I've been chatting a lot with my colleague Julie Carl about conceptual understanding. Also been thinking a lot about the importance of transfer, after some points raised by the ever-thought provoking Adrian von Wrede-Jervis. Although the chart shared here has helped me, mainly because I can clearly see which subjects share key concepts, I know it is not the most visually appealing information - therefor, I made my partner make me a poster which shares this information in a better way!
I'll be working on some soon to help with transition between PYP and MYP, and also some to look at concepts shared between all the programmes.

Here is the link to the poster (two versions)

Next week is Mother Language Day!
We are actually celebrating two days early on the Wednesday, as this day we already have a disruptive time-table (we have a four period day, first two periods are Personal Project Presentations, and the fourth period is the exhibition - so Grade 6-10 will be off time-table a lot! Our third period 6-9 go to normal classes, but may be doing mother language activities). As this is our first year celebrating, I have put together a long buffet of activities/resources. A teacher can pick which activities they do. They can also choose to spend the whole 90 minute period doing these activities, or just five minutes at the start/end. I'm putting the ball in the teachers court. Also as we have had some disruption, due to the storms and our ACER testing moving dates, I know that people are tight on time!

Mother Language Day Activities.
My presentation is divided into two sections. One is about students mother tongues and the other section is about endangered languages! Here is the presentation. Feel free to make a copy and use in your schools.

A little bonus. I pulled the slides about language and literature and language acquisition from a post I did about "Bringing TOK into the MYP". This could also be useful for mother tongue day.

I know a lot of my colleagues around the world are currently displaced and many are in charge of distance teaching, because of the Coronavirus. I thought I'd put together some useful resources to help you.
the following is a quick video, where I cover 15 resources in 15 minutes! These are just a quick snapshot into what the resources do and how they can help. If you want to use one, but can't figure it out, let me know and I will send you a tutorial!

The resources:

• EdX - Free online courses from many top universities and other institutions, including Harvard, MIT, Amnesty International and the Smithsonian Institute. Suited for older students or teacher PD. Most are free, but you can pay money for a certificate.
• Udemy - Also many online courses - I tend to use this myself with practical courses, including EV3, Photoshop, Procreate and Illustrator. Use the filter to find all the free courses!
• ClassCraft - Although it is really a classroom management tool, the Quests allow for self-paced student learning. I set these as optional adventures, instead of setting homework, and students really like them,. ClassCraft just introduced a Kudos feature, where students can give positive shout outs to their classmates. Here is my post about ClassCraft.
• BrainPop - If your school has a BrainPop account, you can actually log into 'My BrainPop' where you set up your individual account, and add your classes. Here you can assign videos, as well as games and other activities. Many people think BrainPop is just for videos, but it is much more than that. Read about My BrainPop here.
• TED Ed - This is more than just Ted Talks - most of the content on this site are short animations. What's great about this site, is that along with each course are questions (open and multiple choice), further resources and a discussion board. You can log into TED Ed for free, and assign students work and follow their progress from your teacher dashboard.
• IORAD - with Iorad you create a normal screen recording, then Iorad allows you to make in interactive, by getting the viewer to click/type along. You actually don't have to insert these manually either, as it records your movement/activities as you make the video. I just made an example for Twine (you can see it here), and I had to delete some steps, instead of adding. I just learnt about this yesterday and tried it today.
• The Day - Great articles for school students. Under every article there are activities, discussion points and further resources. The Day also has articles in Polish, Italian, German, French and Spanish. If you don't have a paid account, be carefully when you click, as you can only view three articles a month. However, you can save the articles and activities to a PDF to use later. 
• Comment Bubble. With this website you upload a video, then assign buttons for students to click. You could assign them in a scale from 'hate' to 'love' or it could be five things to look out for, for example 'similes' and 'alliteration'. You can see the responses along the right hand side, and it also makes a graph below, which allows for easy discussion. Here is one I made many years ago about robots!
• Insert Learning and Actively Learning are both very similar tools, which allow you to import an article, then add in interactive comments, such as questions, discussions and even add extra text and videos. I used Insert Learning to make a few activities recently, including this one about the new Tesla truck. 
• Quizlet - Is not just for language learning (though we are all language teachers...amirite? ). With this website you add words and their definitions (for example, I did one on the MYP Design Command Terms, and another on basic HTML). You just insert this information once, then when the students use it, they can revise through a wide range of different games. You can also do live games in your class when you are reunited!
• Khan Academy - Khan Academy is not just for math! There are many courses on here, which are usually quite interactive. I've used both the into to HTML and intro to Javascript before, and students have enjoyed them. I can follow along, see student progress and also easily do the activities myself too! They work with a range of partners, so you can do activities created by The British Museum, Pixar, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NASA, Asian Art Museum, MIT+K12 and more!
• Manga High and Prodigy Math are both math games my Grade 6s tested during their educational gaming unit. Both allow you to assign topics and track student progress. Both have free and paid versions. I think Prodigy Math was slightly more popular in my class, mainly as they can play with their classmates!
• Schools.Duolingo - Many teachers know about Duolingo, but don't always realise there is a school version. Here you can create a class and can assign student progress (levels and time spent). I almost want to many a German one, and add new/newish teachers from my school, so we can get a bit of a competition going!
• FlipGrid - Flip Grid is great and last year, they announced that all their content/tools would be free! Here you can ask a question (a video of yourself is best), then students reply with a video too! Then they can watch each others videos. This is a great tool for staying in touch with your students. 

If you have any questions or suggested tools - comment below!

I've used Twine in my teaching for a good few years and think it is a great into to some quite complex HTML and CSS! Twine is a basic story building game, where you give the player lots of choices (similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure Story). You can make the game with very little coding knowledge, or you can make it quite complex, adding it CSS stylesheets, HTML and even Javascript.

