Intro Hello, I'm Paddy, and I'm Rachel, and this is "Cup of Tea with a Teacher." A podcast that lasts about the right amount of time to have a cup of tea or coffee and catch up on the latest in the world of teaching, particular literacy, numeracy, and all things library.
Paddy: Rachel, what's happening in your library at the moment?
Rachel: Well, we are back after a fantastic holiday break. We actually came back last week, and I know Queensland returned last week as well. New South Wales is back this coming week, so teachers all across Australia have a kind of staggered return to 2025. But we are back and just loving being back with the students and ready to get into 2025.
Paddy: You know, I think one of the cutest things with the whole coming back for Rachel is that she has her entire library back. And that means that during the holidays, Rachel has been going into school, working on her library and her displays, and various things and she is just so excited about all those displays.
What have you enjoyed putting up? What's front and center in your library now? When the kids come in what are they going to see?
Rachel: One of the biggest changes they'll see is that I've actually built an indigenous reading area in the back of my library, having had my desk at the back of the library because admin sort of took over the front of the library during renovations. You know, school renovations going on. So we housed the principal, the assistant principal, and the entire admin team, and everybody was in there, and it was mayhem and madness. But we got through it for six months. So that's now been converted into an Indigenous area where we'll have Indigenous resources, will have books by Australian Indigenous authors, and I've got a beautiful soft area down there with cushions, and the kids can kind of lie around and have a bit of a yarning circle and yeah, just really a space for community and catching up and more than just reading it's storytelling and that sort of thing as well.
Paddy: Wow that sounds nice, you know, as a kid, I mean it's been a while, but I do remember just being able to lie on the carpet and enjoy reading a book. So I feel like that happened more on camps than actually in our school library. I think our school library had pretty tough, sort of plastic tile kind of flooring I do recall back in the day. But anyway, that sounds fantastic.
So what we're going to do now is get into the section of the podcast that we call "Books in Focus."
So this is a bit of a teacher's shortcut. What books might you be thinking about as 2025 begins? There have been some themes of animal protection coming out in some new books that you've been reading.
Rachel: Yes. So over the holidays I sort of caught up on my backlog of books. And in that Hannah Gold's book, "Turtle Moon" was a bit of a standout, as was Morris Gleitzman's "Twitter". Now that one I did actually read at the end of last year, but just this idea that we're seeing about encouraging children to think about the animals in our environment, thinking about what we can do differently to coexist, to put nature first, to reduce our use of plastics, to recycle where we can, to reduce our footprint on the environment. So I mean, I know that you've been very keen with that, Paddy, with your Molly stories on Learn from Play.
Paddy: Oh, I really have. Although I must admit, I haven't put an instalment out for a little while. I don't know if you've seen on Learn from Play. If you go on there and you click on Learn from Play Originals. Yes, we've got books that Rachel has written and also these audio stories that I've produced around native animals in the urban environment, which I thought was an interesting theme. I plan to put some more installments out this year, but have a listen and let me know what you think and maybe give me some direction in terms of what the reactions are of your students.
There are obviously activities there as well. So I can get tons of activities. Tons of activities. You know, you guys smashed out. Rachel is the brains trust behind all the activities on Learn From Play. And when I said, look, I've got this idea for these animal stories - Molly - The Marsupial Mouse, for example, can we produce some activities? And we've got a ton on there and many of them are free. So even if you're not a member of the website, you can just jump on there and grab them. In terms of animals in the urban environment and just that whole protection of animals out of those three books, which was your favourite?
Rachel: Hmm. I think actually Twitter. I mean, I love. Morris Gleitzman, who doesn't? He writes the most incredible books. He manages to talk about really important topics in a very student-focused way in a way that children can really engage with the story and just the incredible concept that the birds would band together to show people what we're doing wrong and that they're fed up and we need to do it differently because they're going to stop us, basically, is what that book is about. And then spoiler alert. But yeah, the idea of Twitter, the media account is why it's called Twitter. So based on birds, but also on Twitter as in social media. So a beautiful play on the word. Well, that is. That's books touched on.
Paddy: What about teachers tech? We thought we might have a little section of the podcast to talk about the latest and greatest tech and tools for the classroom and the adoption of AI in Australian classrooms is set to transform teaching, they say, and learning processes. But of course it does raise the question, you know, those ethical considerations, data, privacy, evolving role of educators. I mean, I think Google has just made Gemini available in schools. I know that we in the business account, we have it now for free, just sort of showed up. I don't know if that was because anyone wasn't paying for it or why, but yeah, Gemini just turned up in the email just over the last few weeks, and I think you guys have now got Brisk. So tell us about that. I don't know if the audience is familiar with Brisk. I know I'm not. Tell me about that.
Rachel: So Brisk is based on the the same open source AI like ChatGTP, but has far more teacher specific shortcuts and things in there.
