Child's Perspective

Last post I shared the amazing speech given by one of Mt Roskill Grammar's prefects, Joshua Iosefa, at a school assembly.


In the first week of this school term Helen Squires used this as an opportunity to expand the horizons and challenge the thinking of her Year 7 and 8 class (11-12 year olds). The students shared their thinking via a written piece on their blogs.  This response excerpt is from the blog of Crusader, a year 7 boy:

This speech had a message to it, and it was telling brown people especially to stop limiting yourself by listening to the stereotypes because they are not true. Some messages in his speech relate to some of the messages that we have at our school here such as; Strive to succeed, Champions never Give Up and much more.
 My response to this speech is that, brown people like me can do anything we want as long as you have determination in what you do. It doesn’t have to be a sports star or a music person but you can be anything else like a lawyer or even the next Prime Minister.

There are many more such pieces from his classmates linked at the bottom of this post.


The Education Gazette, New Zealand's magazine where teachers find their next job, decided to post the entire transcript of the speech in this week's edition and is well worth checking out.


However, a particular delight for this class was receiving an email from Joshua's mother who had discovered their blog responses online and gave them some encouragement including;

I am Joshuas mother and it wasn't so long ago he was the same age as yourselves.  He didn't have a blog like you all do but he would write into a journal all his thoughts. Some were like poetic prayers and others were scribbles of inspiration he would pick up from people, or books he was reading.  We were encouraged by reading your blogs of the inspirations you all had chosen to keep in your heart and mind from Joshuas 'brown brother-spoken word'.

This was such an affirmation of our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy on many levels and yet another example of how the online world our students inhabit can enrich their lives and experiences.


Links to other students' reponses below:


Darius
Mubasshira
Kaiden
Kobe
Sylvia
Ashleigh

Teen Perspective

This video of a very moving portrayal of Pasifika and Maori youth is clearly making an impact beyond the  school hall where the speech was delivered. Joshua Iosefo is a Year 13 student at Mt Roskill Grammar, and this is his speech at his school assembly. 

Embedding a 1:1 programme

The school year is well underway and all our Year 5 to 13 classes in the seven Manaiakalani schools are now using netbooks as the basic learning tool for every child.  It has been useful to stop and reflect on our progress in the last week. To those in the know, that means we have just completed our mid year milestone document for the Ministry of Education!

We are only in our second year of going 1:1, but it is already becoming increasingly difficult to write a blanket report about our progress.  We need to differentiate in our reporting, and this graphic below is our attempt to show the complexities developing within our schools.

Each X represents a teacher in one of our Manaiakalani schools

We have some students who are in their first year of net booking (1:1) and some who are in their second year. Then we have teachers who are in first year of 1:1 and teachers who are in their second year.

And just to make it a little more interesting we have about 60 kids in Year 9 this year who are in their third year as they were in the two pilot classes back in Year 7.

It probably is no surprise to you that the teachers reporting the easiest start to the year are those who are in their second year of 1:1 teaching with second year kids.

The most challenging?  Teachers in their first year with second year kids.

This is going to get increasingly challenging in 2013 when our schools hire in new teachers for students in their third year of 1:1 learning! 

Managing the Learning Environment

Last year our teachers in 1:1 classes experimented with a variety of ways of managing the learning environment in the digital world. Over the course of the year their thinking began to converge as
• Teachers shared their practice at Netbook Teachers' meetings 
• The PD facilitators, who moved from class to class, began to collate their observations and to share these  
• The recently published research evaluation report included observations and teacher reflections around this.

So this year many of the Manaiakalani Schools felt confident that they had an approach that, while still a work-in-progress,  worked for them.  It created a personalised learning environment for the students, it helped teaching and planning 'make sense', it was transparent to whanau and school management - and was creative, collaborative and fun!


I asked a number of teachers across our schools to create a creen recording video sharing one aspect of how the learning environment was managed in their classes last term.


This post provides links to four primary school classes.  Take the time to explore the links and watch the videos as these teachers talk you through their students use of their Google Site and Google Apps. 


Chris Marks, Pt England School - Year 5/6
Writing movie here, class Google Site here


Sarah Gleeson, St Pius X School - Year 5
Reading movie here, class Google Site here


Helen King, Pt England School - Year 5
Maths (number Strategy) movie here, class Google Site here


Joy Paton, Panmure Bridge School - Year 5/6
Art movie here, class Google Site here


Examples from Tamaki College coming soon…..

Research Online

We now have five years of research reports available on our cluster website.  The latest report to be published is the 2011 Evaluation report of the pilot year of 1:1 Netbook implementation in 18 Manaiakalani classes.



The 2011 evaluation was designed to answer two major questions: 


(1) How does The Manaiakalani One-to-One Device Project contribute to the teaching of literacy in one-to-one device classrooms? 
(2) How does The Manaiakalani One-to-One Device  Project impact on student learning of literacy and engagement in one-to-one device  classrooms? 


The 465 students in 18 classrooms that effectively had a full year of implementation were part of the evaluation. The evaluation used achievement measures, video records and in situ observations of classrooms; one to one interviews with teachers and students; teacher surveys, and artifacts from class and individual blogs. 


To read the executive summary, or if you are extra keen to read the whole report, follow this link.


Research reports are not universally popular, so if you prefer an anecdotal approach to following an initiative I would recommend following clusternz on Twitter. This way you will hear it from the 650 or so children whose blogs feed through this account!  They are not afraid to be honest about most aspects of (school) life!  This should come with a warning though - 25,000+ tweets (each representing a blog post) have been processed in less than three years.


Farewell Colleen:
On another note, the Manaiakalani Cluster wishes Colleen Gleeson all the best as she steps into her new role as Review and Development Officer of Schools, for the Auckland Catholic Diocese.  Colleen has served the cluster as Researcher since 2008 and we are indebted to her commitment to the students, teachers and schools of the area, and her contribution to the Manaiakalani vision. She will be greatly missed.