Beyond a Blackboard

Today I attended the 5th annual Manaiakalani Hui, which was a thoroughly enjoyable and informative experience. My (mini) live sketch note One of the highlights of the day was watching a student representative from each school present a piece of their learning. These presentations illustrated the various ways in which Manaiakalani students learn, create and share. There were presentations on a variety of curriculum areas and topics, although I think watching one of my own learners was most special to me. I felt incredibly proud to watch my student represent our school and share his learning. Using Twitter to share our learning #Manaiakalani It was also a pleasure to hear about the research that the MIT's (Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers) are conducting. A few of these teachers are researching about student achievement in writing, which I really enjoyed as I have been looking into writing for my University study. Research was presented from both Woolf ...

I have been idle on twitter for a couple of years, but it is only now that I have fully explored Twitter as a means of building a professional learning network (PLN). This morning we connected with James Hopkins  via Google Hangout, who shared a presentation with us regarding his journey with Twitter. I loved the notion of using Twitter as free PD and connecting with other educators who have different perspectives and experiences. It's interesting thinking about the different way people view change and technology in education, and how this is discussed through PLNS. After being inspired by James, the MDTA's began our first twitter chat, using #MDTAchat . Anne posed a series of provocations which we responded to and conversed with one another. I found this really interesting, although it was a little stressful! I hadn't considered the learning that could occur from something like this before and will be engaging in other chats, such as EdchatNZ more often.

To start the term off with a bang,  Room 7 took part in a 'Breakout' . This meant that the students had to solve a series of clues in order to unlock a number of locks that were attached to a treasure chest. I first found out about Breakout Edu at Sparkshop ,  where Angela Lee facilitated a Breakout for the educators.  I thoroughly enjoyed this session and had been waiting to use this ever since. As Breakout can be used in any curricula area, I decided to use mine to recap some of our mathematics learning from term two. I modified an established game; 'The Mathematicians Code' by Jeff Hennigar, so that it could be used by my whole class. I ended up using 6 locks on my main box and a smaller locked box which contained some clues. To start off,  I presented the students with a picture frame that contained a picture of a Pythagorean tree. Some of the students realised that their had to be something more to this picture, and found a secret note hidden insid...

I have been neglecting a rather jazzy icon in my dock for some time, yet it could have been used on several occasions this year. While I have fond memories of Garageband from my youth, its latest update is far more complicated than the one I remember. Fortunately, Rob Wiseman facilitated a PLG today and guided us through some Garageband basics. We began at the very beginning... Getting Started Open a new "empty" project. Select the microphone icon to record sound through a microphone and to use the preset sound clips. The keyboard icon allows you to create your own tunes using the keyboard on your computer, while the drum icon acts as a drum machine and the guitar works as an amp.  You are then ready to record or click on the loops icon (top right) to select the pre-made loops. After we had a play around with the settings and basic features on Garage Band (there is a lot to it and things can get pretty technical if you would like them to) we created o...

Today I attended a Manaiakalani PLG which focused on the share element of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy. We first discussed the benefit that sharing has for our learners and we looked specifically at blogging. We investigated the  research  that has been conducted regarding the benefit of blogging during the school holidays and I was amazed at the effect that it had on the students learning. I created the following  sketchnote  to illustrate the key findings of this research, although I found this quite difficult to create as the information was presented live! We then discussed the way infographics can make data more accessible to viewers,  as our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text. If you are interested in using infographics, this website illustrates some of the infographics that are most commonly used. Our task was then to create infographics that were related to blogging. I decided to make an infographic for my two bloggers ...