Manaiakalani: The Hook from Heaven

We are delighted to see the story of Manaiakalani shared by Oiwi TV and the amazing team from Hōkūleʻaʻs Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage.
Manaiakalani: The Hook from Heaven from Oiwi TV on Vimeo.

 Thank you for including us in your journey and telling our story through your eyes.

A Nation Born of Sailors: Kia Kaha

We have spent the past weeks reflecting on the huge distance our Manaiakalani schools have come over the last 4 years, and the America's Cup racing this week has underlined it again.

Every class able to watch the racing, in real time, in high definition, with sound, on a big screen.  
And/Or, every kid, on their own device.  All cheering on Team New Zealand. All with access to information and data - at a mouse click.

This wonderful video, "Kia Kaha San Francisco", is presented as a gift from a Nation Born of Sailors to the Best Sailors in the World...

And to many a reminder of the origins of Manaiakalani.....

Parents engage with their children's learning

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'!

Literacy Cycle

The concept of a Literacy Cycle to describe what is happening when eLearning is being fully integrated with the teaching of English began in 2007 at Pt England School when we were researching the impact of Podcasting with KPE on student learning outcomes in English. I was observing what was happening in the classrooms and met with teachers involved and together we co-constructed the idea of a literacy cycle to visually describe the process occuring. This was very much a work in progress and evolved as the teachers, particularly Sandy Lagitupu, provided feedback on what worked and how the Literacy Cycle could be improved to reflect actual practice.
We were quite over explaining to people that 'this is NOT an ICT project, this is a literacy project - a 21st century way of doing literacy!" There is no way that we are talking about throwing out effective practice that teachers have developed for the teaching and learning of literacy. We are simply saying that by using 21st century tools we can extend the value of the teaching, continue the learning beyond the completion of an exercise AND hope to hook kids into enjoying 'traditional' literacies. So we began looking at a way of depicting graphically what was happening in the classroom.The Literacy Cycle for podcasting with KPE as it is currently being used in Sandy's classroom is shown above.
English as it has been taught for centuries in many schools has been a linear process. For example, teaching writing progressed something like the diagram to the left. The key point of difference with the linear approach is that when the outcomes of the lesson are published ( and this may be by rewriting a 'good' copy, typing it up and stapling it to display on the wall or even publishing it on the school television programme) the book is shut, the print out dangles on the wall or the TV is turned off. That piece of learning concludes and we move on.

The Literacy Cycle concept has emerged from the opportunities offered by Web 2. We still desperately need quality English/Literacy teaching occuring in our schools as the foundation. But 21st Century students need opportunities to do something with the learning outcomes in their own language ie turn them into a digital learning object that they have created; a movie, an animation, a podcast, a funky slideshow etc. And then this digital learning object (DLO) can be shared online in a Web 2 environment where it can live on and on and on.... And it is here that more opportunities for engaging students in literacy learning can occur, through the threaded conversations and reflections posted in the associated comments.

In 2008 twelve teachers across the seven schools in our EHSAS cluster developed Literacy Cycles around the projects they were embarking on for Manaiakalani. The students involved ranged from 5 year olds to teenagers at high school. The project range is equally diverse. Each teacher identified the 'hook' they would be using with their students to motivate them and this is placed in the centre of the cycle (as can be seen in the movie below). The Literacy Cycles have brought coherence to a number of teachers who have previously struggled to clarify the convergence of eLearning and English without creating a whole new programme, and certainly without any suggestion of dispensing with researched and proven methods for teaching the foundations.
The projects mentioned above are being researched over a three year period and the interim findings of 2008 have been shown to us this week. In short, the students have continued to make progress. In fact a number of the projects have seen progress beyond the expected national norms. But of at least equal importance, a large group of students have had genuine 21st century learning experiences for at least one year and have become excited about their learning! More about this in another post...
We are very happy for the Literacy Cycle concept to be used by others who find it helpful. We would appreciate acknowledgement where appropriate that it began with the KPE podcast and Pt England School and has been further developed by the teachers of the Manaiakalani schools.

Manaiakalani - It's about the 'hook'

It's been a while coming, but I have finally made some time to create a post explaining why the project I am currently facilitating is called Manaiakalani....
The name for our project has been taken from the name given to Maui's fish hook - the tool used for the biggest fishing project ever! For anyone unfamiliar with the story of Maui fishing up the North Island of New Zealand, this animation by Thomas le Bas should give you the idea.
For a number of years we have been aware that carefully chosen, cutting edge technologies can be used as a powerful hook to lure our students into engaging with the curriculum. So when we came together as a group of schools to apply for government funding from an EHSAS initiative - which aims to raise student achievement outcomes and increase engagement in literacies through eLearning integration- Maniakalani was chosen as an extremely apt name.
The concept of technologies as a hook really began to take shape in March 2006 when we were interviewed by Darren Greenwood of CIO magazine about our podcasting project, KPE, and the magazine created the graphic to the left to depict our idea. This was further developed last year during my research project titled 'The Lure of Podcasting'.
No matter where one travels in the Western world the underachieving tail of the school population using standardised testing is predominantly found in schools from low socio-economic backgrounds. And our Cluster (District) of schools involved in this project has been no exception as all our schools are Decile 1a . So the symbolism of a powerful AND effective hook was adopted for our project. In future posts I will talk more about what the hooks are and how we are trying to identify them, but early findings seem to indicate that they are a combination of compelling technologies and the knowledge of an authentic audience. And to be effective the hook needs to be part of a carefully constructed pedagogy of improvement. More about that next post....