Paddy: So you've got brisk open there. Brisk AI tools for teachers. Just curious, is anyone in the audience using Brisk yet? What are your thoughts on it? By all means, jump on to our social media where the podcast is posted and drop in a comment. Let us know how you're using AI and maybe what you perceive some of the challenges to be. What do you what do you think some of the challenges are with the AI Rachel?
Rachel: I think the biggest one is just making sure that the information that you give it is really, really specific. That you are putting in prompts that directly create the information that you want. Because Brisk is teacher specific and it can do things like create, decodable texts and make worksheets and all these other incredible things, but if you don't tell it exactly what you want, it won't give you back what you're looking for.
Paddy: Yeah, I've experimented quite a lot with ChatGPT and I've been using it for all kinds of things. Report writing is one thing that I think it does quite well. You know, if you've got a data set that you can load in, then you can get ChatGPT to spit that data out in a, let's say a "parent friendly" format. And I think for things like reporting on children's different levels at school, there's a lot of time saving potential with AI. Whether or not that's going to be implemented any time soon, and obviously it raises the question of, you know, what is the data that's going to be best given and how to best utilise that and leverage that while still keeping things personalised from a teacher perspective?
Rachel: I think you just have to be really careful when you're putting anything into these AI platforms that all of your information is depersonalised. Students names are removed, school names are removed, all of that so that it's all depersonalised. And obviously you put it back in and make sure you put it back in when you're using it in reports and things. But when you're putting it into those machines, make sure it's depersonalised information.
Paddy: Yeah, that's the great thing about the AI doesn't need to know this specific person. You know, it doesn't need to know, oh, Mary did this or Bill did that. You can give it data such as I'm going to give you a scale where one equals this and ten equals that. And you might just type in like one, two, three, six, eight, and then it gives you back the ready to copy and paste dialogue that you might have even programmed in using your anyway. But yeah, the things you can do very, very, very interesting. How you using AI?
Rachel: We found at the end of last year with our report writing, just getting it to read through the comments, making sure that we weren't using the same term twice in the paragraph that we'd written, making sure that it was covering everything that we wanted it to have, making sure that our working towards outcomes were different from our high level outcomes, those sort of things. Just making sure that it was all, just those basics that we would normally have to go through ourselves and check. You can actually run it back through AI and it can do that legwork for you.
Paddy: Yeah, it's look, it's a really interesting space. I know a lot of people are a bit concerned about it. I don't think it's going to replace teachers. I don't think it's going to replace people. I think it's going to help us to do what we do but better, you know, and maybe take up some of the tedious stuff that maybe, you know.
Rachel: Some of the rubrics and the worksheet and the generating of those activities for the classroom. But we still need to be there as the expert facilitators of those lessons.
Paddy: Now, speaking of activities for the classroom, Learn From Play is all about teaching resources and making teaching and learning from a student perspective, fun, engaging, easy. And you've got some resources. We're going to put a spotlight in the section of the podcast we're calling Resource Spotlight.
So Chinese New Year, it's just around the corner. What's going on at Learn From Play in terms of resources for that. So this year sorry, this week we're celebrating Chinese New Year and there's a new book by Rebecca Lim and Cai Tse, I hope I said that correctly, and it's called Our Family Dragon and it's a Lunar New Year story. So it's a beautiful play on this term of our family dragon. And I won't spoil that for you, but it takes you through the celebration of Chinese New Year in Australia and it just captures the essence of family tradition and the festive spirit of the season. And with that, we've created some activities that show. How to make with a pattern for a lantern - so a Chinese lantern, which you see at Chinese New Year. A money envelope which is given to children. So how to make one of those? We've got some cooking recipes, so throwing in some math there. But it's all about not just sitting down and doing a worksheet. Yes, there is a comprehension there as well, if that's what you want to use. But it's also about these physical activities in getting kids engaged in the learning hands on fun play activities.
Paddy: So the pictures in this book are absolutely gorgeous. The illustrations just stunning. So if you love colour in your books and I'm sure your kids will really appreciate this and you want a way to bring a little bit of Chinese culture into the classroom, this is a really lovely book to achieve that and a very topical one for this week.
Onto teachers tips and expert guests. Well, we don't have any expert guests for this section today, but if you have a story to share, a teaching tip or something around teaching that's going to help our audience - please reach out to Rachel@LearnFromPlay.com but today we're going to talk just very briefly about a little tool that you use in the classroom, Rachel, and that I also like to use and that is a little mini amplifier to protect your voice when you are projecting, especially in a large area like a library, you know you've got a little headset, a MIPRO system - How do you find that?
Rachel: So where I teach is an area called The Pit, literally because it is almost like stadium seating and I'm at the bottom of it and the acoustics in there and just terrible. So I found when I started teaching there that I was shouting and that it was really taxing on my voice. So yeah, using the headset, the kids are now used to it, they love it. They will often tell me if the batteries are dead like, No, no, you stopped. You stopped working and say to me, "you stopped working" and I just quickly swap those out. I have rechargeable batteries in there, so I'm not burning through batteries. And yeah, it just makes it really easy for the kids to hear me. So they're not straining to hear me and I'm not straining my voice to talk to them. And I can just talk really quietly, and especially when I can be reading the same book six, eight, 12 times in a week to the students. It means that I'm not straining to do that. And my lessons are one hour long so I can be talking for a long time.
