Beyond a Blackboard

I am always blown away by the innovation of our educators. New tools, apps and activities are constantly being designed and there are so many teachers who are willing to share aspects of their practice. Last weekend, Clarelle and I attended Sparkshop Auckland, an 'unconference' for google educators in order to connect with some of these educators. I learnt so much throughout the day, from both the workshops that I attended, the teachers I connected with and the Slam! session that ended the day. Here are some of my favourite pieces of learning from the day: Bitmoji :  Although this is something I would perhaps use in my social life more than my teaching life, it is rather exciting being able to create your own avatar, which can be used in email as well as through social media. The image of your avatar (there are a range of positions that your character can take) could be used on a class site, as a blogger profile and so on. I thought that they could be used quite we...

As an adult it is easy to forget how much fun it is to be creative, to mould plasticine or create a story with figurines. During this weeks MDTA day I reconnected with my inner child and had a blast - this could be my favourite session yet! Our aim for the day was to create a claymation video to support an aspect of our students learning.  This term my learners have been studying the native bush and we recently went on a trip to Arataki. I decided that this would be a fun topic to use as the focus of my claymation. Here is the process I followed to create my video: Step One: Planning I started by creating a storyboard of my video to ensure that I had a clear idea of what I would be filming. As our learners have also been looking at narratives I wanted to structure my video just like a narrative, with an orientation, problem and resolution. I also included information about the type of shots I would take, the characters and scenery I would need to include. Here is an examp...

One of my main aims since starting at Glenbrae has been to take my learners out of Glen Innes, figuratively speaking. Our learning usually begins with concepts that are familiar to my learners before we move on to explore the unknown. However,  on Saturday 21st of May our school were given the opportunity to take 30 students to an exciting day in the city. They participated in the OMG!Tech Rangers event which was held in the Spark offices in the CBD. Throughout the day the children took part in a number of workshops that were related to Science and Technology. They had an absolutely wonderful time and learnt a lot in these areas. I also had a lot of fun and will be recreating some of the activities that we participated in with the whole class. Check out the video that we made of our day:

After weeks of filming footage of our inquiry project,  I collected my class iPad and connected it to my school laptop to unveil... a complete disaster. Various scenes had mysteriously disappeared, the audio quality left a lot to be desired and the video; we had several shots that contained the green screen and half of the action. Fortunately, my learners are resilient; they quickly learned from our mistakes and created a short trailer depicting all that our original movie had promised, in under an hour. And fortunately for me, my last two MDTA PLG meetings were concerned with the creation of videos, so I will be better able to support them when editing. In this weeks session we were challenged to film and create a short "Day in the Life of" video about learning in our schools.  I found it quite challenging to find the time to film my learners while in the midst of teaching, and only managed to take footage of a few of my lessons. However, it was great to learn from my mi...

Today's goal was to create to learn, with our "create" taking the form of an explainer video. I definitely feel that I learnt a lot about creating video's - I now understand why my learners become so invested in them and how challenging they can be (when you take on something too ambitious!). As soon as Fiona introduced our learning intention I immediately began to recall the number of groups in my class who are in the middle of creating videos at the moment. I am extremely proud of the work that my learners have put into these videos, particularly a group of my writers who decided to plan a story through drama, as they created and recorded an effective movie in a short time frame.  They also created some wonderful pieces of writing because of this. Due to this groups success, I asked my reading group to create an ongoing movie which synthesised the texts that we read in the latter part of term one around Victorian England. It is now term two and I still have had ...

As I approached the stage at my graduation on Friday,  I began to consider where I might be if I had not undertaken this degree. In fact, there was a chance that I might not have gone to University at all, as I am the first person in my family to gain a degree and one of only a handful from my old primary school.  Although I like to think I would have found a job that I would enjoy, it would be such a shame to let my dream of teaching go simply because I was not brave enough to enroll in tertiary study. It felt a little surreal returning to the University of Auckland city campus on Friday to graduate. I know that at other universities graduation is held at the end of the year, yet mine was held after I had finished my first term as a teacher. Although the celebration felt a little belated,  I really enjoyed catching up with my old classmates and I had a wonderful day. The highlight of my Graduation was when I went to dinner with my family as we discussed my ti...