenger for interested students
• Trial text message type contact with students who are averse to speaking/video calls.
• Get hard-line with the persistent lack of work; what can we do to help and what are they doing to help themselves?
• post out a target/goal setting sheet to the 2 paper-based students and ask our LT to check up on this when he visits.
• share the online personality test and ask LA's to complete this - might give them an insight into what barriers/self-sabotage they are setting up for themselves

I may need support from my TL if I end up having to take a hard-line stance with the students who are hardly submitting any work online. Both are over 16 and do not need to stay with us if they don't want to. I also have to impose a change of work hours on my husband if I need to attend the Putaruru advisory as the timing of this advisory and the travel commitment means that I work past my habitual finish time and can't collect our children from school. So attending this advisory impacts on my family also. This is not a problem, but requires more forward planning and organising of logistics compared to activities within my "normal" working hours.

No questions going forward.

Scotty Morrison Study Group - Te Reo at work

After a suggestion from a colleague I asked our office for indications of interest in meeting up 1x weekly to review some lessons in the Scotty Morrison Te Reo Made Easy workbooks.

We've been doing this for almost a term now and have upped the pace to cover 2 lessons per session - we're not doing the lesson for the first time in our session, we're practising our pronunciation and reviewing our answers together. We've also started doing a quiz or activity in the session, such as a 10 question Kahoot quiz to test our recall.

More to add here....

PDA reflections - so far this year

Since I started working on my PDA goal in Term One I feel that the progress towards establishing and maintaining regular contact with my LA's using online media has been very hit & miss, for a variety of reasons.

We have experienced tech issues with our online platform so that even though the YouseeU session appeared to the students I could not open the session as the owner of the meeting. Sometimes students forgot to log on until after the meeting had closed. One student misunderstood the purpose of the meeting link and had kept trying to attend each meeting by clicking on the link for the first meeting - he had saved the link thinking it was like a hyperlink to a website and had been absent for the session I ran F2F at the local advisory, to show students how to use YouseeU. 2 students seem to operate on another planet entirely when it comes to committing to turn up virtually. I get that they don't see the sessions as important or useful to them, and am pondering how to best connect with them so we can catch up regularly in a forum which they are prepared to commit to. More on that later.

The face to face advisory sessions have been an excellent investment of time in getting to know my LA students and have them see that I am not a scary faceless authority figure. It's been very useful in establishing working relationships with 4 parents also - again, putting a face to the voice on the phone. In future I intend to prioritise meeting a family/student as soon as they are online capable so we can get our working relationship off to a positive start, quickly. Past experience has taught me not to assume that a student knows what they are doing online, even if they say the right words there can be big gaps in what they don't know that they don't know - such as organising files which are downloaded from their online lessons to be worked on whilst offline.

Last week I tried running a catch-up session later in the week due to the number of no-shows at the first instance, only to have total no-shows on the second session. One student needed a head set as she is dyslexic and finds typing quickly difficult, and could not get the sound set up on her home computer without using a microphone - sorted this week and she logged on today and was able to communicate with no dramas, finally! I have now started emailing the link out one day before the session, and then emailing, texting and messaging reminders on the actual day of the session.

For the students who have attended: I try to have a focus question ready for them to consider as soon as they are logged on. Things like: what's one thing you could do to help your learning journey before 3pm Friday? And I gave a list of ideas such as - contact my teacher if I'm stuck, finish off the last activity in a topic etc etc. This worked well for the student who attended that session and together we completed the action which she had identified. I have started using "screen share" more often as I get more confident with the vagaries of the YouseeU technology. I've shown how to find news items on My Korowai (more on that shortly) and how to use the information functions on a subject homepage (case in point today: MX1000 - which topics were internally assessed and how many credits each offered) so the student could then ask her MX teacher about recommendations for the next Internal topic. I was also able to show a student the feedback his MX teacher had given on a TMA so we could work out what task he needed to complete next.

The actual technology of YouseeU is very clunky, with the mechanism of the chat board adding delays in the flow of communication. I find it much easier to have people talk, but some student's internet providers don't buffer well enough to make this effective, and other students have an issue with speaking to a device (same student doesn't like phone calls either). I am going to try Skyping the students that haven't been successful with attending YouseeU to see if that makes any difference to their commitment for catch-ups. One student has agreed that using Messenger will be a good way to keep in touch - he doesn't check emails very regularly.

I have just started doing conditional release news items in My Korowai (released only to my LA group) which have snippets of information or a focus question to get them thinking about how they can be responsible for their own learning (variation on a theme with my prompts here!). I showed the news section to the 2 students who attended our YouseeU session today, and will send an email with a screen shot to the others tomorrow, showing them where the news items are and asking them to see if they can remember to check it each time they log on to their online courses.
Example below:

Where to from here: Persist!!

• Keep slogging away with running a regular YouseeU session, for now.
• Use every means possible to get in touch with my students, weekly, with a progress report and general chit chat about what has been happening for them.
• Attend 1 or 2 advisory sessions each term ( a big time commitment due to the hour travel each way) so we can work on their targets/goals for the term and update these in their Google Doc.
• Trial Skype with interested students.
• Trial Video/voice calling using FB messenger for interested students
• Trial text message type contact with students who are averse to speaking/video calls.

Inquiry framework for 2018 PDA

Using a template provided I've met with my TL and discussed and refined my PDA goal for this year

From Inquiry framework document

Problem/trigger

Lack of engagement and/or slow progress of LA students with online learning subjects.

Compelling question

If regular catch-ups with LA students are held online (using YouseeU) to provide ongoing pastoral support and create some accountability/ownership of their learning, will this give students motivation/skills to manage their learning more productively?

What is a valued outcome?

Students achieve their goals (e.g. 80 credits at NCEA Level 1, participate in an advisory activity or attend a STAR course) within 3 terms? (i.e. by the end of this academic year)

Students identify and overcome a barrier to their learning

What evidence do I need?

Progress in subjects to date - with total time in subject/since beginning work in each subject. Use LA google doc running records to track participation, AL, credits

Maybe do a survey using Google forms or Survey Monkey to get students to start thinking about aspects of their learning/areas they struggle with

What do I already know?

Needs persistence; Students have other baggage which impacts their learning

New knowledge needed?

Any mindfulness resources Metacognition websites/quizzes that are student friendly

Possible strategies?

Attend Putaruru advisory 2x per term (?)

Run weekly YouseeU sessions with some “homework” to discuss/feed back on each time e.g. give a youtube clip to watch about procrastination, and share my own situation each time too so that students see everyone has something they need to improve on etc

Meet for a coffee if student is in Hamilton (have told the Putaruru students that I shout a coffee/hot chocolate etc if they come in)

Celebrate success - make a fuss when students get credits/complete topics/ achieve or complete a goal (cake at advisory? Send a card or lollipop in the post? Make mention of the achievement in our YouseeU session)

How will I know it’s made a difference?

Student’s rate of progress increases compared to previous situation.

Ask students for feedback on whether they found the sessions useful - anonymous, survey monkey or Google forms

Actions & timeframes: Contact students every week - meet via YouseeU every Thursday afternoon at 1.30 to monitor progress through topics and careers planning/interests. This links to our strategic goal of supporting LA students using the Manutukutuku model and My Korowai platform.

Links to PTCs: 1.1 & 1.2, 2.1, 2.3, 2.4 & 2.5, 3.1, 3.2 & 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 & 4.6, 5.1 & 5.2, 6.5 & 6.6.