Today I had the pleasure of being invited to participate in in the Nelson Cluster ICT day.

It was just the thing I needed to reinforce my commitment to eLearning for my children. Also in attendance were some of NZ’s eLearning shining stars. Dorothy Burt kicked things off with her keynote outlining Point England’s eLearning Journey. Dorothy comprehensively hyperlinked her keynote with links to highlights of the learning experiences at Point England. She continues to be my podcasting inspiration.

As usual in these sorts of situations I found it difficult to connect to the internet and the battery on my MBP seems to drain as soon as I power up so I had to just listen to what Dorothy was sharing. Not a bad thing, I hear you say. But I found that writing/tapping as I listen helps me to remember and ‘get’ the message. Without access to recording my learning as it was happening I know that I missed some stuff I should have got- that’s why these sorts of back channels are so good. We should encourage our children to be able to do whatever it takes to ‘get’ our message. This thought reminded me of one of Lisa Parisi’s recent postings- doing what it takes to learn and remember in our own way- to move, to mash-up, to make.

Next I attended an I Can Animate workshop with Mike Foster from Nelson Intermediate. I got some good tips particularly to buy Resene Wham paint for a green screen backdrop. I thought I had taken a photo of his set up but it looks like a didn’t. I think a class visit might be on the cards before I have a go an constructing one for myself.

My mate, Jason, from Sitech called in to my class while he was here so that I could return the IWB he lent me for the term. Having the use of an IWB has been a wonderful, engaging opportunity for my class and I and we will sadly miss it as we go back to having to share our one data projector with the rest of the school. Jason did however give me another gadget to play with for a bit- a wireless tablet. Wacom has given me tablet but I have used it exclusively at home. I will give the kids more of a go with the wireless tablet I think because it won’t be so tied to the computer via the USB like the Wacom is.

I also got a look at this new straight out of the box workstation with a 37inch monitor all ready to hook up to your laptop. I thought it was a great way to bring the big screen to the classroom. I could see how we could put that to good use as well.

I then had the opportunity to share some of my own eLearning journey. Many of the links I used are on my wiki.

The conference finished off with a final keynote from Derek Wenmoth. In it he shared his wealth of knowledge and thoughts about the future for us all. Dorothy, Derek, Suzie Vesper and I had a very stimulating conversation about Derek’s latest posting, Without data, you’re just another person with opinion. As I get the last say ‘cos this is my blog- I think that the direction that NZ’s new government is taking to stir up the press to publish school league tables is NOT a positive move although I do believe that we should be rigorous in assessing the value added learning that children attain while in our care.

Derek is off to the UK tomorrow. Ka kī atu a au kia hoki ora atu a ia ki te kāinga.

People have been asking me how I am enjoying being back in the classroom after a year out and about seeing the world and working with teachers instead of eight and nine year olds. Generally I am enjoying being back in the classroom but had forgotten the hours that classroom teaching needs to keep all the balls juggling in the air.

I do miss the adult conversations and the variety of being in a different place and working with different people each day but learning opportunities that we have been having lately at school keep me connected with people and places outside the walls of my classroom.

We are enjoying the conversations through Sylvia Tolisano’s Around the World with 80 Schools Project and enjoyed talking to children in Chrissy Hellyer’s class at ISB, Bangkok.

We also worked collaboratively with Myles Webb’s class at Melville Intermediate in the Waikato. A couple of keen students at Appleby had taught themselves how to use Pivot to make simple animations. I follow Myles through Twitter and his kids were keen to learn how to do it as well. We set up a session using Skype for audio and Adobe Connect Pro’s screen sharing capabilities. Because Pivot is a Windows app and we are an Apple School I used my personal MacBook Pro laptop with Parallels (thanks Ben) to screen share. Children were able to see what George was doing with Pivot at our end through sharing our desktop while he was explaining what he was doing using Skype.

The session went exceedingly well and both groups enjoyed the challenge of the exercise.

It is very powerful for young children take control of their learning and make meaningful connections to ‘expert voices’ of a similar age to learn from one another.

If you have good people in your network you learn good stuff. Last night I caught a tweet by Wes Fryer about a another great digital tool called Capzles. He was impressed and so am I as I quickly made a Capzle from a few photos and a class digital story movie. I added some feedback text and an audio mix of my commentary and some FreePlay music. The features of Capzles that I like are the intuitive interface, the quick ease of uploading content and the timeline effect. It harvests the data from your photos and knows when they were taken and puts them in a timeline. It has great quality in full screen mode as well.

