On the 23 June 2016, we were invited to attend a workshop in Wellington. Run by Tim Barling the project coordinator we had the opportunity to discuss our inquiry. So far only four projects, including ours, have been chosen. Along with the others we discussed our progress to date, lessons learned, vision and expectations going forward; as well as giving each other feedback and ideas.
We got to meet Dr Wayne Duncan who will be helping us develop ideas and ask questions, but even more importantly connect us with researchers who can connect our inquiries with actual research papers. The idea is that we will have research to back our work and be co-authors of a research paper. Overall if was a good day for networking and sharing our progress, as well as getting a sense of our parameters for moving forward. We have created a portal website to act as a gateway to promote our inquiries and possibly future Grass Roots projects.
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In Term 2 at Otonga, we always have 3 Way Interviews with parents and students to discuss learning, achievements and next steps. This year the Year 5/6 team have created a Google Slide for each student with information about test results, learning levels and future goals. These were shared with the parents of each child giving them at home access to the information whenever they needed it. The anecdotal comments made to date would indicate that the parents really like this initiative and feel more connected with their child's learning achievement.
We will ask our parents more about this in our next survey, so we have a better understanding of how this has helped with their feeling of overall engagement, and what else they feel might help build engagement with the own child's learning. When reading some of the parent comments in our Term 2 survey, it became evident that many parents weren't aware that they could access information related to newsletters and events through our school app. This has highlighted the need to promote our school app, as there hasn't been the uptake we would have hoped for. This is a flyer that we will send out to try to illustrate the variety of features in our app (including the areas raised by parents in our survey). We hope we will see an increase in the number of parents using the app.
Our term 2 survey results showed 93.9% parents connected (49 responses of 65? parents) but we already had a high parent connection from the beginning of the year. 89.9% of parents said they access Class Dojo regularly over the school week.
Daily 38.9% Every couple days 26.5% Weekly 24.5% The results for engagement are based on a ranking of 1 to 5, 5 being the highest. By adding ranking 4 and 5 to get the top percentage, we can see that . . . As a tool for engaging in the school: 53.1% of parents feel Class Dojo engages them in school life (as a whole school communication and engagement method we have had mixed responses, perhaps due to a lack of whole school / parent buy-in and education of the Class Dojo platform). How does this compare to the School App? As a tool for engaging in the class: 77.6% of parents feel Class Dojo engages them in classroom life. This is a much higher response as expected as our Class Story focus is sharing the class live and learning with the parents. As a tool for engaging in their child’s learning: 53.1% of parents feel Class Dojo engages them in their child’s learning. Only half; perhaps because not all students get into Class Story photos equally. Do parents want more engagement related to their child's learning? Then is Student Story the answer, or student blogger? 73.5% parents say they have used Class Messenger for 1-1 communication with the teacher, often out of schools hours. Parents seem to feel more positive about being able to communicate privately with easy texts when needed. However parents still find personal meetings the best ways to stay in touch, but when that is not possible, Class Dojo is the prefered choice. In our analysis last term we discovered that we are using Class Story much more (2 to 4 posts a week) because of the ease of use, plus the responses we can track in Class Story. However we discovered that we had done no class blog posts in that term as a result. While this shows the ease and value of Class Story, the other consideration is that a class blog is an open sharing forum, our window to the world, and without it we are moving back into closed communities. Ideally we want both, as they both have value for parent engagement. Class Story captures learning and life in the classroom for our closed class community, but the class blog allows us to share, teach and model digital citizenship with an global audience. Shaun attended the Rotorua Educamp and made a short presentation on the benefits of ClassDojo. He also ran a small workshop at the request of a group of local teachers who were interested in how they could use ClassDojo to develop student and parent engagement.
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Meetings and Minutes
This is where we will keep a record of meetings, minutes, thoughts and Ideas. Archives
October 2016
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