My Grade 6s create a game to benefit members of our community (two classes are working with Grade 5s on middle year transition, and one class are making games for Grade 8s about sleep, balance, mental health/depression and even homework). I've introduced students to HTML and CSS through different methods including some computer-less coding, Khan Academy, W3 Schools, a worksheet in their process journals and some QUIZIZZ and Kahoot quizzes! Now it is time to introduce them to Twine. 

I've built the following presentation to help them to go through each step. It also has a video tutorial and also let's them play a game made by one of my Grade 6 students last year.:

Before they dive in to playing about with Twine, I am going to get them to do two things. Firstly, in groups, they will do a paper version of Twine! I'll use cut out screenshots to guide them. Once they've made their game, students will move from table to table, and will have a chance to 'play the game'.

Lastly, just to check for understanding, I will have them follow an IORAD tutorial. I only learnt about IORAD yesterday, when listening to Cult of Pedagogy. This tool basically allows you to record video tutorials, the exact same way you would record a screen recording. Then you are able to add in interactive features, where the student clicks/types a long! So cool!

Check out my Twine - IORAD tutorial here.

EDIT - ADDING IN SOME PHOTOS FROM THEIR PAPER GAME CREATIONS!

Every year I try to make the Personal Project experience easier for my students and my supervisors. This year one of the things I have worked on, is a new grading document.
​
Changes:

• Directly in the document I have included the command terms and the task specific clarifications for every strand
• I have a separate tab with  more information about individual strands
• I have a separate tab with some more information about possibly process journal entries.

All this information is from the Further Guidance for Projects document (which is super useful).

To save my supervisors time, they just have to highlight in green the levels the student had met. Then I can take the comments directly from these boxes. If there are any particular issues, they can add this to a general comment box too.

Here's the document. To make your own copy, select 'File' then 'Make a Copy'.
Let me know if you use it/like it/have suggestions for improving it!

I've been doing a lot of work with our MYP teachers to make our AtLs more relevant, useful and to have an actual reflection of what goes on in the classroom.  I inherited an AtL chart which had teachers/students covering 242 AtL skills in a year. There was also not a balance across subjects or skills. I am pretty sure that the previous document was not a reflection of what was actually happening in the classroom:

A small team of DP teachers last year decided on a handful AtLs for DP teachers to focus on, so I decided to carry this idea down to the MYP, with all subjects picking just ten AtLs to focus on. The AtLs would have to be linked to the objectives, and should be things they are naturally doing anyway. ​

We will also have AtL skills covered in advisory/homeroom (with a strong focus on self-management and social skills). AtLs can also come up naturally in a unit, or be needed for a particularly cohort, so they can also be added into our units too.

For example:
Design Objective:
Ai. Explain and justify the need for a solution to a problem.
AtL:
Practice Empathy. [Social skills]
We use empathy to understand client/target audience problems, and the exercises we do around this include the use of empathy maps and empathy interviews. Therefor, we are already explicitly teaching this skill and linking it to the objective. This means that design teachers can easily articulate how we do this, when and we can talk about the progression. We don't have to refer to our units or whip out the AtL chart, because this is our bread and butter - something we know and do often. Also by picking an AtL for an objective, it does not mean that you have to use that AtL every time you use the objective....just often!

Here are some other obvious examples:
Art Objective
A iii. use acquired knowledge to purposefully inform artistic decisions in the process of creating artwork.
AtL: Apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products or processes [Thinking: Creative Thinking Skills]

Math Objective
Ci. use appropriate mathematical language (notation, symbols and terminology) in both oral and written explanations
AtL: Understand and use mathematical notation [Communication skills]

Individual and Societies Objective:
Ciii document sources of information using a recognized convention.
AtL: Create references and citations, use footnotes/endnotes and construct a bibliography according to recognized conventions [Research: Information Literacy Skills]

For Language Acquisition, they decided to pick out ten AtL skills based on the Phase 4 objectives. We also tried to keep the exact wording that the IB provided, by re-worded a science and an art skill.
Here are the AtLs all subjects picked. Click on the tabs at the bottom to see the different subject selections.

I also worked with my husband to make some nice posters for each subject. These posters are now printed A3 sized and are in every classroom that teaches a certain subject (which means some classrooms have three different posters in). I will hand out some for staff rooms too and have emailed the learning support team a booklet with them all in. Now we need to work on documenting what we are already doing.
​Here are the posters:

Is anyone else doing anything similar in their schools?
How are you making sure teachers aren't just writing in AtL skills that they touch on, instead of ones they are actually teaching, and skills which are linked to the objectives? How are you making sure the AtL chart is an actual reflection of what is going on in the classroom, and not something that sits on a shelf/in a folder.
Share your tips in the comments!

Before my Grade 8 students continue with their own designs, I set my students a technical skills test using Adobe Illustrator. They had already completed a range of tutorials, (shown here).
In the lesson before their test, I was off at a conference, so gave them a practice exercise. In this they had a video tutorial, along with a list of stock footage to pick from.
Here is their pre-test practice lesson.

In this session, I purposefully selected silly images, as I thought this would give them a giggle while I was away.
At this point, I had already shown them the test document, talked them through it, including letting them know that it is 'open book' so they can look online for any technical support, and can also go back to their tutorials document and practice work. However, I did not show them the images they would manipulate during the test.
Here is some of their work from their practice session:

Here is some of the beautiful work they completed!

I've tried to put a technical skills test at the start of a few units, especially when they are learning something completely new. Feedback from the students is that they feel this makes them prepared and helps them focus on skill development. Does anyone else do a separate skills test with their students?