It fits well inside Blogger. A bonus is that as it embeds you can chose to only have the audio play when you click on the little speaker icon. That’s great ‘cos I find it irritating to have audio play on a blog when it hasn’t been asked so the audio doesn’t come to you uninvited. The only downside I can see is that comments go live immediately. For school I would like to see some form of comment moderation or at least notification of new comments but I don’t think it would be a huge problem.

For next year I thought it would be fun to take a photo everyday- children could add a photo highlight a day and we could grow our portfolio over the year embedded in our blog.

Give it a whirl and create one of your own!

I first saw this inspirational video ages ago and it stuck in my mind so I thought I would try and find it and share it with you- shame about the quality of the actual video but I have fiddled with the code and it still isn’t great.

“This very inspiring videoclip was made by Saatchi & Saatchi. ‘Lessons from the Geese’ has been attributed to a number of authors. The research that I have done, however, seems to indicate that the original text for this piece was penned by Dr. Robert McNeish in 1972. The primary source that brought me to this conclusion was this comprehensive article.”

Below you see the text from the video.

“Leadership Lessons from Geese”

To show the importance of teamwork, we can take examples from the lives of geese.

Fact: As each goose flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the birds that follow. By flying in a “V” formation, the whole flock gains 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

Lesson 1: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are travelling on the thrust of one another.

Fact: When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

Lesson 2: If we have as much sense as a goose we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

Fact: When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position.

Lesson 3: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other’s skill, capabilities, and unique arrangements of gifts, talents, and resources.

Fact: The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up in front to keep up their speed.

Lesson 4: We need to make sure that our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, the production is much greater. The power of encouragement (to stand by one’s core values, and to encourage the core values of others) is the quality of honking we seek.

Fact: When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock.

Lesson 5: If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

This little project has taken a year in the making. In the same way I have a 2009 to do list I had one for 2008 as well. David Kinane’s project ‘Intrepid Journeys’ gave me the inspiration. I had to go over to Motueka on Sunday to help a teacher with her home computer so it gave me the chance to cross another thing off my 2008 to do list. I set the camera up on a tripod on the passenger seat and set it to capture time lapse photos at the fastest refresh rate that the camera allowed which was 30 seconds. As I arrived in Motueka the compressed video lasted all of 4 seconds! When I got home I dropped it in to iMovie and slowed it down as much as I could, exported it and repeated myself. I then dropped a little FreePlay Music over the top to add a little interest. Thanks for the inspiration, David.

As posted before “I love my job”. How great is it to get paid to do a job that you love. Here is a little bit of my day today….

• Late night chat via Skype with Barbara Reid on the perils of Milestone Reporting
• Early morning chat via Skype with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in Buffalo on future thinking.
• A little bit of milestone writing in the morning- there’s got to be a downside there somewhere!



• In the afternoon a student/teacher workshop looking at animation at Upper Moutere. Will Richardson at ULearn had showed me Google Docs presenter so had made a presentation on animation to practice with the tool. This is the third in a series of workshops with students and teachers at Upper Moutere as we look at different ways of making animations, today we were looking at I Can Animate My Personal Learning Network (Fiona Grant) and Atomic Movies came in handy here with screen grab tutorials and a paper handout to guide me as I had never actually used the software before.
• Then a bit of a mad dash (driving dutifully at 49 km/hr) over to Mapua School for ULearn08 feedback. We took more of an unconference style to the reporting back which worked really well. I started off with a couple of links to EdTalks and K12 Online Conference and then ULearn08 participants shared what they had done with people who wanted to know more. It was a pretty good result I thought and people enjoyed the experience and went away good vibes and a few more ideas to take back to their schools.

• Home safely driving at 99km/hr to check my emails and catch up with my RSS. It seems that this blog is on a reading list for some pre-service teachers in Australia as they seem to be posting and reflecting on some of the things that I have posted lately. I am honoured and flattered by the attention. What about giving a little extra encouragement to Meaghan, Natalie, Renee and Amanda who are studying at UTS in Sydney.
• A little work on my blog and a little more work on my miletsone and a distraction from Greg Carroll showing me how to convert a PC into an Apple. Not a bad day in the life of a ICT facilitator from NZ!

On Thursday I am chipping in my 5c into a conversation and ICT celebration at Mapua School. They have invited parents to come along to school and children are going to show them their blogs, Flickr & Delicious sites and other ICT projects they have been doing recently.

Then I am going to have a bit of a chat with them about how to help their children participate responsibly on the internet. To this end I have made a pdf resource that talks of how to make safe Google searches, cyber-safety using Hector’s World, awareness of your digital footprint and a ‘Think Before You Post’ video.

