Manaiakalani

Got a blog? Make a book!

2012-01-19T21:40:00.000+13:00

I never expected to find myself a fan of printing out blog posts, especially as a person who has shared satirical videos like this from way back.

However, this Christmas I ordered my THIRD book from Blog2print and on each of the 3 occasions I have been very pleased with the result. So why on earth would I want to have a hard copy of an entire blog?

On one occasion it was a gift to a person to recognise the 'completion' of a chapter in their blogging life; on another it was a gift to a person leaving a school (and a blog built up with huge amount of content) who wasn't sure what the school would do with the blog when they left, and the third one (which I have videoed below) was to create a quick 'coffee table' example of what the blog was about for occasions when I didn't want to log onto a computer. Sometimes books ARE simply quicker than going online in New Zealand!

All three of the blogs I created books for were rich with multimedia content, so it certainly is disappointing not being able to view the video and podcasts. But it also reinforced to me the importance of creating posts that have text and images along with multimedia.

We live in an increasingly device-rich world and it is not always appropriate to have sound playing because other people are often in close proximity who don't appreciate the sound pollution and headphones can be perceived as anti-social. So it is important to be able to grasp the main points about a blog post via text as well as video.

I am sure there are lots of sites that would create books from blogs but I stumbled across this one and gave it a go. And having spent lots of NZ dollars in the process hoped for the best. I was very happy with the simplicity of the creation process, the delivery time from USA to NZ, the quality of the book and the very positive reaction of the recipient.

High Achievers

2012-01-18T08:00:00.000+13:00

Regardless of political stance, the Manaiakalani Schools were very proud to see one of our own; a local school parent, community member, Board of Trustee member for two schools and supporter of the Manaiakalani Programme from the beginning, enter parliament as the first Cook Island member of parliament in NZ.

Alfred Ngaro was also chosen to give his maiden speech in parliament in response to the Governor General's message at the opening of the 50th parliament in NZ.
As well as congratulating Alf and applauding his success, we were honoured that he made mention of Manaiakalani in his speech too - around the 9 minute mark... (see text below video)

Education with the right attitude can achieve anything, and I endorse the view of the Prime Minister that equity of opportunities of training and learning and mentoring deserves our greatest focus, and that the outcomes of successful employment, business development, and growth will follow. Great examples are the Ōtorohanga youth employment scheme, where the local council has taken the lead with a can-do attitude of reducing youth unemployment by providing training opportunities for all its young people. Or the Manaiakalani project in Tāmaki, where a blended approach with e-learning tools and multi-stakeholder support has seen a rapid rise in our literacy rates.

Generations of Bloggers

2012-01-17T14:53:00.001+13:00

After three weeks at the beach and time to reflect on an action packed year in 2011 of new learning, innovation and challenges, it was hard to pick one stand-out event.

My highlight personally and professionally would have to be presenting a workshop at ULearn11 in Rotorua with my own daughters. Over the years I have collaborated on projects and workshops with a lot of teachers - many of them first time presenters. So it was a lot of fun working on a first-time presentation with my two daughters who have been teaching for two and three years respectively, and blog with their students.

We submitted a proposal we called "Blogging - a possibility for everyone" and began our 'blurb' with this:

Blogging has been around for a decade now and to many teachers it has become so mainstream that it is an automatic part of the class setup at the beginning of a school year. On the other hand, there are many schools and teachers for whom Blogging still has a very geeky vibe.

This presentation is designed to share experiences with Blogging, and lessons learned along the way, from a variety of perspectives:

individual, group, class and subject blogging
primary through to college students
decile 1a to decile 10
beginning teacher to been-around-for-decades teacher

The presentation is embedded below and some of the notes are attached.

We also created a quick links page for people to access the material we were talking about.

My personal pride in presenting this workshop with Georgie and Ashleigh is pretty obvious.

From a professional perspective it was great to be able to share the achievements and challenges experienced in high school classes as well as junior primary school and the middle school years. Being able to share about blogging from the extreme perspectives of Deciles 1a and 10 (socio-economic extremes FYI to non-New Zealanders) offered a much more rounded picture than when I present blogging workshops on my own. It certainly became clear that the issues and challenges are very different and this kind of online sharing (via Blogs) does not have a one-size-fits-all approach.

I was also interested that the high school teachers in the workshop were much more tolerant of the issues facing primary school teachers than vice-versa. This was highlighted when we read through the written feedback forms where a few of the comments from primary teachers (yes - easy to work out who they were!) were quite judgemental of secondary schools. This is of concern to me because I work with Years 1-13 in our Manaiakalani cluster and know that to achieve a learning pathway that benefits all our students we need to be able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes from time to time.

Fortunately most people took away our 'learning intention':

This workshop will NOT teach you how to set up a blog, but it will step you through the many reasons for using Blogging in your class/school/cluster. You will hear about involving your school, parent and wider community. You will hear about things that work, things that are tricky-but-can-be-done and things that don’t work for us. You will hear many tips from the presenters about how to organise and manage both the set-up phase and the daily integration in the classroom. You will have ample opportunity to ask questions, like, “How come my lovely young Bloggers never get to do it once they get to college?”

PS: I should also mention that another highlight in 2011 was presenting a series of workshops with my son-in-law this year! I was chuffed that Joel (who works in IT) was prepared to share a platform with his mother-in-law at a non-education event.

PPS: I had a number of opportunities to present with my husband again during 2011 which is always fun.

I am not sure which of the three groups produced the most heated debate during the 'co-construction' stage!

Film Festival 2011

2011-11-12T22:00:00.001+13:00

The Manaiakalani Film Festival was held on November 9th at Hoyts Extreme Screen Sylvia Park.
This was our 5th annual film festival and again saw 2000+ kids attend screenings during the day and a full house for the Evening Showcase.

Our first three Film Festivals were held at Tamaki College in their auditorium and last year our friends from the Tamaki Transformation Programme encouraged us to be brave and go extreme!

Film Extravaganzas have become popular with schools in recent years and we gained our inspiration from the Nati Awards on the East Coast. I suspect the MADE Awards, also held this week with Bay of Plenty schools, may have had roots in the Nati Awards also.

Our cluster of schools made a conscious decision from the first to make our Film Festival non-competitive and instead be a showcase of our "Learn, Create, Share" pedagogy. It is complex enough to honour all the work put in by students and teachers when it is a celebration event, and I can imagine organising it competitively would be more challenging still.

We display all our movies on the cluster website here
and encourage people to follow the links to the class blogs where the movies are actually embedded. That way the students can track who has been visiting and enjoy receiving feedback on their blogs. I'm sure there is an element of competition around how many visitors and comments their movies receive :)

A massive amount of organisation goes into a major event like a Film Festival, and this year we decided to create a website using Google Sites and to put all our organisation out there in the public. That gave everyone a one-stop-shop to visit for all information from bus timetables to the role of principals when attending a daytime session.

Link to Film Festival organisation website

Hopefully by making the organisation public other clusters and groups of schools will be able to use it too. And of course it will be much easier to retire from the Producer role if the organisation is easy to access!

More photos from the day were taken by Karen Ferguson from Tamaki College and displayed on Flickr here.

Apple sMACdown

2011-11-12T17:34:00.001+13:00

One of the highlights of ULearn11 in Rotorua was the annual Apple sMACdown.
The session blurb began:

Innovate. Create. Celebrate.
Bring out the inner Fanboy / Fangirl.
Apple users get together for a fun session of sharing the interesting, cool, funky and fun things we can do using Apple products.
Share your ideas, favourite apps, tips and tricks with fellow enthusiasts. ....

We welcome all comers, but do begin the session every time with,
"The only thing you are NOT allowed to ask over the next 80 minutes is - 'Will this work on a PC?'. Because for 80 minutes we don't have to care!"

Quite a crowd showed up and the panelists had plenty of competition from the floor for funky and useful tips with all the Mac addicts present.

Our website link is here

The contributions from all the panelists are linked down the sidebar.
Scroll down to the bottom of the home page to find links to all the crowd sourced contributions.

Next time you have a few minutes you'll find heaps to explore and learn from , or book mark it and keep coming back.

Thanks to Matt Thomas, Allanah King, Georgie Hamilton, Marcus Norrish, Kent Somerville, Stuart Hale and Fiona Grant for your contributions to the panel.

Hope and a future

2011-11-03T09:43:00.000+13:00

"Uganda is going to be as developed as America, as any other country."!

This boy has a fire in his belly and an inspiring goal . Maybe our dreams for our students are a wee bit small!
Thanks to Julie Trell for sharing this from her to visit Sr. Miriam Dugan Primary School in Kamwokya, a slum in Kampala Uganda.

Do shoes help us learn?

2011-07-29T10:29:00.006+12:00

This week the NZ Herald has capitalised on the school holidays to run a series of articles about schools providing breakfast for children aged 5-12 yrs of age and the paper informs us that numbers of kiwi kids attend school with no breakfast. They also inform us that breakfast is necessary for learning to occur.

In the same week we have had agitation provoked by the media about schools stating that access to technology is necessary for students to learn.

Various social media have picked up on this as well as radio and television. I was intrigued to see a mention of the Manaiakalani project on Google+ provoke this comment from someone:

Hmmm. I live 200m from pt England school. First reaction is to witter on about the kids needing shoes before laptops... Or for the dairy across the road to stop selling legal pot substitutes.... (more online)

This has got me thinking about shoes. When did the wearing, or not, of shoes in New Zealand schools become an indicator of anything, let alone students learning?

And for a 'showing my age' statement;
"I didn't wear shoes to school in the primary school years and I turned out ok!" Actually, I did when it was frosty. My mother sent me out the door with footwear on most days, but it quickly went into my school bag. Things changed at high school when shoes became a compulsory part of the school uniform, but barefoot and carefree was a common kiwi experience in primary school. What was your experience with shoes and school, and how do you think they influence student learning?

Below is a quick survey to find out about wearing shoes at school - and I would love to hear more of your story through the comments below....

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Teacher Dashboard + Google Apps for Education

2011-07-22T17:12:00.000+12:00

We have been using Google Apps for Education at Pt England School for 3 years now. Russell signed us up when we were at the GooglePlex in California in 2008 - how's that for sitting right next to the help desk!

We began our implementation in a leisurely fashion, bringing onboard those who always put their hand up for new things first and then supporting the rest of the team to start using it. But it was when the students became Google Apps users that the fun began because everyone was so keen. And the teacher's Google Docs home pages were swamped with documents shared by eager students.

We were very fortunate to meet up with Jan Zawadzki early in this journey and hear about Teacher Dashboard which his company, Hapara, was designing as an add on to Google Apps. And we were quite vocal in telling him our ideas about how it could be improved to make our teaching lives easier! We get so many questions about it from other educators that we finally got round to putting this video together to give a Pt England School perspective on how we are using Teacher Dashboard.

iPads Everywhere

2011-07-12T06:57:00.001+12:00

That's right - at ISTE11 it seemed that everywhere you turned everyone was either using an iPad or running a session on them or talking about how they would be rolling them out in their schools in August (which crazily enough is the new year in the northern hemisphere) as their 1:1 device.

One of the interesting perspectives was that something that was deemed too expensive for our parents to afford (see video below) has become the 'cheap' option for schools facing budget cuts and parents wanting to reduce spending from laptop programmes in affluent areas of society.

There was no doubt that the iPad is a magnificent learning tool, or as Gary Stager said in one session I attended, "The perfect accessory to a MacBook". But our years of podcasting showed when Wes Fryer demonstrated a reason why every school needs iPads. He approached Russell for an interview at the Google Party! A crowded, dark, noisy room and was adamant that his iPad was equal to the task of an interview. Wes collared a passer-by to hold his iPad (to video record) and with his highly directional iRig mic he conducted the interview you can hear very clearly below.

Imagine how this would change podcasting in the classroom if you had this set-up? No longer would you need a quiet room, or a laptop/computer. Watch this space - I think we are about to acquire an iPad kit.....

1:1 Programmes: Here, There and Beyond

2011-07-11T17:30:00.004+12:00

The panel presentation I was part of at ISTE was pulled together entirely online, with all the participants living Here (Pennsylvania), There (California), and Beyond (New Zealand). the differences in the schools represented went far beyond geography; there was huge variation in the approaches to setting up 1:1, school expectations, pedagogy, student socio-economic levels, teacher expectations, preparedness for 1:1 etc.

Bonnie Marks chaired the panel and we each presented an overview of how our schools were implementing 1:1 and the impact it has made on learning and teaching so far.

This Google presentation (below) was worked on in our own time zones and is what we each spoke to when it was our turn to present.

The panel responses to a question about some of best things that've come out of moving to 1:1...

Stakeholder involvement, in particular parents
Huge kid engagement across the board. Working at more times of day.
Where teachers used it well there was significant lift in outcomes (but not all used it well).
Secondary kids are feeling much more self directed. Completing course work more quickly.
Need buy in from students. In some schools students only wanted laptops if everyone was doing it (didn't want to be a 'geek' group!)

Hyperstudio just keeps getting better

2011-07-05T12:57:00.001+12:00

One of highlights of ISTE always is getting a chance to catch up with Roger Wagner and the team around Hyperstudio. In the enormous trade hall at this conference it is very rare to find the actual developers of products sitting at a booth talking to people and gathering feedback, so Hyperstudio is the exception.

The standout developments I saw demonstrated at the Hyperstudio Booth this year were:

Green screen improvements - you have always been able to do green screen from years back, but the ability to use built in cameras and create green screen movies directly onto the card you are working on is great.

HTML5 - No plug ins necessary for online browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, IOS) means that finally it will be worth publishing stacks online. Until now there has been a plugin for Safari, but we have found it a barrier for sharing stacks with non-techie people who are not confident about installing plugins.

Realtime Information and collaboration with Google Docs - this means that a Google Doc can be embedded inside a Card on Hyperstudio. People are going to love the ability to finally have images, movies etc attached to Google Forms (currently you can't do this in Google Forms) to create more meaningful tests and quizzes.

Embedding any HTML code in a card - this means your voicethreads, animates, vimeos etc can be embedded in Hyperstudio.

The last three developments are still in Beta, but they will be a free upgrade for anyone who has a current license.

I just wish there was a Linux version so our Manaiakalani kids could use it on their netbooks!

New perspectives of Philadelphia

2011-07-05T12:40:00.000+12:00

This is my second ISTE at Philadelphia, the first being back in 2005 when it was still the NECC. I wasn't that keen on going back to Philly as the first time there I had found it a pretty unfriendly and unhelpful city compared to the other US cities I have visited over the years.

Well, in 2011 I got to experience it from a wheelchair and it was amazing! I broke my foot 10 days before the conference and we decided to go ahead with our travel plans anyway. People could not have been more warm, friendly and helpful in Philadelphia. From the cabs (we took dozens of those) to the hotel staff to the cafes to the conference centre - folk went out of their way to be kind. Opening doors, offering to fetch and carry, and always offering friendly greetings.

