Educating the Dragon » Flaxmere

Journey to ULearn08

Dragon09 — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:18:01 +0000

As I travelled to ULearn08 this year I did 2 things- Firstly I was madly taking pics of my trip to support a PhotoStory3 breakout I was running. Second, there were huge breaks in my journey where I could boot up the laptop and jump on Twitter. The follow is the result of both of those.
I suggest you simply smile and shake your head at me. It was a 3 hour journey that took 5 and a hour, or something like that.
My Journey

A del.icio.us puff of smoke

Dragon09 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:58:14 +0000

Oh dear, I think my delicious account is going to take a bit of hit with the loss of the icons on my Firefox. I had trouble enough with them there. Any hints people as the Firefox update just made them vanish.

Intergrated topic Inquiry learning

Dragon09 — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 03:48:07 +0000

With ‘no fixed abode’ I have come across one major draw back; the issue of my ongoing Professional Development.

As scathing as I have been in the past regarding the value placed upon my own ICT PD (It being one of many, many foci) I am now in the rather unique position of having NO PD outside my ICT focus. This has come about by me not being attached to a particular school for half the school year, and now having the majority of my teaching in a school with very little left in the PD budget.

So I have taken the bull by the horns and ‘affiliated myself with the school I teach at on Wednesdays and went along to my first ESAS (Inquiry Learning) session this week.

ESAS officially stands for ?????? none of the teachers I asked could tell me.

Emily effectively introduced and directed us through the “Sharing circles” – 42 of us into 4 groups.

Here are some rough ideas and notes from my time with them.

Before we broke into groups a helpful list of purposeful ‘rules’ for sharing were discussed and I figured that I might just use them for when I am introducing “Thinking Buddies” next week to help students open up and share their ideas with each other.

Purposeful Sharing

Deep Respect

Light Spirit

Inquiring questioning

Non judgmental

Affirming

and Confidential

Emily spoke at some length about each of these but I couldn’t keep up. Having said that I feel they all speak clearly enough for themselves.

Typing in Inquiry Unit into Google (apparently) is not a bad place to start. It’s where one staff member found the link to Wanganui ICT cluster . There are a great number of helpful templates their all adaptable for the general Inquiry Learning process.

There are a key key features in the Inquiry process

Provocation – This is the catalyst event or statement that gets the ball rolling, the two examples given in our session were “Art- Just a pretty picture?” and “Is all rubbish really rubbish?”

There should also be Big Questions which give the Inquiry purpose and direction.

Some teachers found that they had to generate a large number of the question for the Tuning In portion of the Inquiry, so that the students where able to get on the right track for the Inquiry and tangents were minimized.

Breakfast for the NZBlogger/Tweets

Dragon09 — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:34:43 +0000

Breakfast for the NZBlogger/Tweets is now being served on 7am, 9^th October 2008 at the Decadence Cafe

71 Victoria St, Christchurch. Ph (03) 377 8944

I currently have the following people attending:

Barb

Lenva

If you wish to be added to the list please leave a comment below.

It’s just around the corner from the Conference Centre

Here is the breakfast menu

Ahhhh McCain you’ve done it again.

Dragon09 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:18:25 +0000

Another successful collaborative project.

Students took the parts of newspaper reporters and illustrators to create a 6 page news paper in 3 hours.

I was delighted with their enthusiasm and desire to meet the deadline.

They worked in pairs to write recounts including the 5 W’s and H. using complex and compound sentences, writing and linking sentences together in short paragraphs…. But shhhhhhhhhhh…. They think they were just designing and creating a newspaper.

Go Ted McCain!!

First with the sunrise

Dragon09 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:02:21 +0000

First with the Sunrise this morning. I was travelling at 5000 feet heading towards Gisborne. It was a beautiful morning, crisp and clear with no ground frost, praise the Lord. I’ve never commuted by plane before but when I found out I was only coming to Gisborne to run two sessions I thought: Let’s find out.

If it were not for the hike in air-fuel prices (adding an additional $160 to the bill) I think I could talk Breathe Technology into paying for it every time I come, when you add the mileage, the half day travelling, the food and expenses and the motel overnight it about works out even… kinda.

But flying Sunair at 5000 feet at 350 kph in a Aztec sure beats 3 ½ hours on the Napier/ Gisborne road with the hairpin bends and steep inclines. As I said I was also first with the sunrise this morning 10^th June 2008 – in the world I would guess.

The return trip was equally pleasureable and interesting, for some reason I thought it would be daylight coming back but we just got in the air in time to see the sun go down on New Zealand. If it were not for the incredible engine noise and odd TCP smell eminating around the cabin I would have taken a moment to contemplate the picture and considered what educational metaphor I could possibly derive from the scene. C’est la vie.

My Gauntlet

Dragon09 — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:10:59 +0000

Now that I am stepping away from the Flaxmere scene for a while, Peterhead in particular. I would like to lay down the gauntlet for those teachers that remain.

In the coming years as the Interactive Whiteboard project continues and the ICTPD progresses there is potential for pedagogical rethink about how we are to educate the Flaxmere student’. I challenge you to seek out the book…. and read it. I have gifted a copy to the school, check in the staffroom or order your own copy.

