Bayfield Teachers

Hour of Code We are excited to announce Bayfield's participation in the:  Hour of Code Friday 7th of December Junior School: 10 - 11am Middle School: 11.30 - 12.30pm Senior School: 1.40 - 2.40pm This international event is the largest learning experience in history! In the last 4 years, over 100 million students world-wide have taken part. The Hour of Code began as a one-hour coding challenge to give students a fun first introduction to computer science and has become a global learning celebration and awareness event. During the hour students will enjoy a selection of one-hour digital and stem activities suitable for all levels of experience and ages. The basic message of Hour Of Code is that w e live in a world surrounded by technology and we know that whatever field our students choose to go into as adults, their ability to succeed will increasingly depend on understanding how technology works. By encouraging students to tr...

In preparation for the great Bayfield Book Bonanza in weeks 9 and 10  we have devoted this edition of the Digi Digest to apps and digital activities that might be useful to promote books and reading in your teams. SeeSaw There are literally hundreds of activities on Seesaw that can be adapted to fit into your book fortnight programmes. It is so much easier to have a template to start with than to create something from scratch. Once you have set the activity it is easy to track which students have completed it by clicking on the grey responses bar and scrolling down where you will see a small visual of each students response. Here are a few of our favourite ideas. Book Snap Seesaw Activity Book Review Seesaw Activity Fluency Favourite Seesaw Activity Seesaw News Fantastic News! We are one of the top SeeSaw Schools in New Zealand. 4386 posts this year! We are accepting the offer of free SeeSaw For Schools for the rest of the year. Details to follow. ...

We are looking at meeting the other WST over the next couple of weeks which we are really looking forward to and seeing what other schools are doing and how we are tracking :) Thank you so much for your support at the staff meeting last Tuesday. The enthusiasm around picking 2 target children and focusing on trying to move them from 'at' to 'above' was great and we are looking forward to working with you during this inquiry. We understand that time is very tight and so this focus can become either be an add on to your current collaborative team inquiry around writing or take over what you may have already started (or not started...). Like we said in the meeting there is only a term and a half to go but these children may be passed on to next years teachers or you may in fact achieve this goal by the end of the year! Now it is important to look at why your particular students may be underachieving and how you can change your practice to help them succeed. The hunches...

The future... Core Education top 10 Trends Each year, CORE Education’s experienced staff of researchers, educators, and digital technology experts pool their expertise and share their understandings to identify the trends and influences that are expected to make a growing impact upon education in New Zealand in the coming year. This is well worth a read and exciting to see how many areas we are actively working on at Bayfield. App of the week Newsela Newsela is a data base of current events stories tailor-made for classroom use.  Indexed by broad theme (e.g. War and Peace, Arts, Science, Health, Law, Money), stories are both student-friendly and can be accessed in different formats by reading level. N ewspaper writers rewrite a story four times for a total of five levels per story.  All articles have embedded quizzes that conform to the reading levels for checking comprehension. An account is required to use Newsela, both fo...

Vine & View It was so nice to go in to everyone's spaces and see how we are all promoting student agency in writing! We were blown away by what people are doing and it was great that we were able to get new ideas from each other. The variety of ways that we are teaching writing is very valuable, as it gives the children different experiences as they progress through the school, and we are very keen to hold on to that. Next term we are hoping to organise another Vine & View with Westmere so we can see what other schools are doing too. Student Voice We were so impressed with the students that we spoke to and the passion that they had for writing. Most of them were able to articulate what they were currently learning and how they could make progress. It came through how much they loved free writing as well as teacher-led writing and it is great that we have a balance of both. Here is the student voice continuum that we mentioned at the staff meeting: We consulted t...

Tuesday the 26th of June The Bayfield Digi Digest #3 Introducing....... Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko - the National Digital Readiness programme launched last Friday by the Ministry of Education. Developed to ensure teachers and kaiako are ready to implement the new digital technologies content. Including experts and resources from CORE Education, Open Polytechnic and Canterbury Uni, online toolkits and videos to help us gain more confidence in delivering new curriculum content.  We encourage you to sign in and have a look around the site. There are heaps of great ideas to use in your learning spaces, particularly with next terms science/digital inquiry in mind! An example of which is this cool Pixel Value Interactive which explains the colour behind pixels.  Pixel Interactive    RGB Mixer The programme is inspired by the legend of Māui, his kuia Mahuika, and how the source of fire was discovered. Māui was curious, brave, determined and had a great desi...

Hi all, We met Ned our Across School Teacher this week. She has been a classroom teacher in the Westmere community for a very long time and seems very enthusiastic about this new position and working with us. Student Voice Next Friday we would love to get some student voice around writing and agency from the kids. We are hoping that you are able to choose six kids from your space to answer some questions from either Annette or myself. A mixed range of abilities would be good. Please let us know a couple of times that would work best for you in your spaces and we will organise a timetable. Student Agency and Choice We are constantly hearing the word 'choice' in relation to student agency and we are beginning to realise that there are different levels of choice. Below is an illustration which shows the continuum of choice. The link to the full reading is  here . Can you think of any examples of your students being designers, advocates or entrepreneurs? We would love to he...

Following Holly & Nat's fantastic Digi Digest we've decided to update you with what we are doing within our WST role and any resources, readings, or ideas we find to share with you. We are both very excited to become your Within School Teachers, leading an inquiry into Writing and Student Agency at Bayfield. We have started to do a lot of research around the inquiry spiral and the link to this reading is a life changer. It's great to see many teams have changed the way the run their team meetings already, beginning to follow the inquiry spiral process. Don't feel like you have to fill in each stage of the spiral every week, you may be in one phase for weeks or even months. Our first steps as WST will be to 'scan' what is currently happening with student agency and writing at Bayfield. This will include: - Asking you to share with us your planning and how you are currently using assessment - Looking at the data - Gathering student voice - Looki...

Digi Digest 2 The Bayfield Digi Digest It has been a busy two weeks for the digital team. The highlight of which was the Interface Xpo last Thurs day where we picked up many ideas. We attended workshops on Onenote, coding, Adobe and spent an awesome hour with Mindlab recreating a plant moving in accordance with the sun using electrical engineering!  Digital Literacy Survey Thanks to those of you who have filled out the Digital Survey. We now have 99% percent response rate. We are impressed with your digital fluency and enthusiasm to learn. We have begun analysing the results and are planning to tailor our training sessions accordingly. (See Onenote training at this weeks Techie Brekkie below.) How comfortable are you using Onenote on a daily basis?                                                              ...