The greetings. Seems like every second person who went past would have a quip:

"What does the other fellow look like?"

"I'd hate to see the other woman"

"What did he DO to you?" - looking at my faithful driver.

And sitting parked while my driver was scouting for supplies (or just taking a break) I met heaps of new and interesting people who took time to stop for a chat.

But I also had a new appreciation of a conference from the perspective of a wheelchair. I saw endless table/counter edges, but frustratingly couldn't see what was on them! Same in Reading Terminal Market - a place I had fond memories of from my previous visit - you really can't see the food on display from wheelchair height. When parked in a lecture theatre it was surprising how many people then came and stood in front obscuring the view. And I didn't get to take photos the same this time. Getting out the camera was often just one thing too many. I discovered collecting schwag is for the able bodied - it doesn't get offered to people dwelling below eye height, and if you can't see it you can't help yourself the same. But the name badges everyone wears on lanyards were at the right height to read this time!

No trip to the USA is complete without a bathroom anecdote or two! I have some beauties from this experience, but have decided that discretion is the better part of valour this time round - regretfully. Suffice it to say that doubling the size of the cubicle and putting in a handrail does not magically make a stall 'accessible' to a person struggling to walk!

I hope that the impact of my wheelchair and crutches sabbatical has made me more empathetic to others in similar situations.

The other perspective that was so different this time round was brought about by social networking. In 2005 social networking was in its infancy, so the conference felt like 20,000 strangers walking around who may have known the small group they came with but no-one else. Six years later it was more like a big reunion of 20,000 people. Everywhere you went there were people bumping into old friends and people they had only met online before this week. I guess it may not have been like that for half the attendees, but the difference for the other half was noticeable.

QR Codes

2011-07-05T10:11:00.001+12:00

Last year at ISTE there was a lot of talk about QR codes. This year, there wasn't so much talk - they simply were everywhere as a normal part of conference life.

In most sessions (including my own) the presenters displayed QR codes for their links to their online notes. Most people had a blend of QR and print data on their handouts and business cards, but there were a good number who only used QR.

Teachers from Pt England School sent me off to ISTE with a big bunch of cards to give out with QRs to their class blogs. I distributed these in the two sessions I presented at, so time will tell whether people visit their blogs as a result.

I discovered the downside to QR though. I was determined not to use the data plan on my phone this time and end up with a large phone bill. So I was reluctant to use the QR reader on my iPhone. I began looking for a reader for my MacBook, so at least I could access the online notes and information when people only gave out QRs.

After some research I found there is not a lot of choice out there, and I ended up downloading an App called - QR Reader ! It requires you to also have Adobe Air installed and uses the camera built into your Macbook. It does the job ok, but is a lot more fussy than an iPhone about getting the angle right when it scans. I am also looking at something called QuickMark in the Apps store, but it costs $5.29 so is not something we will be putting on the classroom iMacs.

We would be very interested if someone has a better App to suggest - must work on an iMac and or MacBook. Also looking for a good Linux reader for our netbooks.

Dance with the Dinosaurs

2011-06-29T08:40:00.002+12:00

I was thinking of titling this "Hanging out with Dinosaurs" but that might have given quite the wrong impression!

This time last year I posted about the highlight of ISTE 2010. Well, Google have done it again.

We received our invite to "Dance with the dinosaurs, kiss a butterfly, and (mini) golf like a tiger at the Academy of Natural Sciences" and hobbled (in my case) on down there for a fun night out. And yes there were dinisaurs there and they were quite something to look at.

3 Minute Keynote Smackdown

2011-06-27T10:15:00.000+12:00

What a great idea! The final session of the Saturday EdubloggerCon at ISTE11 was introduced by Steve Hargadon as "your opportunity to hear in 3 minutes what some great speakers talk about in all the keynotes you miss!" Or something to that effect.

So for an hour we were treated to some inspiring keynotes in successive 3 minute bites - perfect! Snippets from these are below.

If there was one speaker we wanted to put on a plane back to New Zealand, it was Kevin Honeycutt, http://kevinhoneycutt.org/
Some quotes from his 3 minutes...
Our kids have digital limbs
We cannot amputate those digital limbs
We have to learn to use them
Give kids rigor and make them quote sources. You don't cite your sources I delete your post
'Where might YOU fit as a teacher'. Not "where does the tool fit'?

Earlier in the web 2 smackdown he demonstrated with his iPad and a cardboard guitar.

It was so much fun we had to track him down afterwards and get our own demo....

Introduction: Steve Hargadon

1. Kathy Schrock - Infographics as a Creative Assessment

She showed an inspiring 3 minute movie of her keynote outline to keep to her brief.

From her website:

An infographic is a visual representation of information. Come learn tips and tricks for using student-created infographics as an authentic assessment. The presentation will showcase how infographics are created and concentrate on the student literacy skills necessary to research, critique, summarize, and communicate information in a visual way to reach their audience.
2. Brad Flickinger - Unbelievable Elementary Tech Projects Spoke about what is going on at his school, Bethke Elementary School.
Quote "21st C skills need to have 21st century assessments"
3.Howie DiBlasi - "Making Waves In A Changing Education World"
4.Cindy Lane- "Geo Apps Span the Curriculum"

More of Cindy's wealth of Google Earth/Mapstips and tricks

Gave us her URL for her presentation notes Http://goo.gl/f9e8U

Reminded us that:

Maps/ Earth/ Sketch up all talk to each other
Math lessons are possible using Google Earth (thanks Tom Barrett)

5. Joan Gore and Janet Corder - "Success Solutions for the High Tech Classroom"

Using LiveBinders with Junior students
6. Adam Bellow - "Web Tools to Make Your Classroom Rock!"

Likes to use Webtool rather than Web 2.0
Education technology is not about stuff

From his website about this keynote:

Come to a session that focuses on ten amazing web tools to make learning more captivating and exciting! We begin with a memorial for the term "web 2.0" and move on to explore tools that will bring new life into the classroom. The web tools focused on will reach across all subject areas and can easily be scaffolded for different age groups or student abilities.
7. Hmmmm.... forgot....
8. Steve Hargadon: "School 2.0"

Factory model of schooling is broken
Social media has brought a profound power shift
Freedom <----------->structure, and school has been at the structure end

9. Tammy Worcester: Google Projects for Kids!
10. Rurik Nackerud: "Sharing is Caring"
11.Kevin Honeycutt: Trends, Tools, & Tactics

see above
12. Katherine Walraven: Youth, Technology and the World We Want

Taking IT global

Hope challenge
Understanding challenge
Engagement challenge
Apathy challenge

13. Bernajean's Spotlight I-imagine: Waking Up a Generation for Greatness

From her website:

Calling all educators to illuminate students' sense of identity and purpose through exploring, mining understanding and imagining taking their place in the world. The I-imagine project creating 3-4 min vision videos is grounded in new research for inspiring hope, joy and action in students discovering and activating their own life-goals - living in the truth that their lives and talents matter to the world. Narrative story is one of the oldest and most proven tools for motivating individuals to engage in change, mobilized by inspired hope while activating positive actions NOW. Finding purpose and passion are the hallmarks of a life that matters, a life worth living. They are also the source of joy and happiness. The greatest gift parents and teachers can give their children is to help them discover, nourish and act on this truth NOW. Participants will explore the possibilities, research and process and positive impact when students create multimedia visions via docudrama stories AS IF their future life is NOW.

This sounded to be along the lines of videotaped self-modeling as defined by Dr. Peter Dowrick of The University of Hawaii ie where he uses carefully planned and edited positive self-images of behaviour on video.
14. Scott McLeod: Where we are, where we need to go, and the importance of leadership

Leadership is the key to change

If leaders don't get it it's not going to happen

Perspective -why are they here
Practice. It's about who you are, what your practices are
Pedagogy. Know and define what your pedagogy is

ISTE 2011: Web 2 Smackdown

2011-06-27T03:41:00.005+12:00

First up in Philadelphia for us was the EdubloggerCon on Saturday June 25th. This was a great chance to meet up with friends and learn new things.

These are my notes from the web 2.0 smackdown. If you have been using any of these feel free to add links to your work through the comments.....

Web 2.0 Smackdown - Organized by Lisa Thumann

Shapeways.com
3D printing software

http://stencyl.com/
Scratch kind of website for making games

screenr.com
records whatever screen you're on

jotform.com
create forms that go straight to your Drop Box

notaland.com
kinda like prezi

Casual Collaboration.

Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and enjoy an interactive chat with more than 50 friends.

answergarden.ch
no login required so great for school kids. Create quick surveys

AnswerGarden is a new minimalistic feedback tool. Use it as a tool for online brainstorming or embed it on your website or blog as a poll or guestbook.

scoopit.com
Find web2 tools, post it on the website. Kinda like netvibes or iGoogle

Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic!

Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant streams

Publish it to your favorite social media or to your blog

lucidchart.com
Create organiser diagrams and mind maps online. They give all educators free pro accounts.
Diagrams Done Right

We have rethought and redesigned the entire diagramming process to make it as easy as possible. Draw flow charts, wireframes, UML diagrams, and more with just a few clicks.

HTML5 and web standards make LucidChart fast, smooth, and reliable.

Collaborative. Work simultaneously with as many people as you want.

qwertytown.com
Keyboarding game. A social network. Teach your kids to type. Can limit the social network to the level you are comfortable with
30 day free trial. Also teaches Internet safety as they play

QwertyTown teaches keyboarding, an essential component of literacy for today's students.

Reinforces skills through safe online communication

Addresses Common Core Literacy Standards

Entirely web based

Customizable for learners with different abilities

class.io
A way to host your class within Google Apps. Kinda like teacher dashboard but much more limited

Bo.lt
Connect with People through the Pages you Share
allows you to take any URL and create a unique one

shmoop.com
Learning guides
eg literature. Allows students to choose a novel and has masses of information about the book. Free text to speech so they can listen to this as well.

present.me
a really easy way to present and share your presentations
If you can’t see a presenter’s face their impact reduces by 55%!

Present.Me is a community for easily recording & sharing your presentations. If you’re a business – it could be to share within your own private space with your employees and customers, or publicly on www.present.me to market to your prospects and collect leads.

Present.Me combines video, audio and your presentations in an easy and intuitive way, so your audience get to see and hear your message in the way it was intended. We’ve built the whole process with ease of use in mind, there’s no need to download specialist software – it’s all there in your browser already. And because it’s online, you can instantly share it with anyone you like, anywhere in the world.

gamesalad.com
Make games with GameSalad Creator
Create games for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HTML5. No coding involved. All drag and drop. Similar to scratch. Embed code available for blogs portfolio etc. No flash, all html5

storybird.com
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Read them like books, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards.
Create a story with their clip art. Keep adding pages. Collaborative storytelling. Embed on web.

mycybertwin.com/
Create your own cyber twin. Possibly fun for adults, but kids would have to give it way too much information to make it effective - unless you were doing an embellishment genre for writing, then it may be great fun!

popplet.com
combination of glogster and prezi
Check out Amanda's great post about how she uses Popplet here.

pixlr.com
Online image editor for the masses
Edit photos online. Kinda like photoshop express online

oneword.com
Online vocal builder and enhancer. They give you a word, you write as much as you can about it in the time allocated ie one minute.

You’ll see one word at the top of the following screen.

you have sixty seconds to write about it.

click ‘go’ and the page will load with the cursor in place.

don’t think. just write.

Then type in name and email and submit it. Then you can see what eveyone else has written.

weekinrap.com
Flocab gives you the last week in current events in rap

flocabulary.com
hip hop in the classroom for vocabulary

Flocabulary produces educational hip-hop music and engaging curricular materials to teach academic content for grades K-12. The programs are proven to raise scores on state reading tests and are being used in over 10,000 schools nationwide. Heralded as "groundbreaking" and "necessary," Flocabulary has been featured on The Today Show, Oprah & Friends, and MTV.

Dream Job

2011-06-12T03:29:00.003+12:00

How do you feel about your job? Would you call it your dream job?

From time to time I meet people who don't seem that thrilled about their job. I guess in recession times it is understandable why they don't move on, but I have often wondered why they would keep doing it.

Today I came across this diagram when I was reading Jen Hegna's Moodle course on Creating Student ePortfolios with Google Sites (and yes, I did have a smile at using Moodle to workshop Sites....).

I feel blessed that my job has more often than not landed me in that sweet intersection of passion/talent/career. Hard work, crazy hours - impossible milestones! But if those 3 circles align it doesn't seem to matter.

How 'bout you?....

Google Apps Transition Process

2011-06-11T15:20:00.000+12:00

In the first half of 2011 we were notified by Google Apps that our school account was going to be transitioned into a new environment which would provide many additional apps and benefits for our users.
This was great news and something that we had been looking forward to.

It was not completely straight forward, particularly if you were a school with no full time IT admin staff or if you were a school who had been using Google Apps in a big way prior to the transition.

I decided to document our experience through a series of posts as we went through the transition.
Because Blogger is linear, the posts are in reverse order now, so this final post on the subject is to provide a table of contents in chronological order for anyone interested in benefitting from what we learnt.

1. Transitioning our Google Apps accounts
   Where to start

2. Impact of Conflicting Accounts
     What to do if you have used your school email address to sign up to other Google tools in the past

3. More servoices available to your school
    What new apps are available to your Administrator and your school

4. Transitioning User Accounts
    Move the whole school at once or select some pilot users to move first?

5. Transition Process Complete
Helping teachers and students access their apps (in our case Blogger) that have been moved from public Google accounts inside the school Google Apps domain.

Transition Process Complete

2011-06-11T15:01:00.000+12:00

Several posts later, we finally get to enjoy the fruits of going through the painful transistion process with our Google Apps accounts. We have apps like Blogger and Picasa inside our school Google Apps Domain and everyone is good to go.

Except.

There is one more step with the student individual blogs. Up until now the students from each class have been sharing a generic login to author their own blogs

eg. room29@ptengland.school.nz

So the class teacher (who is Admin for all the individual student accounts) had to go into each blog from her Blogger Dashboard and choose Settings > Permissions >

then send an invite to the student using their personal Google Apps email address and invite them to be an author of their own blog.

This seems pretty straight forward:

The students receive an email in their gmail inbox, they click on the link which takes them to Blogger, they follow the instructions and, hey presto! They can now sign in as themselves when they post to their own blog.

Well it should be that easy, but unfortunately the links to make that happen on two screens in the process are quite small and the text on those pages which catch the eye lead the student to start setting up a new blog. So we made this next movie to remind the teachers and kids what to do. They say it has been helpful....

Blog transition to Google Apps from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Now all this is behind us.

Our students sign in to their own Google Apps account.

They can acess their Docs, their mail, their Blog, their Sites, their Picasa account, their Maps - all through a single sign-on process.

The good news is that for the schools in our cluster who only joined up to Google Apps this year, they did not have to go through this process at all. Their accounts are already in the new Google Apps environment.

Hope publishing this learning curve has been of use to others who are going through it.