Read it and ponder this:

What are the key goals identified in the book?

How do you see these being reflected in your school or in your own practise?

What is the one thing that you have taken away from the book and how will that impact upon your professional understanding, your classroom practice or both?

Educating thinkers and learners for the 21st century

Dragon09 — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 03:24:12 +0000

Karen Boyes

21^st Century Learners

We so often expect for ‘me to win someone has to loose’ For so long Karen argues that has been the case in Education. Its about time we took a serious look at that. With the new possiblities through the new curriculum in New Zealand we have a opportunity to address this imbalance and make education a ‘win-win’ situation.

Technology is changing, REALLY fast now. Karen challenges us and asks: Are we keeping up? Are you? Am I?

Interactive Whiteboard are good and a step in the right direction but the kids very quickly ask, ‘yep…now what?” “What’s next?”

So what skills are they going to need for the 21^st century? We need to turn them into thinkers and Learners for the 21^st century.

Think of it: Wikipedia is the first port of call for information, youtube, iTunes two billion tunes available off the web. Gone are the days of “ooooo, I just bought my first stereo,/walkman.”

, access to the world…. TradeMe is fast becoming the first not the last port of call for purchases.

Everything is happening too fast.

There are six pionts that Ted McCain points to, to help us in developing the 21^st century citizen:

Resist the temptation to tell

Kids are different to in our day.. Opening the door through education is no longer required because now they have access. We need to teach them to inter-relate and use the information effectively. Why are we labelling kids so early when the brain matures at such a vastly different time from student to student. Educational milestones; reading this well aged 6,7,8 NUMP level 3,4,5 by such and such. They should be a guide and we rather than saying “They are not developing” we should rather scaffold their learning with the view to them ‘maturing’ in their learnnig later. (Karen said that bit better than I typed it but I hope you get the idea)

Back on track….. With Apollo 11 being only 3% ‘on target’ for its mission to the moon so our kids need to be, we as teacher spending 97% of our time on ‘course correction’.

Let them experience life and learning they have to do it for themselves; how does a child learn about ‘hot’ you can tell them off all you like be until they touch hot they won’t full understand the concept- My boy was like this, at 18 months he touched the bulb of the beside light when it had been on a couple of minutes, Now when I say ‘That’ll be hot’ he understands more fully- there is pain and discomfort involoved that he does not want to experience again.

Stop teaching decontextualised information

We need to give them a real world context. Dr David Sousa states that we needs to learning to:

1 make sense

2 have meaning

How do we get them to buy into learning?

Stop giving the final product of our thinking.

- Enpower them to do it.

Why are they still dependant at Y13?

75% of tasks we do in the classroom kids should be doing. Sure we need to scaffold you can’t just expect them to that on Monday morning– Who decides what is important to learn in your classroom? You, the government or the kids! Who should decide?

Problems first teaching second-

Getting the children empowered through ‘role play’ Please see Edcast one or my example of Ian Jukes’ talk

Progressively withdraw from helping.

ICT stands for the progression towards independence : Independent , Collaborative, Teacher. Progress through the year. They become dependent and less reliant on teacher input

Re-evaluate evaluation.

Have we missed something. Is the written test enough??

Looking below the surface- what is it we are about- what is the best for their futures?

Teacher make every other profession possible- 21^st Century.

Ian Jukes “We are doing a great job in educating our kids for the 1970’s”

My hyperlinked life

Dragon09 — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:01:12 +0000

It’s been one of those days all month and the next few weeks don’t look any different.

Have you had times in your life like you wish it could be hyperlinked so you can do several things at once?

Here’s my example, please just hover over the links (they are not real)

Today, prepare for reliever, finish off NUMP snapshots for ‘non targeted kids’, prepare presentation on Higher Order Thinking (For real link click here), review material for presentation at meeting for Interactive Whiteboard training, This afternoon teach my kids something, probably writing, final classroom preparations for ERO visit.

Tomorrow: teach my kids, welcome a visitor into my classroom and demonstrate PRS in use, Final preparation for Flaxmere ICT conference presentation, listen to Karen Boyes speak, DO my presentation, out tonight with my wife and friends.

Yep, I wish reality could be hyperlinked sometimes….

Sitech- leading the way in school/company partnership?

Dragon09 — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:16:39 +0000

My school is part of the Sitech Champion Schools programme. As part of that programme the staff here have been involved with a professional development model that appears to be working. Hardware and software have been purchased for the school and the company has provided many hours of training and professional development in it’s use in the classroom environment.

Private provision is an interesting situation, company’s vary in there product and support available. I would be interested to know of any strategy or framework which guides this aspect of school provision. As the product and support varies from company to company the experience of both staff and students also varies along with the development of ICT within the school. Is this a good thing, or bad?

Perhaps the diversity of provision is advantageous in Early Childhood and Primary phases but I would surmise that as students’ progress through Secondary and onto Tertiary national parity would be more desirable to ensure an ICT literate workforce.

Sitech Learning Zone