Bayfield Teachers

Welcome to the first Digi Digest of 2019! We are excited to share our plans with you at tomorrow's staff meeting. In the meantime here are a few hopefully helpful hints to get your digital programmes up and running for the year. Seesaw is a fantastic way to communicate and build relationships with families. There are so many resources being added all the time. Make sure you check them out in the activities tab. Procedures for setting up Seesaw in 2019 How to archive 2018 teams How to add new co teachers How to set up a new team Mathletics Its time to reset Mathletics for the new year. We encourage you to try the new version. It is more intuitive than the previous edition which will no doubt be phased out at some stage. Heads up to juniors the Numeracy for Early Learners has new content and is worth checking out for level one learners.  Check this 3 minute refresher clip on setting up your new groups: ...

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...