Transitioning User Accounts

2011-04-07T19:11:00.000+12:00

Having made the decision about which services to offer your school, the next step is to decide whether to bite on the bullet and transition everyone at once, or whether to test the waters with a few user accounts first.

"You can move everyone to the new infrastructure today, or you can try out the new account services with selected pilot users"

Pilot Group

We went for the selected pilot users option and moved a few teachers, a handful of students and some random accounts set up for subject areas. When you begin the transition Google offer you an email that they have created to send out to the people being moved to explain what was occuring. We accepted that offer - may as well see the reaction of the pilot users when they get that in their email inbox over the weekend!

The result was a mixed bag as most of the users had conflicting accounts and they had to work through thay process by themselves. The feedback from them clarified where the rest of the school would need support. And that is what led me to this series of blog posts and movie tutorials.

The first concern to me was that a small group of users were unable to be moved at this time - and that included me! It appeared that the one thing we had in common was that we have signed up to a lot of public Google services using our school domain email. We are still "on hold" today, waiting for them to sort us out. It seems that we can sort this ourselves though if we follow these four steps:

Step 1: Visit www.google.com/accounts and sign in with your personal Google Account
Step 2: Click "Change email" under "Personal Settings"
Step 3: Enter a different email address where you can receive mail, enter your password, and click "Save email address"
Step 4: Check your other email address and click the link in the verification message from Google to confirm your change

With the knowledge we had gained so far we made this next video and showed it to the staff to give them an idea of what was to come...

More Services Available to your School

2011-04-07T14:05:00.000+12:00

Behind the scenes, the adminstrator(s) of your Google Apps for Education account have received notification that your school account is going to be transitioned to the new infrastructure. And they have the choice of doing it at their own pace, or leaving it to Google to action early this year.

We decided to do it ourselves, and began the process by selecting which services of the 61 on offer we would make available to the school community. We chose 3: Blogger, Picassa and Google Reader. We will add more as teachers request them, but thought those were enough to get our heads around initially.

The briefing for account administrators includes:

"We're adding more services to your control panel, so be sure to tell us whether to turn each service on or off. After the transition, you'll be able to change available services for units within your organization.

Turning off a service prevents your users from signing in to the disabled service with the account assigned by your organization. They will still be able to sign in to those services using accounts that don't belong to your organization."

Why is this good news? For one thing, once you sign in to your Google Apps account you now have these extra services available to access seamlessly without have to alter sharing permissions and you don't have to sign in again. For another, our students are all under legal age to own public Google accounts and so they can use these services without the teacher having to set up class accounts under their own name.

The video below is a screen capture and walk through of what it looked like when I explored this signed in as an administrator.

Impact of Conflicting Accounts

2011-04-06T05:30:00.003+12:00

Having made the decision to transition our Google Apps accounts, we decided to do a little homework - including reading the manual! Or at least working through some of Google's help sheets and videos.

The most important thing for us was getting our head around the dreaded 'conflicting accounts" and how that would impact our users. We are not a big domain with only 500 accounts, but at least 400 of them have conflicting accounts and no-one wants to be the help desk for 400 people when they discover things are no longer how they should be.

There is a perfectly intelligible video from Google at the bottom of this post which gives their perspective on conflicting accounts, but let me give you mine.

Long before we moved to Google Apps for Education I had signed up for a number of Google Apps to use at school. My list included Docs, Sites, Blogger, Picassa, Reader, iGoogle etc. I used my @ptengland.school.nz email to sign up. It was so easy and once I had signed into one of them in a session the whole lot were available.

Then we moved to Google Apps in 2008 and now I had an account inside our Apps domain with exactly the same email address. And it all worked fine once you got it sorted that when you signed in using the green box you were inside Google Apps, and when you used the blue box you were in your public Google account. It would even let you have both accounts open in the same browser - as long as one was a public (blue) account and one was a Google Apps for Ed(green) account.

Warning: after the transition, I would no longer be able to use my school email address to access my public Google Account. Fair enough. And Google has a process to talk you through the first time you try to sign in. Sounds easy to anyone reading this blog, but there are lots of adults - and 350 children - who might finding the warning screens and 'helpful' emails incomprensible if not scary.

The next scenario is the children at the school. They all have a personal blog that is owned by the school (ie the Admin account) but they are able to Author their blog through a class sign in, set up by the school - and this is a public Google account. So they will find themselves confronting this too the first time they try to post to their blogs. And even more, they will no longer be able to have their Google Apps account open and their Blog open on the same browser. They are used to having different tabs open and flicking between them. This will create a conflict and no longer be allowed.

So we put some thought into how we could prepare for this before beginning the transition.

Transitioning our Google Apps Account

2011-04-05T17:19:00.000+12:00

In 2008 we became a school using Google Apps for Education . This means that Pt England School set up our domain with Google Apps for Education ie we signed on with Google and became an account holder using the domain name ptengland.school.nz. This free service for schools allows the account administrators to choose Apps from the limited list made available. We are able to

create accounts for teachers and students
manage all the accounts
communicate, collaborate and customise in a cloud-based environment

...all hosted on Google's servers at Google's expense.

"Google Apps for Education offers a free (and ad-free) set of customizable tools that enable faculty, staff and students to work together and learn more effectively."

We had a very gradual introduction experience, with the early adopters piloting the use of Google Apps initially. Next we added all teachers, then we added class accounts for the students to share (eg room29@ptengland.school.nz). Finally after 18 months we provided the students with individual accounts, set up for us by Hapara.

We also introduced the Apps gradually, leaving email till the teachers had become used to Docs, Sites etc. We have found this process remarkably smooth and have enjoyed the collaborative opportunities created by this cloud based learning and teaching environment. So much so that we discovered an urgent need to give the students 1:1 access, as you have read much about in this blog.

Recently the Admin Dashboard has been displaying a notice that our Google Apps account would soon be transitioned to a new infrastructure. The selling point seems to be that we will have the opportunity to add dozens more Apps to our domain account and we will only have to sign on in one place to access them all. For anyone who has had the frustration of having a separate account for Blogger, Picassa, Google Reader etc etc this seems like a great idea.

It is a great idea, BUT ... there's a catch. For those of us who have used the same email address (ie our school email address) to sign up in many places we are now going to have conflicting accounts to deal with. More about that next post.

We were being offered two options; to work through the transition process ourself in our own time OR to have Google do it for us when 'they' decided to.

We chose to work through it at our own pace and I decided to write a series of posts documenting the process we are going through as a school.

The video below is from Google explaing why this is a great idea. I particularly love the Admin guy sitting at his desk throwing Apps into the keepers and ignore piles.

T.E.A.M. work : behind the scenes of a 1:1 rollout

2011-03-05T22:29:00.000+13:00

Our 1:1 rollout has had some amazing people and organisations donate time and passion - and most importantly a sense of belief that this is actually possible! I would like to acknowledge some of these organisations here. In a recent update to the Minister of Education, Russell Burt attempted to list all those who have been involved so far:

It has been invaluable working in partnership with a government initiative in our community (The Tamaki Transformation Programme)
Working with MOE to problem solve and receive advice has been absolutely crucial and the support of professional development and research essential.
WINZ have been of great assistance treating the Netbook bond payment as a stationery item
Housing NZ has helped with access to the roofs of houses and with finance for the 1st phase of the wireless build
Equico under Paul Beattie underwrote the cost and the liability of our 1st 450 netbooks for parents to lease, to the value of $xxx
Fusion Networks under Andrew Gurr, have donated development & design time to the wireless build
Hapara Ltd under Jan Zawadzki, have donated countless hours of design & build time to our cloud solution the 'Teacher Dashboard'
Simpson Grierson donated the time to develop and establish Manaiakalani Education Trust which is now the holder and distributor of these joint resources.
Cranleigh Merchant Bank donated the time to help us improve our business case and
planning
A Volunteer Developer Group (the Manaiakalani Hackers) built our netbook operating system free of charge ( a contribution of 100's of hours)
Norrcom, under Paul Norris and Edtech, under Peter Nelson helped us acquire and roll out the devices at an affordable price.
Manaiakalani Education Trust with its establishment trustees, Pat Snedden (chair), Brett
O'Reilly (ICT NZ) Robert Carter (Devanti) Anthony Samuels (community) Greg Va'afusuaga (community) Mele Latu (community) have accepted the liability and responsibility for resource and support.

Together Everyone Achieves More

1:1 Reflections from the Chalkface

2011-03-04T22:23:00.001+13:00

A lot has been written on this blog from a facilitator's perspective about moving into a 1:1 environment, but I expect there are a few of you wanting to know what it is really like if you are a teacher, thrown in at the deep end. 30+ eager kids looking to you to make the dream work....

This week we had our first after school meet up of the teachers from the 17 pilot classes in our cluster of schools. They teach kids ranging from 8 - 15 years of age and all have one thing in common; this is the first year their students have ever owned a netbook to use at school. I wasn't sure who would even turn up because I have been in and out of their classes and seen how hard they are working for it - and another after school meeting could be a bridge too far. They have been using the netbooks for 3 weeks at the most. So I was quite blown away when 24 turned up; including extra teachers who don't want to be left behind and came to learn from the pioneers.

Once we got the most important item, food, out of the way, we followed the agenda we copied from the Maine schools;

What is working?
What is not working?
How have we problem solved?

I created a Google form for people to fill in online and we had some lively and honest conversation for about an hour and a half.

What I am going to do is this; give you a link to all the feedback we collated, paste the positive stuff below and embed a movie from the youngest class in the cluster as we filmed their "Go Live" moment.

Hope something in this is useful to you.

What is working in my netbook class? (submitted through online form)

Year 5/6

Children's engagement with learning. All they want to do is go on the netbooks. They love to do anything and everything.
Commitment to writing. The kids are getting a buzz out of seeing their writing on their blog. They no longer have to wait for the multimedia machines to post, so I think their commitment to writing will continuously grow.
Kids helping each other out with problem solving and trouble shooting. Nice to hear great convos about what to do or how to possibly tackle issues.
Certain kids are becoming experts with the netbooks and Google, and are really showing their abilities to help others and become leaders.
FINALLY I have enough machines so that kids have unrestricted access to blogging, docs, research - whatever! Has been everything I hoped for in this regard.
I am so happy with the netbooks. I use the LEARNZ virtual field trips a lot with my class and it is just so much easier now each student has individual access to the on-line information and can listen to the audio conferences and watch the videos as often as they need to.
Use G-edit as default to go on to when docs or internet down. Means time not wasted and students' work can go on
Enthusiasm for writing etc from kids
Finally after 4 weeks of repetition most kids are becoming competent logging on and off Google Doc/ blog/ mail etc
Have now got set time for typing practice which I have made structured and monitored so children are actually practising correctly and working through the levels of the Tux typing programme on their netbooks rather than playing the typing games. Working much better.
This week I've have started to introduce some online reading activities -Google forms related to journal activities and the kids are enjoying using those.
"Key Things to focus on"
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Logging on and off Google Docs/Blogger till confident
- Copying and pasting from Google docs to blogger
- Uploading photo to blogger
- Command T to open new tab so have docs/blogger/mail open
- Commenting on others blogs and leaving footprint.
These are pretty much the main things we have worked on in 4 weeks and some are still just getting their heads around it.

Year 7/8

Having child experts/technicians to help trouble shoot

What is working? (Notes from discussion)

The kids want to work.
4 weeks in, everyone can now log on and get working.
Head down, tail up. Group work is working well.
Finding new things to share. Getting the students to create forms themselves rather than just fill them out.
Getting over the log on practice has taken time, so tasks have been minimal in first 4 weeks. Reading activities, using Google forms.
Having visual keys to help through problem solving.
Troubleshooting - the students do a lot of figuring it out themselves.
Netbooks mean there is always something to do for early finishers.
Having a virtual teacher online was a new thing (using a maths video from Khan Academy) , and released the class teacher for support.
Willingness of students to help each other. Commitment to improving their keyboarding skills.
Communications from students who would not normally do things like that. ie student emailing teachers who would not normally speak up
Typing practice. Lots of teachers trying to enforce faster typing habits
Personal challenges for each student as they are no longer sharing machines.
Take screenshots of work as they go to give a record of what they have achieved in a lesson. eg in a Maths challenge

Go Live in Room 13 from KPE TV on Vimeo.

T.E.A.M.

2011-02-28T22:02:00.000+13:00

Together Everyone Achieves More

This is a favourite saying of a friend of ours, Greg Va'afusuaga, and the recent events in Christchurch have exemplified it. It has become a repeated refrain from city leaders, that people need to rely on their friends and neighbours as frontline resources are stretched thin. Tonight on TV3 we watched a whole street pulling together to cook and share resources and courage in this unbelievably distressing time. TEAM work in action.

The 'ordinary' Cantabrians have been an example to us all as we can only watch and pray from afar.

I have been touched by the response from children around New Zealand as they use social media to try to make sense of what they are seeing on their screens. Posts like this and this are among dozens that have been coming through my RSS feed in the last week.

Kia kaha Christchurch.

Manaiakalani Research: 2008 - 2010

2011-02-15T12:27:00.000+13:00

Colleen Gleeson from "The Learning Edge" has released the eagerly awaited report from her research into the Manaiakalani Project. The focus question was "What is the impact of the Manaiakalani Project on literacy teaching and learning?" She has been gathering data from students, lead teachers, principals and parents over three years, 2008-2010. She has released interim reports at the end of each year which can be accessed here. Her final report is available here.

The Project definitely provided a motivation for writing, an improvement in audience awareness and purpose and in presentation skills. Other school interventions also had an impact on literacy achievement; however the Project has provided a purpose and enthusiasm for literacy.

The students of Manaiakalani were provided with a “hook” (e-learning outcomes published in on-line spaces) which gave these decile 1 students a voice to be heard globally. Subsequently, participating in the Manaiakalani Project enhanced their literacy, engagement, oral language and presentation.

With the advent of netbooks in 2011, schools are starting on a new and innovative initiative that, with careful planning and implementation and adequate support and funding, could be the key to 21st century education in New Zealand.

This gives us a lot of confidence in our pedagogical foundation as we move into Phase 2: The Manaiakalani Project provides 1:1 digital learning opportunities for all students in years 5-13, rolling out across 7 Decile 1a schools in 2011/2012.

Swimming Technology - WaterSafe Pools2Schools

2011-01-14T19:32:00.001+13:00

"If schools can't get their students to a pool, why not bring the pool to the school?

It sounds far-fetched, but that's exactly what WaterSafe Pools2Schools programme is doing in Auckland..."

Pt England School has never had a swimming pool and providing water safety lessons for the 600+ students has become increasingly difficult as the local swimming pool, a short walk across the field, has intensified the barriers: regular price hikes, making access very difficult (ever tried taking 60 kids for swimming lessons in ONE lane -while the other lanes have at most 1-4 members of the public doing lengths in them?), and a general attitude of intolerance to the local children sullying their waters. It became so difficult that a group of children invited the Mayor of Auckland to school in 2010 to present to him their concerns about why they were unable to access their local swimming pool.