Apart from the content I am particularly pleased with the clever way I have been able to embed the video into the pdf using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Next year I would like to have a go at using this tool to create digital portfolios to add to children’s Google Apps page linked through our school website. How geeky is that!

After quite a bit of deliberation and a fair bit of angst I have made my ULearn08 selections. Fickle creature that I am a few of the my, ‘I really want to go to that,’ sessions were on in times that I was presenting myself. It’s a shame my two tasters are in different breakouts. I think I will just try and gatecrash the second half of someone else’s workshop when I have finished. Such is life!

Also of course really looking forward to catching up and spending time with good friends from overseas & closer to home and also meeting people I have met through my network who I feel I know but who I probably won’t recognise unless they come dressed as their avatar!

Breakout One- Keeping Competencies Complex- what happens when we listen to kids? Jennifer Carteris & Robyn Foster. I want to see how other people are getting to grips with the key competencies in the new curriculum.

Breakout Two Taster- Twitter- building your network. Twitter ID.

Breakout Three Taster- Cool Adobe Applications for Free. Me.

Breakout Four- Podcasting. Wiki.

Breakout Five- Network Literacy- Levering the Potential of a Hyperlinked World. Will Richardson. A F2F session will be great.

Breakout Six- Marina View Television- Colin Gover. Using my copy of Adobe Visual Communicator with my fellow Adobe Educational Leader.

Breakout Seven- Unconference. To play and learn and twitter and Skype I should imagine!

Now I thought I would offer a little something to the Unconference- any requests???

Ewan McIntosh’s Perfect Tools for planning an Unconference sounds like a lot of fun but I wonder if people would go for it. I think it would be just grand if we could have enough people that wanted to share that we could run his People Picker- give everyone a bit of a look at something new , maybe Ustream it for Chrissy now in Bangkok and have a bit of a laugh. A bit of speed geeking would be the idea.

Hope everyone decides to go to the Breakout Seven Unconference so other people will be at the one that I go to.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Last Friday night I called in the experts. Before heading off to San Francisco I bought myself a 500GB wireless Time Capsule that took 72 hours to do the back-up. Hardly lightning speed! And it only backed up once after that. Even after a two hour call to a help desk in Australia!

I relented and called in Pete the Geek whose fingers flew like a concert pianist across my keyboard and now I have a heap of back-ups at good speed and I can now print wirelessly to my printer. I now just find myself clicking on the Time Capsule just to see the magic of the interface. Awesome.I don’t even pretend to be technically minded but I do know when the task is beyond me and when I should call in technical help.

It’s a pity more primary schools don’t do the same. On my travels I see teachers trying to be all things to all people and being called on to spend hours setting up and cloning laptops, delving into the school’s server, making printers print, fixing problems. Teachers should be teachers. This technical work is sapping their energy for their day job. A technician can do those jobs in lightning speed and save a heap of time for the teacher whose passion and energy is being drained away trying to fix technical issues that they don’t have the time, expertise or resources to fix. It’s a false economy to have a teacher spending days cloning laptops instead of preparing for teaching.

• A number of schools and classes in my cluster are now blogging in earnest and getting plenty of feedback and interaction flowing from it. Now they are ready to take it to the next level and go out their and use their blogs to foster links outside their classrooms and schools.

For me that collaboration really started through Paul Harrington from Wales and I exchanging comments on each others blogs and podcasts but teachers want to know how to go about starting those links and working on some meaningful projects with other classes.

Lenva Sheering has compiled this reference to the benefits and curriculum links of using collaboration on her Auckland Home Group wiki.

Here are some links that they may like to use to do just that…

• Teachers Connecting- A teacher will register and complete a profile of their class level, interests and level of teacher technical skill. Others who are keen also to collaborate can see what projects are on the go that might suit them.

• Rocky Jensen (NZ) has put together this wiki of collaborative projects that people can easily add to and browse fro something that might suit you.

• Last year my class participated in an Imageverse project where children exchanged hands of friendship around the globe. Not strictly on line but the children loved decorating their hands and receiving hands from round the globe.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
• Of course, most obviously, there is Twitter but it make take a while to build up a network of co-collaborators. On a side note it was great fun on Saturday night to gather a group of us via Twitter all watching and tweeting on the Kiwi triumphs at the Olympic rowing events.

• Kim Cofino, in Bangkok, also has a project site that offers links to collaborative projects organised by grade level.

• Then there’s always our own English On Line Book Backchat where classes get together and discuss books- again arranged by class level. This site hosted my very first on line discussion and the results still show up deep in a Google search!