Paddy: Yeah. I remember again, this is going back a little while, but being in a classroom as a student, you know, if you just cast your mind back and let's just say you miss something that's being said by the teacher, maybe you are a little distracted or something. You couldn't hear them properly anyway. And so you get a little bit more distracted and you start, you know, looking around yourself and then you realise you've missed a whole section at that point. I know I used to think I know a lot of kids are better than me, even though I think, Oh, well, I've missed a little bit. It won't matter if I miss it all now, I mean, there's no point in even listening at all and that's where you would lose me and I think kids like that who maybe can't quite hear, you know, right at the back or wherever they might be when you because you put the box at the back of the seating, do you or do you have it down next to you.
Rachel: I have it away from me. It's aside from me, but it's definitely facing the students. So it's it's very disconcerting for them if it's behind them or when they're working, because my seats are actually not where I sit and talk to the students. It's actually up on the level area and it's very disconcerting for them if I talk to them from the pit microphone and I'm actually standing behind their desks to try to talk to all of them, and then they look around because they know that I'm not standing in The Pit, but that's where the noise is coming from. So it can actually be quite a disconcerting thing for them. But as I say, their used to it.
Paddy: That's funny, I didn't I didn't know you did it that way. I always put it at the back behind facing towards me. So almost like a feedback so I can hear myself so I don't end up raising my voice. But their older kids that don't seem to be too concerned by that. And it stops me when you can hear yourself, at least certainly from my experience with this, when you can hear yourself and we really we're talking you know, normal speaking volume here, it's not like it's not like encountering no echo around the classroom or anything like that is is just a very low level amount of amplification. So you can talk in your indoor quiet voice, which I think goes over very well with certain kinds of students as well. You know, sometimes when you're projecting, I mean, when you're excited, that's great. But if you're projecting because you need to and you're a bit tired, your voice can come out a little harsh, I think, and forced. And the kids, you know, they you can see the difference between when you're speaking gently to them and they can hear and everything's great versus, you know, you're projecting at the end of a long day and and it's starting to sound a little harsh.
Rachel: The other other big teaching tip, having taught now for well over 20 years, is that you learn that if you speak loudly, the children will speak loudly. And the louder you get, the louder they will get. If you speak really softly, they will be quiet because they want to hear you. So you will actually end up with a much, much quieter classroom if you are speaking quietly. So I never, ever shout at students. I never raise my voice, partly just to protect my own voice, which is what we're talking about here. But also because it's counterintuitive that if I am loud that you will get loud.
Paddy: And when we say shout, I mean, we we have our own children, for example, and my son often says, "oh, why are you shouting at me?" And there was no shouting. But it's interesting, children will have a perception that you're shouting at them just because the volume is raised a tiny little bit, you know, and it is very interesting that perception of how kids take in volume. So there you go. There is a there's a tip for what it's worth, a grain of salt. You know, if you find that your voice is getting tired a lot and you're doing a lot of talking, then, I can certainly recommend, and Rachel can attest to the value, of a MIPRO unit or something like that. They're tiny little amplification units and they can go a long way to to supporting you as a teacher in the classroom.
Rachel: I think in the future, we'll see if we can find a speech pathologist who can talk to us about tips and tricks for protecting your voice.
Paddy: Oh, we're going to have lots of guests. Lots of guests. We just got to get that organised. And likewise, the next section, your questions answered. We're going to be answering questions that you posed to us. And also the broader community around Learn From Play. Questions that you want answered. So once again, we don't have any questions right now. I mean, we could have made up Mary from X-Y-Z school, but the reality is that we know you've got questions but pop on to Facebook or wherever you want to consume the Learn From Play social media. I think we're on Instagram as well. Pop us a question and that will be what shows up in this section. And if you've posed a question and if you've got something to say as well, maybe we'll give you a call and do a very quick grab from you that we can share in the podcast here so it's not just Rachel and myself talking.
And that's pretty much the end of our Cup of Tea with a Teacher - Like, Share and Subscribe, email Rachael (Rachel@LearnFromPlay.com) if you've got any teaching tips or questions and we hope you've enjoyed this first instalment, the first of many where we are going to hopefully be coming to you every fortnight and just reaching out and participating a little bit more in the community, particularly as Rachel is now back full time as a teacher librarian. This is the way that we're thinking will give us an opportunity to stay connected with the Learn From Play audience and also find new people to connect with which is always lovely in the teaching community.
I'm Patrick. I'm Rachel, and you've been listening to Cup of Tea with a Teacher.
We'll see you next time.
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