So it was a wonderful bonus when Watersafe Auckland decided to bring their pool - and all the associated paraphenalia - to the school and put it down on the netball court! And as an added bonus it also came with WaterSafe Auckland's aquatic education facilitator Chris Burton, who taught the students and the teachers.

Check out the video below to get an idea about it, and this article in the Sunday Star Times. And more from the kids themselves about it below....

Swimming Pool from KPE TV on Vimeo.

The students LOVED the whole concept and blogged endlessly about it:
Chante;
On Friday after school the hard courts were empty but on Monday it was a different story.
When I came to school a pool had magically appeared. I went to go see how big it was but there was a big bunch of kids doing something so I went to see what all the commotion was about. It was just people admiring the school pool...
Dante;
We all had life jackets to put on. Some of them were a tight fit and some of them fitted snugly. When I put on my life jacket I was shivering and shuddering.
Lola;
Eagerly waiting outside the pool, we all had to put on a life jacket. It was damp and clammy because it was wet.
Turuhira;
I wish we could still have the swimming pool so we don’t need to walk down to the public pool near our School.
Teresa;
Chris is from Water Safety NZ, he is very kind. Chris teaches the whole school about safety, one of the safety rules is to float on your back and don't panic.
Brooklyn;
As I hopped into the pool my teeth started to chatter like beaver gnawing at wood. After a while I got used to it and and the chatter of my teeth started to die down.

Food Technology

2011-01-08T09:28:00.000+13:00

Holidays at the beach, and this year we are enjoying a faster internet connection than many New Zealanders experience in the city. We are making the most of the fibre rollout around the Coromandel and are catching up on all kinds of recreational web surfing that got put aside in the busyness of the year just gone.

We discovered one piece of technology that made us laugh when we walked down the beach to Luke's Kitchen for dinner. Luke has been enterprising and has started up a pizza place out of a caravan and a lean-to he built that kinda reminds us of eateries in Phuket. He says he built it himself using bamboo out of the bush behind (it is at the foot of the Black Jack Hill). He also has live music provided by friends playing in the garage alongside. The pizzas are fabulous and the million dollar view over the Bay makes it a great night out.

After placing our order over the counter in the caravan, the waitress attached the Post-it to a pully and whisked it outside to the oven. I pulled out my iPhone to grab a few photos and put together this movie.

I have been experimenting with a fun piece of movie making software from Aquafadas called "KidsMotion". These guys keep rolling out cool apps that are must haves for schools.

2010 - Young Ambassadors

2010-12-31T13:48:00.002+13:00

During 2010 a group of Year 6 students from Pt England School have acted as ambassadors not only for the school but on behalf of the Manaiakalani project. They auditioned for the role in February and developed their own presentations which they have since shared with visitors from around the country and overseas. Some of the groups have been large, some have included folk like Cabinet Ministers, and some have been interested classroom teachers. Regardless of who the audience was (and what these kids were missing out on - from Maths to Art to Swimming!) these ten year olds gave more than 100% to the task of sharing how they learn with others.

Housing Minister Phil Heatley chatting with the children after they have presented to him.

Many people have asked if they could have a video of the student presentations, so as the year ends I am publishing links to them. I am not embedding them in this post. You will need to follow the links to each of their blogs - and leave them some feedback :)

Angela: What is eLearning?

Selena: Television and other screens

Toreka: Blogging

Ala: Graphic Art

Seini-Mino: Podcasting with KPE

Mubasshira: Google Apps

Erene: Video Conferencing


Aidan -Multimedia Technician

Wireless Solution

2010-12-03T10:51:00.000+13:00

Sometimes you see something that makes you smile and you just have to pull up, hold up the traffic on the round-about and take a photo.

This was one of those times - driving past Tamaki College and I saw the big aerial going up on the roof for the wireless connection to Pt England School. For someone like me, who needs to see something to believe it, this was a big moment. Yes, this wireless connection between our schools is really happening. Thanks to the team from Fusion Networks. This is a big project they are giving their time and energy to.

So I went round the round-about again and got myself into position to take my pics - and because this is Glen Innes, the traffic just waited :) The next visible sign of progress is seeing the network pop up on my mobile devices as I drive around the district - and No, I am not about to reveal the password! But TLN is the Tamaki Learning Network...

Netbook Handover

2010-11-22T20:35:00.001+13:00

Tuesday November 16th came and the first two classes of Netbook students in our Manaiakalani Cluster received their Netbooks. What an awesome occasion to be part of. One of the many spin-offs is that by giving the students connectivity on a 1:1 basis they have blogged about how they felt.

So here come some links if you want to read it through the kids' eyes....

Helen T and Sam and Tuipulotu and Ocean and Shaniah and Tia

One quote from Year 7 student:
I am really excited about the future and how this may change our school lives forever

These two classes, Room 19 with Ms Tito and Room 20 Mrs Nua have not only the pleasure of being first, but also the responsibility of piloting the project. This includes keeping smiling through all the teething issues, exploring the possibilities and recording their findings. They will also be required to mentor others when they get their turn next year. The two links in this paragraph will give you a perspective from the two teachers' point of view.

Netbooks in our Hands! from KPE TV on Vimeo.

These students signed a useage agreement form before taking temporary possession of their Netbooks for four weeks. This batch of Netbooks are owned by the cluster (thanks to a philanthrophic donation) and will become our insurance pool of Netbooks for 2011. They will have to start leasing their own along with everyone else in 2011.

We have a three stage pilot for the 1:1 roll out across our seven schools.

Stage One: 2010 two classes in one school to work through the teething problems

Stage Two: 2011 13 classes across six schools (including two Year 10 classes)

Stage Three: 2012 All students from Year 5-13 in our seven schools

Student Netbook Agreement:
I agree that:
I will respect the equipment by always looking after it and keeping it safe
I will respect others by always using this netbook to interact with other people in a positive and caring way
I will make the most of this opportunity to learn lots of new things and to share them with others
I will always be in the right place, at the right time, when I am online. If I am in doubt I will ask my teacher.
I will protect my password and keep it completely secret.

Student Technicians

2010-11-22T19:48:00.001+13:00

One of the design goals for this project is that student technicians will be the first port of call for school-based trouble shooting:

"The device should allow a technican to re-image it quickly using a USB stick only."

So when the first 100 Netbooks arrived, the moment came when all the adult professionals had to step back and hand over control to a bunch of eager 10-12 year olds - who had all applied in writing for this position. eg

"Dear Mrs Burt
I am writing this letter to apply for the job as a Netbook technician. I like to help both students and teachers and I have very good people skills. I can explain very well with detail so people can understand. I would love to know how to fix technical difficulties as well as getting people started. I know I will be a reliable and a great technician.
I would love to have this job and I thrive on responsibity. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely etc"

This was a big ask on many levels; EdTech as the company who procured the Netbooks and are supporting us technically, the development team who has put endless sleepless nights into developing the operating system and hacking the BIOS, Russell who has advocated from the outset that students CAN do this, and me who had volunteered to 'train' them when all my expertise is in the Mac OS, not Ubuntu!

Fortunately Joel created a training video, and with Nevyn created a list of written instructions. What could be simpler? Take a look...

Netbook Image from KPE TV on Vimeo.

OK, so that was all we had to do. We watched the video over and over until we all felt confident and then I was chosen to demo the first one - lots of pressure!

Student Technicians from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Things didn't go quite to plan initially, and Nevyn has written that all up here and here.

But they ironed out the glitches and soon the techie team were on a roll, swapping BIOS sticks for OS sticks and discovered they could do the complete job from unpacking to repacking in 14 minutes if all went well - particularly if John was ontask to put the BIOS password in for them.

Students Imaging Netbooks from KPE TV on Vimeo.

In one day 8 kids imaged 100 laptops with ease. No sweat. Roll on the next round of the pilot with the next 500.

We had lots of interested visitors during the day to lend moral support, and most of them were handed a Netbook and asked if they would like to help out with the process. Because so many have put so much into it we decided to UStream the day so anyone who wanted to could watch - from classrooms and offices. At one stage we had 40 viewers online! Not bad for a geek fest.

So when all was completed and the Netbooks were back in their boxes looking like new, all was ready for the BIG day - tomorrow we hand them out to their new owners!

Student technicians:
Joshua, Lepa, April, Sela, Helen, Nathaniel, Paulitia, Latham

Developing the Netbook image

2010-11-22T11:23:00.007+13:00

It is one thing to cheerfully say we will save a lot of money by not having a proprietary image on our Netbooks. It is another to come up with a free solution - that is robust and has everything specific to the needs of the Manaiakalani project in it. We are all teachers in this project, not IT geeks!

So Russell sent out a call through the online open source community asking who would be interested in helping us out and people came, offering amazing skills to the project. Over several months on most Tuesday nights a bunch of people have turned up at Pt England School at 5.30pm - fresh from their day jobs and worked into the evening on creating an image for our Netbooks.

The design goals are fleshed out in detail here, but in short we were looking for something fool-proof, open source, that would meet all our classroom and pedagogy requirements and provide a safe environment for our students to learn in.

We also set as a goal that our students would be the technicians for these devices - meaning we would put most of the technical support money into the wireless solution and not the devices.
We wanted to develop a group of trusted students as technicians aged 10 years and older who would be able to handle most of the basic issues. Warantee issues of course would go back to the manufacturer and device repairs would go through EdTech.

Nevyn and Tom did a lot of the work on the Ubuntu based image and Joel worked on the Bios - something I never knew existed till this year :) In fact I learnt a whole heap of stuff that I never knew existed through sitting in the back row at these evening sessions.

As the 'Go Live' day drew nearer the pressure came on key people in the group to have the image ready to go for the first group of students on Monday November 15th. Obviously this meant some working through the night on the weekend before.

We have found it very interesting and entertaining to read about this from a non-educator perspective on Nevyn's blog.

Development Team from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Next post: Handing over to the student technicians

Choosing the Netbook

2010-11-22T10:31:00.000+13:00

Choosing the Netbook for all our schools took some time. We needed to find something suitable for students ranging from Years 5 - 13 that would meet our list of requirements.

We sent out a request to vendors asking for samples for us to trial and were surprised by the responses. Three in particular realised quickly that this project was not a waste of time (some seem to think private schools and new state schools are the space to devote their sales efforts) and that if successful there will be thousands of students eventually requiring an affordable device.

We started with the XO - the One Laptop per Child device. Partly because I saw Nicholas Negroponte demonstrate the prototype at NECC in San Diego in 2008, and partly because we like the open source philosophy behind it. So we bought one during the Christmas 2008 Give One, Get One campaign.

We tested half a dozen other netbooks supplied by vendors and had a team of Year 7 students who were the lab for this process. They used each one over a period of time in class and kept a spreadsheet (in the best possible way- on a large sheet of paper) where they scored each device against a list of desirable attributes. These ranged from speed of the internet chip to responsiveness of the keyboard to general appeal/desirability.

In the end there were always new products 'just around the corner' and we were told by our TTP partners that we had to make the decision. The vendors presented their supply and support packages, along with the costings and this was taken into account along with the students' recommendations.

We went with the Asus EeePC as the best out of the devices and support packages we were able to afford. The pricing key for us was that we did not want to buy an operating system - the Netbook was to come empty so we could put a linux based image on it. More about that in the next post....

Netbook Testing from KPE TV on Vimeo.

1:1 Vision Established - Why Netbooks?

2010-11-22T10:07:00.003+13:00

It was during the NECC conference in San Antonio in 2008 that a way forward for our students to enjoy the same 1:1 opportunity as their more affluent peers took shape in our leader's mind. And since then he has been working tirelessly to bring this about - with a magnificent team of helpers. This was reinforced at ISTE in Denver this year.

The next series of posts are my attempt to document snippets of the process we have gone through.

Why 1:1?

Since the advent of Web 2 technologies around 2005 and the with the impetus of the Manaiakalani projects beginning mid 2007, we have been exploring ways in which our students can use these emerging technologies to improve their academic achievement outcomes as well as increase their motivation and engagement. This has been well documented on this blog and through the research carried out.

As we suspected, this approach has been successful with our students and the only major drawback has been the lack of access to enabling technologies. This produces inequity with only some classes being able to work in this way and some students. In order for every student to have a 21st century learning environment every student needs to have access - to a device and to the internet. And in a community like ours, where the mean income is $17 K per annum, this is only going to happen through the schools for the majority of students.

In the same time period the government announced a focus on getting all households access to ultra fast broadband, beginning with the schools. And we were exploring the possibilities offered by cloud computing, particularly the free offering to schools through Google Apps for Education.

In the last major wave of technolgy - the pencil and paper revolution - our families (mostly Maori and Pasifika) were amongst the last off the starting block in adopting it. And their children have been playing catchup ever since. This time round - the computer technology revolution- we have the opportunity to be amongst the first, so why wouldn't we find a way to make it happen? Partlicularly because our students adapt to it so quickly and creatively.

Why Netbooks?

It all comes down to price really. As an ADE, of course I would love to see all our students with iPads or macBook Airs - but that is never going to happen is it!

So we needed a device which would enable cloud computing for our students. Robust, quick internet connection, large enough screen to be able to work on effectively, and all at a cost of $10-$15 / month for their parents to pay.

Netbooks seemed to fit the bill so that is what we explored.

Film Festival 2010

2010-11-14T21:36:00.000+13:00

The Manaiakalani Film Festival was held for the third consecutive year on November 11th. Students from our seven schools, ranging in age from 5 - 18 years, presented the movies they had been making at this festival event. Some of the movies were made by small groups, some by students across year levels and some by entire classes. We have elected to make this annual event a cluster celebration rather than a competition and we all share in the joy of seeing what each school has to present.

We present the films during the day to the 2000+ students from the schools, who bus in to the venue in shifts throughout the day. Then at night we hold a parent and community showcase. For the first two years we held it in the auditorium at Tamaki College, but this year we went huge and hired Hoyts Xtreme Screen at Sylvia Park Mall. We were grateful to our friends at the Tamaki Transformation Programme giving us encouragement and support to take the event to the next step. And we couldn't have done it at all without financial support from the TTP, Fusion Networks, Hapara, Rachel Hill and a local family.

There are so many 'gems' from the day that could be quoted here, but one thing that struck me was how many of our children as they entered the cinema made it clear it was the first time they had ever been to the movies here. It was heart warming to see how much it meant to the kids (and their whanau at night) to see their masterpieces on a real cinema screen.

The evening showcase began with entertainment in the foyer by a band from Tamaki College, and was MCed by Anthony Samuels (who many remember from his "What Now" days) then 22 movies were rolled out - each presented briefly by the students who created them.

All the movies screened can be watched online now. The link to them all is here.

I learnt a lot about creating movies for this screen during the event and have started writing notes for next time here.

This movie segement is part of the introduction (yes, it is meant to start from a black screen) and explains how this event fits into the Manaiakalani Project.

