May Recap

A lot has been happening in the 14 clusters across the motu and we thought we would highlight some elements of our partnership for you at the end of each month. The headlines below are brief and include links to more information if you have the inclination to explore further.

MET and its community delivery partners have now supported close to 10,000 adults to develop foundation digital skills as part of the DIA-funded Kanorau programme.   Check out the Free Digital course for Manaiakalani school communities Jenny Oxley	The Research team is really enjoying catching up face-to-face this term at the Research Reflections and Middle Leader Sessions. We look forward to analysing rich data from the observations facilitators and school leaders are undertaking this term. Georgie Hamilton	2022 has seen Manaiakalani Device Care take on the role of providing Accidental damage protection for over 2100 learner-owned devices purchased this year.  How to make a claim.   Dave Winter	The Digital Fluency Intensive is well underway with 83 teachers from across the motu learning, creating, and sharing together in term 2. Connect with current DFI cohorts or register for the remaining cohorts this year.  Vicki Archer
We are up and running with 11,000+ learners connected to edublogs now. We appreciate the patience and commitment your teachers have through this move to a new sharing platform.  Recent blog posts here Dave Winter	The 2022 cohort of MIT teachers has brought some valuable projects to our network. They have been meeting regularly to support and challenge each others’ projects, both face 2 face and online. Follow their progress Dorothy Burt	110+ teacher registrations for the Secondary Department Discussions this year.  These online meetings are the ideal place to network with high school teachers in specialist subject areas.   Register or view resources and recordings. Kerry Boyde-Preece	Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu empowers our young people to learn to be Cybersmart through engaging in online behaviour and thinking that elevates positive actions. Blogging Teams are connecting and sharing across our communities of learning. See who is participating, and weekly blogging tips, and register anytime to join a team.  Fiona Grant

 

Creating Equal Learning Opportunities

 This white paper, "Creating Equal Learning Opportunities" was written by one of the commercial partners who support Manaiakalani Schools. 

For several years ACER have supplied the Chromebooks the students use and it is a tribute to the strength of the partnership that they have taken the time to understand the 'Why' rather than focusing on the commercial 'What'.

"This paper provides an overview of the Manaiakalani Programme with insights from Manaiakalani convenor, Russell Burt, who is also principal of Point England School in Auckland – one of the schools in the Manaiakalani collective. It also discusses the support that Acer provides as a technology partner, and the significant value this brings to learners in the Manaiakalani community"

ShakeOut I LockDown I MeetUp

 We're proposing a new drill for schools that are fortunate enough to have their learners attending in person:

 It's well past time we included regular MeetUp practices. These should be designed to support success in the event of further requirements to stay home and learn via remote learning.

Over years schools have been required to have regular 

• Fire Drills: to prepare for fires on the school grounds
• ShakeOut Drills: Preparing for earthquakes and tsunamis
• Lockdown Drills:  Preparing for Emergencies and Traumatic Incidents

In October 2020 we proposed that Manaiakalani Schools add regular MeetUp practices to the raft of eventualities for which we prepare our young people.

When our schools were first closed for COVID-19 in March 2020, schools preparedness for the move to remote learning varied. Perhaps the most common area of variance was video conferencing. This included the teacher confidence to host it and the learners understanding of protocols and procedures to enable a successful connection for learning.

By October, with Auckland schools having been through two seasons of remote learning, it became obvious that anyone with the luxury of learners sitting in the same room should be taking the time to practice using video conferencing effectively for remote learning. We suggested that teachers and principals maximise the opportunity to observe barriers to access, which in turn become barriers to learning and lead to isolation during distance learning.

Recommendations for a MeetUp include:

• Socialising protocols and expectations for your school/kura
• Rehearsing digital skills and social behaviours required for successful connections and learning
• Ensuring equity and access for every student, to learning and social interaction
• Supporting and reinforcing Cybersmart interactions

Ideally, a MeetUp practice would need two adults. 

• Someone in another room/place to lead the online interaction with the learners - even doing something as simple as reading a story to the class
• The teacher to stay in the classroom with the learners to both provide support and to observe (taking notes to follow up on) successes and barriers

Four seasons of lockdown later (at the time of writing this) it is beyond time that teachers and students are able to seamlessly segue into connecting with each other via Google Meet in Manaiakalani schools **

This week Matt Goodwin and Fiona Grant from the Manaiakalani facilitation team released an entertaining and informative blog post to support learners (and teachers) to "follow a good Google Meet etiquette".  They included a poster of prompts to support a successful Google Meet.

** Disclaimer, of course, that this is assuming learners have a device and connection to the internet at home

COVID 2020 through the eyes of our young people

Adults have had plenty to say about the impact of the pandemic on our young people, and we are delighted to hear our tamariki speak for themselves on the subject.

In term 4 all Manaiakalani schools contributed movies to our annual film festival. These were created at the individual, class or school level.  We continued to use our umbrella theme, taken from the New Zealand Curriculum vision statement

 "Our vision is for young people who will be confident, connected, actively involved, and lifelong learners."

Approximately one-third of the entries were centred on their response or reaction to the COVID pandemic and how it impacted them personally.   One delightful example is this music video, 'Stay at Home', written and performed by a student from Tamaki College.

We are grateful to the team from N4L who took the videos made by our tauira and compiled a short film to allow our young people to speak for themselves.  This video weaves together excerpts and voices from across the 13 Manaiakalani schools....

13 years of Film Festivals

Preparation for the annual Manaiakalani Film Festival takes the best part of a year, so when we went into Level 4 lockdown in March we were in a quandary. With everything else going on, was this something we would give a miss in 2020?

Our principals made the call to go ahead with planning the festival, in the hopes that the situation would have improved by November and it could be a face to face event, but with the proviso, we would move it to an online event if we were still required to social distance.

Our teachers and learners rose to the challenge and continued to plan their movies to contribute to the Film Festival and as it turned out we were able to host a face to face event. There was a palpable feeling of celebration as the busloads of children and teenagers arrived at the theatres and appreciated being able to see themselves, or the movie they had created, on the big screens of the three theatres we hired.

While we were slightly down on the number of movies contributed (85), we still had more than 3,500 young people attend the 12 hour festival and a full house attend the evening showcase. Around one third of the movies had a definite COVID theme, and the rest were our usual eclectic interpretation of the mission statement of the NZ curriculum and showcased confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners.

We altered our traditional style of welcome video to represent a year of distance learning through Google Meet, and re-enacted a Meet session. This brought back warm memories to all who had taught or learned in this way in 2020.

As always, the movies screened are available online at our film festival website and we invite you to view 2020 through the very positive eyes of the Manaiakalani tauira.