Manaiakalani Film Festival 2010 from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Young Mums engaging with School

2010-11-13T22:14:00.001+13:00

One of the things I really enjoy about my job is meeting the parents at the different schools in the Home School Partnership meetings in the evenings. I am always impressed by the dedication of the teachers and principals who turn out in force - often not just as professionals, but as caterers for the evening too.

Glenbrae School recently held one of these events to give the parents a chance to learn more about the Manaiakalanai project and to learn how to access their own kids' blogs and leave feedback.

Another first for me was a group of young (FaceBook) Mums asking me if they could have access to the class blogs so THEY could post photos and stories from home about their kids. I had a quick think about that, and after a bit of a korero we all agreed that on a class blog it probably wasn't appropriate. BUT they were most welcome to email photos to the class teacher and type up stories their own child told them and the teacher would post them on the class blog.

I am looking forward to seeing where this goes, as it adds a whole new dimension to the idea of Home School partnership!

Glenbrae HomeSchool Partnership from KPE TV on Vimeo.

A new twist to Parent Engagement

2010-09-02T21:21:00.000+12:00

One of the strengths of the Manaiakalani cluster is the collegiality and diversity within our schools, and it is always a priviledge to be invited along to participate in their Home School Partnership nights. Having learnt from some of the other schools, St Pius X used a group of Year 7 and 8 students as the 'coaches' for the parents tonight. Sure the teachers were present in the room, but the students were the trainers. And they worked with other adults, not their own parents. See the video below for more.

Another positive aspect of our diversity is the perspective a Catholic school brings to our cluster. This prayer that Paul Coakley, principal of St Pius X, opened the evening with is masterly, whatever your faith....

Lord, as we attend this meeting tonight,

Give us the patience to accept the true believers and carefully listen to the thoughtful critics. Help us understand and welcome technology as a tool, not as a Saviour sent from on high or a devil destined to destroy us. Let us not worry nor let fear stand in our way as we thoughtfully integrate information technology with the basic skills necessary for our students as they become educated citizens in a world filled with information.

Encourage us as we embrace the humbling feeling of techno-ignorance. Help us use this process to better meet the challenge and stress that many of our students feel as they continue their studies at our school. Keep us open to new learning from anyone, especially open our spirits to the possibility that the students may need to be our guide, at times, as we step into this new world.

In all we do with technology, let us ask the burning question: "How does this practice improve student learning?" Moreover, let us use technology to answer even more questions about our students’ learning journeys. And let these answers make us sure that our technology use makes a difference. In short, grant us the ability to move beyond the intoxicating interest in the novel and the new, to a deeper concern for the learner and the learning.

We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen

Student Internet Use in the Holidays

2010-08-31T18:43:00.000+12:00

After the July school holidays seemed like a good time to check up on how much access our kids have to the internet out side of school. I wanted to get a feel for the different age groups across our seven schools and so I tried to come up with a few questions that would help them to be quite clear in their own minds about what they did online. We have filed the report that Colleen Gleeson kindly wrote up, after analyzing the data, under 'Research', but it definitely fell into the 'snap poll' category rather than scientific research!
However, the idea was to capture a snapshot of our students and I am pleased we got that.

In the week following the July holidays, teachers were asked to survey their classes, using a show of hands for responses.

Student Internet Use in the Holidays
This is what they were asked for:

"I would like to get an idea of how many of our students had access to the internet over the holidays. The Tamaki Wireless Net is going ahead, and in time the whole community will have wireless. So it will be interesting to look back and see how many kids had access to the internet BEFORE this was established. Please ask your class these questions and complete the form."

The questions were: (with teacher clarification in brackets)

Did you go on the internet in the holidays?
Did you go on the internet by yourself ie. You held the mouse, or did you watch other people using the internet? (Tease out who actually chose what to click themselves and who were bystanders.)
What did you look at most on the internet? (Group the responses and give numbers eg YouTube = 13)
How many children visited school or cluster blogs? (To read, comment or post - you could verify this by asking what they saw )
Where did you use the internet? (Try to find out how they get access to it. Group the answers and give numbers eg Home = 12, Internet cafe = 11, etc)
What device did you use to access the internet? (eg. Computer? laptop? Phone? PS3?)

We had six of the schools respond, so the results covered Years 1-8. Although Mike has rightly reminded us that Decile rating is not a good description of schools, in this case it is helpful as an economic reminder. All the students in the survey are Decile 1a, and that gives a clear indication of the lack of resources available to them out of school. Our wider community has two excellent libraries in Glen Innes and Panmure (the Mt Wellington library) and both have a number of computers available for kids to use.

What did we find out?
29 classes responded. 25% of our students had access to the internet at home.

Approximately 50% of the surveyed students accessed the internet over the holidays at some time.
Of this 50%, half of them had access to the internet at home, mainly using computers or laptops.
The majority of all age levels used the internet at home.
The majority of students who went online accessed the internet by themselves ie they got to hold the mouse - a significant point in internet use!
Social networks, games and You-tube were the most popular sites for students to visit. Social networks were used by all age groups. As there are no students in this cohort at the legal age to access social network sites, this is an interesting finding.
An average of 38% of students visited their own school’s blogs or a cluster school’s blog.
50% of the students who used the internet had access to the internet at home. One school stood out (School E) as not having the access at home. Incidently this is the school furtherest from the libraries or shopping centers with internet cafes, so they had very little access at all.
The older the students, the more they accessed the internet.
A majority of junior and middle school respondents (66% and 69%) used the internet by
themselves. 80% of intermediate students used the internet by themselves.
Junior students mainly visited games, then YouTube and Blogs, Middle school students
mainly visited games, then social networks and YouTube. 42% of Intermediate students
visited social networks, then games and YouTube.
Junior students only used computers or laptops to access the internet. The majority of
middle and intermediate students used computers and then laptops to access the internet. However they did use PS3s, iPod touch, cell phones and X-Box as well.

This wasn't scientific but it gave us some useful information leading up to the first round of netbooks arriving and some students having their own device and their own free access to wireless 24/7.

As is always the case with surveys and research, a lot of the interesting information comes out in the discussions AFTER the process.

A few teachers saying they were surprised by what their students revealed - mostly in terms of what they did online and the amount of access they were able to find. They can't be having these kinds of discussions with their students.
The amount of under-age social networking accounts owned means we will have to review carefully how we managed our filters for the wireless infrastructure. We will be supplying it to them free to use out of school.
A teacher from School E who blogs with her class prolifically, and gets very little comments on the blog and few international 'hits' found only one student had access to the internet over the holidays. Her question, "Why should I bother continuing when only our class reads it?" was hard to answer.
Conversations from the students about why they didn't use their own blogs more revealed a very obvious scenario; they only get a very limited time on the internet and when they do get a look in it's YouTube, Games and Social Networking all the way. It will be interesting to see if the Manaiakalani project ends up reflecting overseas studies; when students have their own device 24/7 and they are not time pressured they will multitask between recreational, social and learning based activities. Time will tell.

Blogger improves Comment Management

2010-08-29T21:17:00.002+12:00

The recent update from Blogger to comment management will make life much easier for teachers managing class blogs and for any of us managing personal blogs. At this point in writing the Manaiakalani schools have 240 blogs posting student content and we have had very little problem with inappropriate comments on any of these blogs. But we have had a real issue over the last 6 months with spammers. And when they have hit a blog they have defaced 15 posts at once, which has been very tedious for teachers to remove.

We have very reluctantly responded by turning comment moderation on (for posts older than 14 days) and activated the capcha / word verification tool. We do not like doing this because between them these actions create real barriers to our students and whanau - and anyone following this project will know that one of our major goals is developing student voice and authentic audience. Removing barriers to interaction with our students' online learning is important to us.

So it was with real pleasure we saw this notice on Google Support:

"To make it easier for you to manage your comments, we’ve created a new Comments tab for you to access them. Here, you can manage published comments, comments that have been flagged as spam and comments awaiting moderation if you have turned on Comment Moderation..."

They have made a lot of useful changes at once:

Being able to see all your comments in an editable list - just as we do with posts and labels.
For our researcher, having a tally of how many comments have been made on a blog at a glance is useful
Being able to select some comments as spam and 'train' Blogger to recognise similar ones in the future as spam - just as we do with GMail. I have already had success with this in the past week.
Being able to remove spam comments from one checklist without having to track them down on each individual post

Engaging Parents through Home School Partnerships

2010-08-17T11:06:00.002+12:00

Engaging with parents in an authentic partnership to educate students is way more complex in this decade because we are using learning tools that didn't exist when most of our parents and teachers went to school. So we have less of a shared understanding of what education looks like and feels like.

I have just re-read Dr Mona Mourshed's quote from The Education Project conference I attended last year,

"Students spend 60% of their time out of school. Technology has the power to unleash the potential of the student because they have access to learning during the 60% time."

and been reminded again how important it is that we move forward WITH our parent community if we want the Manaiakalani project to be effective in our 4 major goals:

To raise student achievement outcomes
To make learning portable (Anywhere, Anytime, Anyplace =A3)
To have engaged learners
To ensure our students have employment readiness

In the early stages of this project our 4 development strands are occurring almost behind the scenes:

Mindware development
Infrastructure
Devices
Cloud solutions

But it is essential that we keep our stakeholder groups (students, teachers, parents, government officials, business partners etc) informed and included so that when the day comes to "Go Live" we are all moving in the same direction!

It has been a particular pleasure this year to participate in Home School Partnerships being held in our community of schools in the evening. I have attended and participated in the ones focussed on the Manaiakalani project and each has been a positive and successful event. We have learnt things along the way, so here goes:

The Purpose needs to be very clear, particularly within the staff and school leadership.
Trying to cram in too many key messages about a variety of events dilutes each message.
For these eveings the purpose has been; to inform the parents about the Manaiakalani project and how it is progressing in their school, and to give the parents a hands-on opportunity to interact with their own children's shared learning. And even then it has been important to take small steps, so we have been focussing on getting them interacting with the student blogs so far this year.

Knowing the parent community is most important; what are their particular needs, where are they likely to be in their current understanding of the mindware and the technology behind the Manaiakalani projects, and what will induce them to come out at night!
As all our schools are decile one and are in a 3km by 2km geographical area, the parents have a lot in common. Many of them are sole caregivers, they often have larger families, many will walk to the meetings, and our recent survey showed less than 25% have the internet in their homes. They are predominantly Maori or Pasifika families.

We know that what will bring our parents out at night is their children! They are supportive of their children and their learning and love seeing what they are doing at school. So the evenings need to include the children and we get them to bring their parents along. Issues we need to have thought through are:

Child minding

Food - kids are always happy when they have something in their tummies!
How are we going to get the children to interact with their parents? If the evening is about getting the parents using computers then the children need to be firmly told to keep their hands off the mouse. If the parents are not confident they will sit back and let the kids do it for them - and we all know that watching some whizz kid tearing around the screen is no way to learn anything about using a computer. We heard this thinking confirmed by teachers from the Maine 1:1 project at ISTE recently.

Schools have used various inducements to attend including:

kids putting on a couple of items first
kids writing personal invitations on cards to their parents
printing out invitations on a thin strip of paper and attaching to every child as a wrist band before they leave in the afternoon - that way most get home!

The formalities for the evening which seem to make an impact are:

having the principal welcome the parents and give the project a huge public seal of approval
having a brief overview in plain English (all geek terms stripped out!) about what we are trying to achieve and why
teachers standing up and speaking about how it is actually working in the classroom and impacting the kids
explaining exactly what we would like parents to do - again in very plain English - "We want you to read your own child's work and leave them positive feedback!"

Giving the parents an opportunity to have a go themselves is very important. How this is best carried out depends on each school's facilities, but most have sent the parents off to classrooms along with the teachers and let the parents sit down at classroom computers with teachers helping them. We have found that where we had well laid out instruction sheets for the parents we have had the most success. Particularly with large visual screen shots of what to do.

There needs to be an extension group too because we have found in each school a group of parents who have access to computers and have technical skills, especially with FaceBook. Teaching them how to use RSS to feed their child's blog posts to their FB has been successful. And working parents have appreciated being able to include their email address in the blog RSS settings so they get notified (often at work!) when a new post is published.

The evenings have been greatly appreciated and will be an ongoing feature of the Manaiakalani project. Our next step will be providing workshops for parents to develop their digital literacy further. It will be great when we can have cluster workshops that parents from any of the schools can attend, at times which suits them.

The video below is from Tamaki Primary School, in Panmure. They held a movie and popcorn event at the beginning to show the parents some of the student' movies.

Netbooks - The pencil NOT the book

2010-08-07T20:31:00.010+12:00

As we prepare for the unprecedented (in New Zealand) rollout of 1:1 computing for a community of Decile 1 students, one of our recurring discussions has been about the misunderstandings the terms 'notebook' or 'netbook' lead to.

In our planning and preparations we see the device the students use as the pencil or pen. This provides lots of flexibility in terms of what we choose or even what the students bring from home.

The "book" for the Manaiakalani schools is definitely the Cloud solution we have set up. In our case this is Google Apps for Education.

We expect our students to be writing on documents in the cloud, using spreadsheets, creating presentations and even drawing and recording sound via their "books" in the cloud. The Google Apps are supplemented by a wide variety of Web 2 tools teachers and students can select from.

When our educators get their heads around this concept, it answers the questions which arise time and again; what software will be on their devices? what happens when they break or leave them at home? how much storage space will be on their hard drives? etc?

The device is simply the pencil - if it breaks, just like a pencil, get another one (or sharpen it!) and carry on working because your "book" is in the cloud.

This simplicity in thinking and working depends of course on a very reliable supply of fast internet to every school and home. And we are working on that too.

Thanks very much Lepa from Room 18 for drawing the graphics I wanted :)

Bloom's Taxonomy

2010-08-03T23:02:00.000+12:00

It is not unusual to hear teachers dismiss Bloom's taxonomy as ' something we had to learn at teacher's college' and follow this up with why the flavour of the month is a better metacognitive approach to learning. I have always found Blooms to be a practical and 'easy to understand and implement' approach, and even more so since Andrew Churches has begun sharing his work around Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. It was interesting to hear how widely accepted and respected his work has become when we were at the ISTE conference too. Having Creating at the top of the Higher Order Thinking chain certainly reflects the work being carried out in the Manaiakalani schools.

This video link tweeted by @jcorippo is not only amusing, but is a good example of Creating in action.

iPad for grown-ups: reading books

2010-07-15T19:29:00.000+12:00

I have been reading lots of educators postings about the iPad sharing all kinds of cool ways to use them in school and for learning, but I have always known that when I finally get one it will be for me! Because I am a reader and everyone I live with is a reader (Define: reader = a person who reads fiction regularly during the school term as well as serious work-related material; a person who will stay up into the wee hours of the morning during a working week on occasion reading fiction until it is finished!). When we all go on holiday together too much of the car boot space is taken up with library books. So the advent of a versitile eBook reader will be a wonderful asset to our household.

For the past week I have had an iPad and today I sadly/gladly handed it over to the person I bought it for. I would have bought two so I could have one for myself, but we searched six states in the USA as we travelled and we only ever managed to find the one wifi iPad sitting in a store waiting to be bought - at Best Buy in Medina, Ohio.

So while I had the iPad I downloaded the Apple book reader, iBooks; the Barnes and Noble book reader; Amazon's Kindle reader; Borders' book reading app; and a free one called Free Books.

Then I bought a few books, took advantage of Barnes and Nobles free eBooks and downloaded lots from Project Gutenburg. I also added a few lengthy .pdfs that I had been meaning to read. Then I tried to squeeze in as much reading time as I could. Fortunately a flight from one coast of the US to the other, a 6 hour stop-over in LAX and a 12 hour flight to NZ gave plenty of opportunity to read a few books and documents.

Here are some of my thoughts from the past week of reading....

There really wasn't a lot to pick and choose between the reading apps. They all had nice page turning, bookmarks, the ability to go online and lookup words or information (if you have wireless - which of course I never had on a plane). They did the double page landscape and the single page portrait. I was a bit miffed that it was only pdfs that you could pinch and squeeze to enlarge text. I had anticipated being able to do that with books and give aging eyes a break.

The real differences come in what they allowed you to download or to buy. Project Gutenburg is currently providing the backbone to all of the reading apps and the free book giveaways. It has 33,000 titles available to download for free and it is surprising to discover which books are already out of copyright and have now been digitised by the team of volunteers working on this project. All the classics and childhood favourites are there. I think that the Free Book app has the best interface of the ones I tried for reading these. I notice that if you go to the iTunes Store it is a free download, but the weblink is charging $1.99.

I presume the iBook reader is not yet available in NZ because iPads are not here yet. And if it is like the music and movie iTunes store, the US offerings will be different from the NZ ones. So that works fine if you have a US account. Barnes and Noble work from IP address and will not sell to anyone outside North America. I really don't know what that is about. I downloaded lots while I was there, but know that there will be nothing more from now on - unless anyone cares to email me some of the next round of free books ;) Amazon is quite bizarrre. While I had a US IP address, they knew I was a New Zealand customer and wanted to charge me a $2 shipping fee!!! for eBooks. So I didn't try any of theirs. And Borders seemed to be the most straight forward. Give them your credit card and they will sell you an eBook. I like that non-discriminatory approach.

Most of the readers offer the option to read in sepia rather than just black on white. That is a nice option for the eyes. And I did like the way I was able to turn the backlight brightness down on the plane to give my eyes a rest too. The battery lasted easily for 10 hours, but we discovered today that it is a trial when you are up to a good part in a book and the battery goes flat. Talk about frustrating.

Reading in bed with it is fine. Reading on the plane was not quite as good. Planes are uncomfortable at the best of times and the iPad didn't squish into the confined space in the same way a paperback does. But reading pdfs on a plane via iPad is way better than wads of printouts. If you are a person who falls asleep over your reading and lets a book slide to the floor with a thunk, then you would need to invest in a good protective case!

Biggest frustration; not being able to quickly flip back through the pages when you have lost a piece of plot context and you want to check up on something that happened earlier.

In conclusion, it is probably clear from this post that I am a fan of the iPad as a book reading device for grown-ups.

Global Collaboration

2010-07-14T17:25:00.001+12:00

One of the joys and benefits of technology developments in the past decade has been the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with people from all over the world as part of our shared learning experiences. We have benefited from having a number of schools in the USA interested in video conferencing with our students and working together on collaborative projects. However, because we have some shared history from Europe a few hundred years back, we can be lulled into thinking that we need to be doing 'projects' together rather than spending time finding out about how each other lives and sees life.

After two weeks in the USA enjoying the unfailing hospitality and kindness of people across the six states we visited, I have been reflecting again on the many cultural differences between Kiwis and North Americans. Many times I have reminded myself to not be deceived by the fact that we speak different versions of the same language. We have very different cultures, influenced as much by factors such as geography and climate as by our forebears.

I would urge both Kiwis and Americans to make the most of these digital communication opportunities to explore (and enjoy) the real cultural differences between us and not make presumptions based on what we glimpse on television ( NB: Kiwis) or how Peter Jackson and other movie directors portray us (NB: Americans). This is the first time I have visited the USA when more than 50% of the people I have talked to have complimented me on my soccer team! And even more have told me that visiting NZ is 'On my bucket list'.

I have been taking notes as I have travelled around, mainly via photos on my phone, of things that have intrigued / amused / astounded / informed because we don't experience them in New Zealand. In no particular order, here are some snippets - Vive la difference!

items with an ** are illustrated in the photos below....

First item has to be: everything is larger than anything New Zealand has ever experienced - you name it, it will be much bigger :)

Portions and malls; trucks and land; holiday houses - 4 bedrooms seemed minimum- and campers; fishing lines; airports

America has great roads - huge roads, fast roads, well maintained roads. Lots of toll roads to pay as you travel on. And they drive fast on them.

Everything on the the roads seems to be huge. The trucks, the cars, the SUVs, the boats being towed.
People tow amazing combinations - fast eg a ute towing a very large camping trailer towing a car towing a boat. All in one long line. Going fast.
Motor cycles don't seem to require helmets - even on the freeways going fast **
Radio station frequencies are advertised on the sides of freeways dedicated to giving you information about the area you are traveling through
Sign on the back of a passing truck: "My USA - no comfort or aid to the enemy".
Every state has different laws about seat belts. They change as you cross state borders eg Virginia says " Buckle up Virginia - It;'s a law we can LIVE with!"
In some states the speed limit is enforced by aircraft!
On a very fast freeway we all screeched to standstill while a state trooper shooed a family of ducks across the highway
We saw 3-4 dead bambis on the side of busy roads. Maybe cars are more lethal than guns nowdays

National pride - you have to experience July 4th in the USA to really get a picture of people who know how to do national pride.

Every house on the street flying the flag and sporting bunting. And if you go to church over the weekend you get to see it in the church context too. **
The food in the supermarket came flag-themed with masses of red/white/blue food for sale on July 4th **
Interesting the way they sing "God Save the Queen" on July 4th - kinda nice

Other stuff

Inside a decadent ice-cream eatery, Cold Sone Creamery, there is a sign on the counter outlining all the ailments that these icecreams will NOT cure! We thought we were just out to get an ice-cream, not to cure cancer! **
People kept telling us that Virginia Beach was 'very strict'. We discovered that you get fined for swearing in public, for appearing drunk while walking etc there **
The visual pollution: power lines and billboards cluttering the sky in remote parts with beautiful scenery
We were quite surprised that we could not eat outside when we were having meals in beachside cafes in North Carolina. The waitresses said it was against the law.
A long public pier put over the sea was gated off and payment of $10 was required to fish and $1 to walk out onto it. **
The air conditioning units - you need a jersey to wear inside on very hot days or you freeze
Pennsylvania billboard: "We treasure our country, our cows, our children" - we passed it too fast to get a photo :) However, in all the miles of farmland we never saw a single cow outside on the farms. Maybe the cows were all inside somewhere….
Bathrooms have long been a fascination of mine and this trip I saw an effective method of controlling graffiti; they placed a board inside a picture frame on the back of the toilet door - and it worked - all the messages were contained within it. But the dreaded gaps are still there! **
Cheese - well, there is nothing that resembles the cheese we eat in NZ
Coffee - Funny how something that you would think would be the same the world over can be so different!
Tipping everyone, everywhere; the price appears to have gone up and they have started publishing notices to 'foreigners' that we HAVE to tip 18% of a meal bill **
Visitors are no longer called 'aliens' - now we seem to be 'foreigners'
Cafe menu have appetisers, salads etc but the entres section turns out to be the main course?? Asked waiters about it but they didn't understand the question (or the accent!)

There is lots more, but I think that we need to take time with our students to help them connect with each other and try to put themselves in each others' shoes. I believe it is easier to have a quality learning experience with kids from countries who speak a different language because we don't make presumptions that they are the same as us - just with a different accent.

The Haul - Shopping for America

2010-07-14T10:01:00.001+12:00

Doing our bit to support the American economy is an important feature of any trip to this part of the world and we have made sure we didn't drop the ball on this one. Today I realised that this could be another authentic education activity, thanks to reading USA Today over my morning coffee.

US teenagers (I have only come across girls so far) are posting 'haul' (shopping Show 'n Tell) videos on YouTube. And stores are starting to take them seriously. Makes my couple of photos posted on Facebook pale into insignificance! The example I have embedded below is heading towards a million views and there are heaps more of them online.

After visits to the US I usually return home buzzing with ideas about how we can leverage the latest technology trends in our schools, particularly with a focus on literacy. It wouldn't take much to integrate this idea into the English curriculum, but I can also see a great 'hook' here for Maths- we just need a sponsor.
Watch this space for the launching of the "GI Haul" video channel!

A haul video is a video displaying the fruits of a shopping trip which someone uploads to the Internet. Haul videos may be used by bloggers to connect with their readers and community, and they are also used to generate communities of their own...... Researchers who are interested in the changing ways in which the Internet is utilized and people interact with each other may cite the haul video as one example of how the Internet has changed social interaction. Historically, young women commonly showed off their hauls in person to friends, parents, and roommates. Today, they may be more inclined to post a haul video which will reach not only friends and family, but people all over the world who may be interested in the vlogger's life or opinions on fashion.

Preparing for a Netbook Rollout

2010-07-11T12:39:00.003+12:00

As we make plans for the Manaiakalani netbook rollout to the Year 5-13 students in our cluster, one of the priorities for learning at the ISTE conference was what schools, districts and states in the USA who began similar projects several years ago have learned from the experience. We were particularly interested in state schools and anyone who had implemented a project like this with lower decile students. If you don't think this distinction is important, let me tell you that whenever we talk to people outside our cluster about the Manaiakalani Project vision, the first thing more than 50% say back is, "But what about theft and damage?" A response to that question is a post on its own!

We attended a presentation titled "How to Design a Successful 1-to-1 Program".

The brief included:

"The Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) is the largest and only statewide 1:1 initiative in the USA. Encompassing every public school 7th and 8th grade student and every educator teaching grades 7 through 12, MLTI has 70,000 laptop computers deployed across the State.... Maine has deployed over 155,000 laptops and 800 wireless networks in the last 8 years. If there are mistakes to be made, we've made them. Learn from Maine's successes and failures to help ensure a successful 1:1 program in your school."

This session provided a wealth of information and I have noted down practical ideas here which we think will be very useful to the Manaiakalani Project netbook roll out. So, in no particular order, here goes.....

Teaching and Learning thoughts:

Teacher Preparation is essential
One year before students have the devices the teachers need a laptop and a data projector of their own
BUT don't wait until staff are fully trained to give the kids their netbook - they will never be fully trained for what is around the corner!
Use online communication tools with teachers to support their learning, to collaborate and co-ordinate eg Google Apps
Hold regular teacher meetings where these questions are asked; "What are you doing that's working?" and "What are you doing that you are having challenges with". And record the answers in an online space.
Get teachers out of school to state and district (cluster) meetings to share their learning and needs
Every staff meeting book 10 minutes to have a teacher show something that is working
Don’t teach software - teaching learning, using the software
Principals need to be attending the professional development alongside the teachers
It won’t make a bad teacher better, but once you have taught a 1:1 class you will never want to teach in another way again
The pedagogy must be different. Putting a device in the hands of every student and continuing to teach in the same way we were taught is not going to work.
In the US they found that 60-70% of the text books they used were available online or as pdfs or podcasts

Parent and Community (Whanau) thoughts:

Insist that parents come in to school for training before the individual student is allowed to take a netbook home
Newsletters in a variety of forms are essential for communication
Ongoing training of parents (at school) should be done by children - but always mix it up. Don't have kids train their own parent!
By product of this is that PARENTS use technology more at home
Send the netbooks home. Research shows that sending the netbooks home results in improved test scores.

Technical Support issues:

Less breakage occurs in netbooks that are being used all the time than those that are stored a lot!
Breakage is inversely related to HOW the technology is being used
What they are being used for makes a huge difference. If the kids see classes/learning as boring.... breakage and theft goes up
More breakage occurs with laptops than netbooks
Need a regular weekly meeting to review challenges and highlight those that need to be urgently fixed
Infrastructure - always double the bandwidth you think is necessary.... and double it every year. You will never have too much
Every classroom needs its own managed access point for wireless
Students MUST be used as technicians. You will never be able to employ enough adults.
After trial and error, student technicians fell into two layers; kids who enjoy 'fixing' and problem solving, and kids who organise and administer the requests for repairs
All netbook issues are logged with the kids who organise the repair scheduling - they cope with the stress being generated by kids with dysfunctional netbooks
The hands-on techie kids liaise with the adult technicians and work through the job schedules. This way they are not having to interface with aggrieved peers
Have two old desktop computers in the back of the room as fall backs for kids who left netbook at home or have it in for repairs. Don't replace with another netbook!
It is not worth insuring netbooks. Cheaper to replace them.
Use old laptops (especially those with dead batteries) as desktops in back of classroom - for when a kid has one out for repairs OR when kid has been inappropriate - give them one of those :)
Filtering/Firewalls solution: The best solution they have found is the one they call the GOYA solution (Get Off Your A***) “Teach your teachers to get up and walk around the room” to actively monitor what students are looking at on their screens!

We would appreciate any other useful and practical tips from folk who are further down the track than us.

NB: This post clearly does not address the huge pedagogical shifts we are having to make to prepare for a netbook roll out. There are many other posts in this blog which reflect our thinking in that area.

***Update: Russell Burt has shared his notes after attending several 1:1 sessions at ISTE on a .pdf which can be downloaded from this link

Your Keys to the City - Denver

2010-07-07T14:57:00.000+12:00

First impressions on arriving in Denver, Colorado are that it is a very friendly and very clean city. After spending seven days in the city for the ISTE conference we can confirm it truly is. We only saw graffiti once as we drove out of town. It has a fantastic climate, good shopping in the centre of town, good eateries and every place we went to had New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc on the menu :) Denver is one of those places in the world that you leave knowing that one day it would be good to come back.

It is a city that is easy to navigate - the regular layout of the streets meant even the most geographically challenged (me) could find their way with ease. And the public transport was great. We tried it all; taxi, airport shuttle, bike, horse and gig, free shuttle buses and city buses. All the drivers were helpful and waited patiently while kiwis fumbled with correct change. This is a welcome change when you are a tourist.

One of the special delights of the city was the Your Keys to the City programme in the main street - 16th Street mall. 10 pianos were left out 24/7 for passers bye to sit down and entertain the foot traffic. And these were no ordinary pianos. They all were hand painted by local artists.

"Ten uniquely painted upright pianos can be found along the 16th Street Mall in Downtown Denver for one month starting May 21st. They are part of a seasonal program called "Your Keys to the City" created by the Downtown Denver Partnership. The concept is designed to encourage those in center city to interact with their public spaces in new and spontaneous ways while contributing to the vibrancy within our urban core! "

We presumed one of the reasons the city was so clean was the large number of people employed to clean up after people and horses. It certainly wasn't the police presence because we hardly saw any. It was surprising then that there seemed to be so many homeless people and people asking for money. Although it was pretty constant it never felt threatening. The major drawback was the complete lack of iPads to be bought in the city. People owned them and were using them everywhere we turned, but they proved impossible to buy. Fortunately we had better luck in Cleveland!

Google Block Party

2010-06-30T04:23:00.001+12:00

The highlight of Monday June 28 at ISTE had to be the Google Block Party. The invitation had gone out during the day to sign up for the party and they appropriated an outdoor area by the Performing Arts Centre. It had all the Google hallmarks: primary colours, great food and drink, and light-hearted fun. The party came complete with jugglers, magician, a kitchen sink band, party games with lots of Google prizes and loot bags to take your prizes and lollies home in.

On arrival we all queued to have our photos taken for hologram luggage labels. The principal who accompanied me got talking to Fun Productions about the possibility of getting them made at school to give every five year old one as a fun way to commemorate their first day at school.
All in all a great way to wrap up the first official day of the ISTE conference.

One of the many Google takeouts during the day was a tip shown to me by Cindy Lane. Google have recently released templates for Building Better Balloons in your Google Earth Tours. These will be fun to use for Google Earth Lit Trips. The layouts of the information balloons are already done for you if you use one of these templates.

Soccernomics and education

2010-06-27T06:05:00.000+12:00

This book cover caught my eye as I was trawling the airport bookstores. Made me reflect on rushing to print with prophecies and wish I was wearing that All White's T-Shirt from Mr Vintage! Australia - king of the world's most popular sport? History has told.

It's been a great couple of weeks of sport in New Zealand with successes in a number of codes. We can tell from the kids' blog posts that they have been captured by it, with many of them having all nighters watching sport on TV. You do have to wonder what the excitement over a series of draws tells us about the relative importance of soccer in our nation though. The media and general public often give the All Blacks huge flak when they have had a win! We expect them to win in style. But our expectations for the All Whites are such that people are phoning in to talkback stations demanding a ticker-tape parade for some draws.

I know I am not the only one to draw comparisons between our expectations in sport and education. We like to think in our Manaiakalani schools (all decile 1a) that we are not satisfied with a draw - which to us is getting our students to the national norms. We want the wins! That's going to keep us busy a while longer.

Managing your online identity

2010-05-28T10:59:00.000+12:00

The latest report from the PEW Internet and American Life project has some good news and some concerning news in it when I read through it today.

It was heartening to see that young people (age 18-29 ) are the most active at managing their online reputations, as can be seen in the graph.

Of concern are the numbers of people in the older age groups - those more likely to be teaching our children - who do not take active steps to manage their privacy. I guess the presumption is that they don't know how.

There has been a thread running this week in the MLE reference group forum online about what social networking NZ schools have blocked, or conversely what they have actively decided to open. From the responses I get the feeling that schools are mostly blocking everything rather than teaching students how to manage their online identity and activities. This is not surprising if the teachers don't know how to do it themselves.

When speaking at conferences, from time to time I ask the audience "Who Google's themselves?"
People look self-conscious about raising their hands until I say that it is nothing to be ashamed of. If we are unaware of what is (or isn't!) being said about us, then we don't know where to start with managing our identity. A Google Alert is so simple to set up and so informative.
As a parent I am amazed by people who don't Google their own kids from time to time (or have Google Alerts set up). Those who challenge me about this invariably raise the issue of their own child's right to privacy - from them. My response to that is, "If all the other millions of internet users can see it, why should I be the only one who refrains?"

I recently showed this video to our Lead Teachers and some interesting discussion ensued....

The full report is available here:
Young adults are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. When compared with older users, they more often customize what they share and whom they share it with.
Those ages 18-29 are more likely than older adults to say:

They take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online -- 44% of young adult internet users say this, compared with 33% of internet users between ages 30-49, 25% of those ages 50-64 and 20% of those age 65 and older.
They change privacy settings -- 71% of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online. By comparison, just 55% of SNS users ages 50-64 have changed the default settings.
They delete unwanted comments -- 47% social networking users ages 18-29 have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with just 29% of those ages 30-49 and 26% of those ages 50-64.
They remove their name from photos -- 41% of social networking users ages 18-29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged to identify them, compared with just 24% of SNS users ages 30-49 and only 18% of those ages 50-64.

Maori TV shows the way - again

2010-05-26T16:55:00.000+12:00

Ok, that title may be a tad over the top, since I am writing about a piece they did featuring Pt England School, but they really do make some great television on that channel!

We became dedicated fans of Maori TV a couple of years ago when they did their first all day ANZAC special and even included the mother-of-the-nation, Judy Bailey, as one of their presenters.

It bothers me when I see kiwis griping about tax payer money going their way because from my couch they make by far the best use of my taxes of any of the government funded channels in NZ. And if all that is bothering you is a bit of Te Reo and the sub-titles, then you really need to get over yourself!
Towards the end of last year they contacted us to see if they could do a piece about eLearning for the 411 programme which has a technology, science and design focus. It aired in March this year and it was only this week that I discovered the archive online. Unfortunately they don't offer an embed facility so you will need to pop over there on this link to catch the full show. I just snipped off the last minute of it to upload here. Kia ora!
We were very impressed by their interaction while in the school filming and by their journalism when we finally saw the story they told. And we have been using the camera work and editing as exemplars for our staff and kids.

Parents engage with their children's learning

2010-03-23T21:17:00.003+13:00

We have been focussing on publishing student outcomes in online spaces to motivate and engage students in their learning, with a particular focus on literacy outcomes. Our research results have shown that this is highly effective, with students saying things like, "I like writing now because I know that people read it." It shouldn't really have needed a researcher to tell us that writing with only the teacher as an audience is not very motivating!

We have also discovered that working with students in this way is very motivating for teachers because they get feedback - albeit via the kids work - in a new and authentic way.

But we have had a real sense of validation as we have started to see our parents engage with our students through their online work. We publish the students work mostly through blogs, and we have made the settings very public. No passwords required to read, and no passwords required to comment. So we have been finding that our parents are being generous and as well as supporting their own child, they are leaving affirming comments on the work of children other than their own.

For anyone unfamiliar with our district, the majority of our families do not have computers or internet access at home and so we don't take their interaction online for granted. But anyone who overlooks the impact of Facebook on every age group of adults is out of touch with life in 2010. Our young mums at school may not have the gear at home, but because they use Facebook they get themselves connected at different times during the week - friend's places, internet cafe, library etc - and it is up to us to suggest ways they can interact with their own child online at the same time. We have been gathering email addresses from our parents and including them in the Settings (Email and Mobile tab) so they receive an email every time the class or student posts. We are also teaching those with Facebook how to add an RSS feed to their page so they can receive updates there.

Last week we held a Home School partnership meeting at night to teach our parents how to respond to their children's blog posts. We were taken by surprise when 93 parents turned up! This Flip video shows them listening to a preamble in the hall before they went off to classrooms to enjoy a 'hands on' blogging experience - leaving 160 kids with the principal for 'baby sitting'!

Aviary added to Google Apps for Education

2010-03-13T10:47:00.005+13:00

With a huge focus on creativity in our Manaiakalani projects it has been a concern to some of us that through Google Apps for Ed we are in danger of moving more and more into 'productivity' apps with our students and spending less time on the creative apps.

The announcement that Aviary has been added to the available apps inside Google Apps for Ed is VERY welcome.

Image Editor, Effects Editor etc for graphics is a great start, but even better news for the Manaiakalani schools is the Audio editor.

As Jim Sill says:, "Aviary allows you to create graphics, audio files (Podcasts, VoiceOvers) and more. Now, you can save the files you create and they will be stored directly in your Google Docs account. It also gives you embed codes so you can put the pictures or the mp3 player on your site. This really opens the door for classrooms to produce content and share it with ease."

Can't wait to see our creative students and teachers using it.....

Transforming teaching by broadband

2010-03-10T09:34:00.005+13:00

The last two eLearning conferences I have attended in New Zealand have opened with the Minister of Education speaking at length about the government plan to spend $1.5 billion on fiber optic roll out, which will include schools, across the country. What was perplexing to me was hearing significant numbers of kiwi teachers express sentiments along the lines of "there was nothing in that for me"! Agreed, the previous Minister announced a day off school for all teachers during his final conference speech, and the implications were far easier to grasp.

I observed a class of Year 3 students grapple with a similar concept recently when they met to discuss how they would spend the wonderful $250 prize they had received from the Ruth Hart Jessee Strange Award - a big feast or a Flip video camera? Hard decision for them to make!

I was reminded about this when I watched the BBC video of Sam Pitroda, who is adviser to the Prime Minister of India, delivering his views on how access to broadband in his country will impact teachers and teaching in India in the very near future.

Some of the gems from his talk include:

"Technology is a great social leveler, second only to death."

"It is not a question of replacing teachers by broadband; it's a question of transforming teaching by broadband."

He tells us that:

In India there are currently 550 million telephones

They are adding 15 million new connections each month

There will be 800 million in the next couple of years

This will see the whole country connected and the local government bodies connected to form a national knowledge network.

He speaks about the teacher's role as a mentor and talks of the internet / broadband bringing the guru tradition back to India. Guru are people who are there for you, who have many answers, we look up to them, but they are not always teaching.

He says the concept of teacher delivery with duster and blackboard is obsolete; it doesn't make sense today but we still go on doing it! And it will have to change. That's the power of the internet.

I am reminded that as educators we need to be looking for inspiration at every level (from personal to blogs/books/Twitter to large conference keynotes) outside of our traditional 'Mother Country' and North American go-tos. The video is only 3 minutes long. Check it out here.

Google Moments

2010-03-09T19:13:00.003+13:00

The crew at The Onion have continued their amusing satires of Google by publishing an article on March 2nd entitled "Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology".

With paragraphs like this....
"Whether you're Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are....."

You would hope more people realise this is a spoof than those who were hoodwinked by the video below :)

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Stuart Middleton Engages Teachers at Learning@School

2010-03-08T20:00:00.004+13:00

Stuart Middleton opened the recent Learning@School conference in Rotorua with a masterly overview of decades of education in New Zealand and gave us his take on the problem of student disengagement in our schools. He pointed out that there was no way this is something we face on our own; "dropping out of education systems, is now the number one issue of English-speaking education systems..."

Anyone follow this via Twitter and the blogs would have read that the Keynote was universally well received, probably because it spoke directly into issues kiwi teachers are facing right now. And maybe because it was surprising at an ICTPD conference to have the opening keynote address something different from what @deangroom tweeted as the "Blah blah, Digital Native, blah blah, times they are a changin', blah blah, beige..." that we too often seem to hear.

The video embedded below, via CoreEd's EDTalkNZ channel, is well worth taking the time to watch...

"In his keynote address from the 2010 Learning@school conference, Dr Stuart Middleton outlines what is known about disengagement and the reasons for this phenomenon, and outlines potential responses to it."

Digital Storytelling

2010-03-08T12:26:00.006+13:00

"A Child's War Machinima"

Students in the Manaiakalani Project create hundreds of digital stories as part of their literacy programme. One of the best parts of my day is viewing these as they are published online, mostly on their blogs. I am always on the lookout for exemplars to show the students and teachers to stretch our thinking and to promote awareness of what others are doing.

This weekend I was looking through some digital stories published on Edutopia, of the George Lucas Foundation and I found this one produced by Nafiza and her classmates at Global Kids Virtual Video project.

"A Child's War Machinima" says

As part of the Global Kids Virtual Video Project, a group of students created this animated movie about child soldiers in Uganda.

At 6 minutes 43 it is well worth taking the time to watch this very moving story. You would need to make your own call about the age group of students you could show this to, but I am sure they will find the story compelling as well as being challenged by the production values.

It does not have an embed option, so follow the link over to their website....

BC Reader - iPhone App

2010-03-02T18:37:00.003+13:00

Short post for iPhone buffs out there...

Thanks to Anthony Samuels for introducing me to BC Reader recently. Perfect for anyone who doesn't know what to do with Business Cards when they are doled out to you. Obviously the content is valuable and you might want to look the person up sometime. But since everyman/woman and their dog carries them now-a-days, the stack gets so huge that you can't find them when you need it anyway.
Enter BC Reader. Download the app from the Apps Store (cost $4.99). Each time you get a card you take a photo of it. It scans the photo and enters the details into your address book. Done. Throw the card away.

BC Reader iPhone app from Shufflegazine on Vimeo.

Twitterific Tweachers

2010-02-25T12:24:00.004+13:00

I have always believed that teachers should use the frameworks and tools they expect their student learners to use in their own professional learning. In January I contributed to the Red Beach School teacher only day and enjoyed seeing how Lesley and Sarah and their team used their students' "Powerful Learning" model as the framework for the staff professional development day. It prompted me to do more of it myself!

Conferences are a great place to try out new ideas (if the submissions committee is brave enough to select new ideas!!), so Lenva and I decided to present our Twitter workshop at Learning at School USING Twitter.

We set up a twitter account @nztweachers , and the entire presentation was a series of tweets and interactions with the tweets of others. Now the presentation is over, the twitter account remains as a stand-alone tutorial on using twitter for teaching and learning. If you scroll to the earliest tweets in the archives and work from bottom to top to have a resource you can use for yourself or recommend to others!

At one stage during the presentation students from Bucklands Beach Intermediate tweeted in their gems.

This is the blurb we gave to the conference committee:

Twitterific tweachers:

This workshop will be a lighthearted introduction to the use of twitter as a t(w)eaching and learning tool.

Twitter can be used to support the learning of teachers and students in every area of their lives.

It can be everything from an online supply of the latest pedagogical ideas and resources for the teacher, to a shopping extravaganza.

This workshop will be a twitterfest rather than a presentation and will certainly be different from any workshop you have attended before.

To get a headstart and connect with us before the workshop, join twitter.com and follow @dorothyjburt and @lenva and of course our workshop id @nztweachers

GoogleFest

2010-02-25T10:58:00.005+13:00

Learning at School in Rotorua provided another opportunity (excuse!) to spend some time collating the multitude of Google tools, apps, ideas and tips which have come my way. The GoogleFest workshop was billed as "an opportunity to explore a number of Google tools, share what we have tried and gather ideas to take back to our own schools". About 50 people turned up and fortunately the wireless held up for us all to go online and have a play.

This post is simply a directory to some of the resources I shared during this session. I created a Google Doc and shared it publicly so the participants could access the links quickly.

Many of the ideas and resources shared have come from the amazing GCT community. So thanks to Lisa Thumann, Lucy Gray, Kern Kelly, Molly Schroeder, Cindy Lane and Tom Barrett for their resources.

We have particularly appreciated the inspiration of Jerome Burg who generously shared and facilitates his Google Lit Trips concept. If you haven't tried it, you are missing a really engaging way to hook students into reading. Over on the Google Doc there are many links to YouTube videos and other easy to follow tutorials about aspects of creating Lit Trips using Google Earth.

One of the best ways to keep up-to-date with the latest on Google is via Twitter. You can follow all of the various Google 'department' tweets (eg Sites, Maps, Earth etc). I also have a column in my Tweetdeck which displays all the tweets which include the word 'Google'. There is no way I read even a fraction of them, but many times I have glanced at it and seen yet another user sharing a cool idea.

Please add any Google resources and ideas you use via the comments :)

Word it Out

2010-02-06T18:02:00.005+13:00

2009 seemed to be the year when word clouds became mainstream. They can be used across many areas of life, and teachers have found dozens of ways to use them creatively. I know that students love using them, particulary when they enter the URL of their blog and check what they have been focussing on in their writing. I do the same from time to time. You can read about it from a 9 yr old boy here.

This one below comes from a site introduced to me by @achurches on Twitter and seems like a nice change from Worldle. Word it Out does not have as many features yet (it says more are coming) but I find that Wordle is blocked in some of the schools I work in, so this might be worth checking out for that reason alone. I do wonder though if 'Wordle it' has become the verb for word clouds in the same way Google hijacked the search engine?

Adults learn from Students

2010-02-04T15:15:00.000+13:00

School is back! Three days in to the new year and there is a learning buzz in the air. Happy kids and invigorated teachers are always fun to be around. It is the time of year when routines are being set and monitors are being assigned to key tasks around the school.

One of the 'positions of responsibility' for Year 6 students at Pt England School is presenting to adult visitors. Auditions are being held today and somewhere between 4 and 6 students will be selected to fulfill this role for 2010. They will not necessarily be the most articulate or confident students (that is very easy to train them into). It will be students who have something important to say about their learning and who genuinely are doing what they speak about! They will write their scripts of what they want to say about their learning, talk it over with the teachers in the eLearning Team, and start preparing for the first group of visitors expected in Week 3 - a group from America.

This is a very empowering role for students and I love watching them develop in confidence and skill over the year. This group becomes (if the past years are anything to go by) the epitome of confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners at 10 years of age. Before the mantle is passed on to the 2010 team, I thought I would publish links here to the presenting team of 2009. Each of these students published what they had to share with visitors on their personal blogs at the end of 2010. If you are interested, follow through these links and watch the videos of their presentations.

Sela speaks about her learning through podcasting
Helen speaks about her learning through PE.N.N. (our daily school television)
Paulitia speaks about her learning through schoolTV (our public television programme)
Leoden speaks about his learning through video conferencing
Tanielu speaks about his learning through blogging
Cruz was the team technician!

NZ Herald excels in Creative Writing

2010-02-04T09:41:00.005+13:00

The past couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to work with clusters of teachers around the North Island as they prepare for the start of the new year. For me this is a fabulous learning opportunity as I get to learn from them and see the different ways schools take on the challenge of preparing for the year ahead. I get to speak about eLearning - one group went so far as to announce me as the eLearning 'expert'! I think it would be more accurate to say enthusiast.

One of the major points of my presentations this Summer has been about our imperative in 2010 to prepare our students with dispositions of digital literacy and digital citizenship, starting at the age of FIVE. In passing I talked about having Google Alerts set up to alert you to what is being said about you and your school. It is even interesting to know if nothing is being said! As part of digital literacy I spoke about teaching our students to discern the accuracy of information of things they see and read online.

I had a feeling of deja vue when I sat down after speaking at the Inspired Impact Conference and opened my laptop to check my email. A Google Alert had arrived while I was speaking to say Pt England School was mentioned in the New Zealand Herald. Of course I followed the link to check it out....

The Herald's creative writing skills became apparent from first glance at the Headline, because I had a vague memory of hearing about the reporter phoning the school early in December (hardly breaking news when it was a month old). I was sure I had heard that "The media could make decile 1a schools look bad" was the thrust of the comments made. But the big alert to anyone who knows anything about the person being quoted - whether from sitting in staff meetings, participating in school and community events, or personally- is that he never uses deficit words like 'poor' to refer to our community or any decile 1a schools. Was it only for sensationalism that the editor chose to use the word 'poor' to talk about us in a headline (which of course is read by the community) or is that expressing an underlying attitude of this publication towards decile 1a communities? Hmmmm.....

Since the NZ Herald has not yet published Russell's letter of clarification, I have asked if I can add it to this post....
"Herald Reporter Andrew Laxton quoted me in his article on Education National Standards, 28/01/10. I wish to present my own unvarnished opinion: I do not ever, refer to schools or areas as being "poor" and do not pretend to represent all the low decile schools and communities of this country. I was clear with Mr Laxton that I support evidence based education and agree with many others, that parents and students own this evidence and deserve to have it shared with them as clearly as possible. I was equally clear with Mr Laxton, that there was no evidence whatsoever, of the government or the Ministry of Education ever wishing to create school 'League Tables'. Indeed, I challenged Mr Laxton that the only group ever to show such propensity was the media. Further, that if responsible reporting displayed value added, rather than a simplistic comparison of one school's position against another, schools like ours would look great and we could display to the public the truly excellent work we do. To this, Mr Laxton replied that the media reported what the public wanted. I hope reporting will also be be evidence based and truly educative. Russell Burt Pt England School"

Google Apps Status Dashboard

2010-01-24T18:58:00.006+13:00

Google Apps status updates are available from this link.

It is well worth bookmarking and going there whenever you are beginning to feel like you are wrestling with one of the Google Apps.

In their words, "This page offers performance information for Google Apps services. Unless otherwise noted, this status information applies to consumer services as well as services for organisations using Google Apps."

You can see from this screen shot that information is supplied about 11 Apps.

Hands up who wishes Blogger was one of them??

You can see from the information supplied about this outage with Google Sites that there was less than an hour between them publicly acknowledging the problem and posting again that it was fixed.
Note the RSS feed at the bottom of the Google Apps Status Dashboard page. I have added it to my iGoogle page so it is nice and handy to keep an eye on.

Rock Our World - The Movie

2010-01-18T15:08:00.008+13:00

Global collaborative projects for classrooms have become one of the education buzz terms for happening teachers in the noughties. This term is used to cover a wide range of programmes and activities and from my limited experience they are not all created equal! They range from: "I've Got this Idea and I would like some foreign schools to join it - but strictly on my terms at my convenience"; through to the inclusive, sweeping-across-continents Rock Our World. Some of the projects are really successful with only 2 or 3 schools participating, and some have very large numbers involved.

I have a long personal interest in learning in this way because I had a teacher in primary school who set us up with penpals from around the world, and I exchanged letters with 3 of them (Japan, France and Argentina) for a number of years. It is hard to imagine now how I had the patience to keep that up when the delay between letters was weeks or months. I supsect that it was an ongoing curiosity about how other people around the world lived that provided the motivation for a child living on a dairy farm in the Waikato.

Recent technology has created an opportunity for huge numbers of children to extend their learning, their understanding of others and their world view and have a lot of fun doing it. So I am always interested when I see new ideas for projects being tweeted or blogged or publicised on places like the GlobalEducation Ning. I do have a few things that I look out for before I even consider bringing them to a busy teacher's attention back at school - which is all I can do now I don't have my own class:

the learning- what is this all about for the students?
does it look like fun?
who is organising it? (I've been caught out in the past and discovered when we were all set up and waiting to go that the organiser started it as a way of them learning how to use video conferencing tools, and so we never actually got to speak because they weren't able technically to connect with us. Very disappointing for the children.)
is it truly global or just a bunch of international school expats working together (I love International schools and taught for 5 years in them, but I want our students to meet the locals!)
is this going to be a synchronous or asynchronous experience? To be practical it needs a significant asynchronous commponent, but nothing beats the synchronous for kids. Actually talking to, or being on a chat with, kids from somewhere far away and mysterious is fantastic.
is there give and take in the synchronous, or will the time zones always favour the organisers? It is part of the learning fun to get up in the middle of the night and huddle around a webcam, but it gets a bit tiresome if there are members who always schedule the conferences for Period 2 during school at their end!

I tweeted a question about this back in October: "What is the biggest difficulty you face when connecting kids globally? Time zones? School term dates? celebrations/holidays?" I was surprised how many responses I got and a very large majority said time zones. In fact 100% of the Kiwi responses said that, and I supsect that is because our time is so out of kilter. One of the greatly appreciated touches in ROW is the table we all get handed with our times all mapped out so we can find our own and the other schools with a quick glance down the table. This is a much more inviting solution than being told to "Join us at 9.00am EST" or similar. Another appreciated solution is to take the time to look up the other participants' time zone and invite them saying something like, "This will be 12 am your time and 10.30 am our time".

I noticed in the last round of Rock our World that holidays and celebrations were a biggie too. Carol Anne organised a calendar of all our school holidays and festivals and on any given day of the project there was at least one school either away on holiday or having a short break for a festival celebration. I guess this was bound to happen when 40 schools from all 7 continents were participating!

This has been a very long introduction to Rock Our World - the Movie. In the second half of 2009 Pt England students participated in the 11th round of ROW. This one was around the theme of 'Tolerance'. As well as the usual learning experiences we have with ROW (all learning about a topic together, writing music together, and lots of video chats with each other to share the learning) Carol Anne organised a song that we all learned to sing and everyone videoed themselves to contribute to the final music video - which has now been published on iTunes as a song and YouTube as a video. You will glimpse the kids from Pt England and Summerland schools in it. Rock Our World! Song sung by students in 40 schools in all 7 continents!

Andrea Tele'a was the teacher who managed Pt England's participation in ROW and published footage and updates on the Ning. Student reflections were published on their own blogs.

This is how Carol Anne introduces the video on YouTube:
ROW is an international collaboration where students from around the globe compose music, make movies and meet each other in live chats! http://rockourworld.ning.com/
Songwriter: Stephen Petree
Sung by: Stephen Petree and the Students of ROW 11
Also available on iTunes! http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/rock...

Congratulations if you made it this far. Carol Anne has just announced on Twitter a new round of ROW....."What do you get when you cross Rock Our World and NIKE??? A brand new season callled "Walk Our World!" WOW!" Looks like another fun one to sign up to!

What did you read at the beach?

2010-01-16T07:09:00.005+13:00

One of the things I love about other people's baches is reading through the bookshelf. You can always rely on an eclectic mix of paperbacks left behind by previous holiday makers and a stash of ancient tomes that have to have come from someone's great-aunt's deceased estate!

This summer we trekked north to Henderson Bay in the far north of New Zealand. This beautiful beach with surf, sand, rocky headlands, fishing, diving and pohutukawas typifies the images that come to mind when talking about an NZ Summer Holiday. We stayed in a small cottage and camped around it as the whanau expanded. The bookshelf here was behind the back door and you wouldn't want to begin to psychoanalyse the contents.

One book that provided hours of entertainment was "The Children's Hour With Uncle Arthur - Book 1", by Arthur S. Maxwell. Wholesome, Truthful, Uplifting, Inspiring Stories for Boys and Girls. Complete with more capital letters than I have seen in a long time. It was a collection of improving homilies for children of the 1940's, and was illustrated by a selection of the most hilarious photos and paintings.

Thought you might enjoy this one....

(If you can't read the caption, click on the photo and it will open in a new page)

Cape Reinga to Bluff in one year

2010-01-15T11:17:00.004+13:00

Cape Reinga and Bluff have to be two of the top 10 'must sees' in New Zealand. One of my highlights of 2009 was getting to travel the entire length of the country and visit both of these kiwi landmarks for the first time in my life. In January'09 I went on a road trip north with my family and was stunned by the beauty of Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island. As well as the wairua and physical beauty of the place, it was impressive to see the way that DoC have developed the place for visitors.

Then in the October holidays while speaking at the ILT conference in Invercargill I paid my first visit to Bluff- at the bottom of the South Island. And once again stood beneath the iconic signposts. This time it was cold, bleak and Wintery, but this created a great counter point experience. It was then that I realised how privileged I have been to have seen both places inside one year. And was reminded of a post I had done the year before after a trip to the West Coast of the South Island. New Zealanders really need to get out and see this great country before heading overseas.

This Summer we again headed north, to spend our Summer at the beach in Henderson Bay in the Far North. Because it is only a 45 minute drive to Cape Reinga we decided to go up there after dinner to see the sun set. A couple of dozen people had the same idea and most had brought cameras (and tripods) and were there to take creative photos. It was quite a fun, camp atmosphere as people started talking to each other and even helping each other frame up their shots. Whether looking through a lense or huddled together on one of the bench seats, the sun setting over the place where the Tasman and Pacific Oceans meet that should be on everyone's bucket list.

And when the sun finally set, the solar powered light beamed out from the lighthouse on the cliff top, lighting the way as most wandered back up the path to their cars and a few seemed to be settling in for the night.

Campus Channel

2009-12-15T09:32:00.003+13:00

After more than a decade of publishing a daily televised news show, prolific blogging and podcasting, we are still exploring more ways of sharing and celebrating the students work.

When we met up with Jeremy from Tentacle and hear about Campus Channel earlier in the year we were interested with his concept of a simple web based interface for teachers and students to upload movie content to and have it play on screens around the school. At the moment we have it playing on one screen in the foyer and there are always kids, parents and courier drivers sitting or standing in front of it checking it out.

I like the way it uses a simple twitter feed to display messages at the bottom of the screen. And I am amazed at how many people read them! It is more effective than a notice board. I created a twitter account to use just for this purpose, and it cycles through the current and up coming evens and announcements. Well. current as long as I remember to go back and delete out-of-date tweets!

The web interface allows you to create playlists and have different content on different screens. The vision here is more screens in corridors and other public areas of the school in the future.

Coming to an end with our Blogs

2009-11-27T08:01:00.004+13:00

This is not breaking news that Blogging is about to come to an end! Just that our academic year is coming to an end in New Zealand and as we farewell our classes for the Summer and prepare for new students in 2010, some teachers are beginning to ask, "What do we do with our Blogs?" This tells us that Blogging has become a mainstream activity in many schools now.

The question has two main underlying strands: these Blogs now contain an extensive record of student learning so we want the content preserved for the students; they also represent a lot of hard work on the part of the teachers who don't want to lose all the connections and hyperlinks that have evolved.

So we have tried to put together some helpful tips for our teachers about what to do at the end of the year. They come under headings like:

if the teacher is leaving the school
if the teacher is switching rooms or levels
if the teacher is starting from scratch
if the teacher is inheriting and 'old' blog
etc

You are welcome to check out and use our Google Site we have created. If you have further suggestions for it, please add them to the comment here.
NB: as we use Blogger, the resource is all based around Blogger.

We can't help you if your own school has different protocols! eg We have heard of a school that requires teachers to close down all blogs and start fresh at the begining of the year; we have heard of schools directing teachers to hand their blog to another teacher etc
Well worth checking out the expectations at the beginning of the year before you start blogging!