• The Flat Stanley project is an oldie but a goodie. The idea is that you send off a ‘Flat Stanley’ around the world and follow his trail- sort of geocaching for little kids.

• E-Pals is a long running site linking classes of similar ages and interests to get together and form bonds.

• Voices of the World is a Ning where people who join have a community where they can post media, audio, blog, links and the like. You have to join the Ning first then look for what is current with the project. It is based in America so the school terms are different to ours but it is nice to concentrate on hearing the student voices speaking with different accents and languages.

• The Victorian Department of Education in Australia put together this great site of collaborative projects.

• Lastly is another Ning organised by Jen Wagner. This Ning even has a group of Kiwi educators. We are starting to use it to talk about ULearn08. Again you need to join first- this Ning has many groups where educators from around the globe can form areas of common interest to link their classes.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Here is another piece of creative fun. Great for use with the Wacom Tablet and a pen to draw with. With Imagination Cubed you draw and then the site re-draws your pen strokes in fast forward and you can email it to someone. If you had more drawing skill it could be a lot of fun. Click on the drawing to see how I draw my tea cup.

I like to think I am getting the hang of Lead Teacher Days and this one was on Digital Story Telling at Mapua School. We started of with a few exemplars of great digital stories like this one from a Robert Lloyd- a Brit describing his kiwi adventure.

We followed that by a look at where digital story telling fits with the curriculum- we quickly gave up as it fits just everywhere. That was my point really. Digital stories are an excellent media for improving literacy across the spectrum really. We then looked at some of the tools we might use- iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, Keynote, Powerpoint, Moviemaker, Photostory3 and a number of Web2.0 tools thrown in for good measure. My favourite at the moment I would like to use with a class is Videocue.

Videocue picks up your iSite camera and with a scrolling autocue you read your script that you can change the speed of if you are a slow reader. When you are done it automatically saves a Quicktime version onto your movies. Makes a girl almost want to have a class of her own to practice with!

We then set about creating digital stories based on a couple of poems I had pre-selected. People worked in groups as would happen in a classroom and our progress was recorded on our Discover IT Tasman cluster wiki. The afternoon was spent sharing and planning for our next school tour and Eric Frangenheim’s visit in early July.

New Zealand is hosting the Time4Innovation Conference. Many NZ educators are participating through viewing video and adding to the discussion boards. Last week I enjoyed hearing Janice Gulbransen talking about leadership.

Janice’s Video in Google Video

This weekend I watched to TATV – a group of Te Awamutu students shared their voice. To hear what the students have to say about how they want to be taught and what they want to be taught click on the 2008 folder and view the video “You Have a Message.” Both videos are thought provoking and worth taking a moment out of your busy day to watch.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

OK- I am deep in milestone reporting – crafting lofty statements that should focus on student learning outcomes and teacher professional development. What do I do? I show @efreeman down Christchurch way how to do Skype, chat with @achurches in Auckland and end up playing in iChat video with a couple of un-named types who I won’t name because they should be working too I suspect! Now that was very cool. I didn’t realise that we would all show up in video at the same time- we ended up morphing ourselves using PhotoBooth while we were chatting. A spot of light relief is a wonderful thing!

This week I had the pleasure and privilege to visit with Greenwood Kindergarten in Motueka. Elaine Newton, the Early Childhood ICT facilitator invited me to lead a workshop on creating music with Garageband at the kindy. I was so impressed with their set-up.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Good for Animoto for sharing their educational account so that teachers can now create longer than 30 second videos for free and download them for playing and keeping on your computer- great for playing and sharing if your internet is slow and spends a lot of time buffering.

As Ewan McIntosh says- it takes zero skill levels to create great videos. To access the educational side of Animoto use this link and ask Rebecca for an educational registration key. She does ask to be kept in the loop as to the kinds of things you are creating.

The quick example I made celebrates my first term as ICT facilitator for Discover IT Tasman.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Here is one just for Kiwi Primary Schools! Today I got a few requests for Twitter followers and two of them were from the guys at Selwyn Ridge School in Tauranga. Through these links I found out aout the Movie and Digital Excellence Awards for NZ students. They say…

“The MADE Awards were started from a collaborative exploration of finding ways to celebrate student achievements in community settings by Tahatai Coast School and Selwyn Ridge School.

Students love to use digital media to discover, explore and communicate learning. Much of the fantastic work completed by students has an audience limited to their class peers, sometimes a school assembly, and occasionally to a proud parent who has popped into class.

The MADE Awards seeks to establish an outlet that enables students to show their work with a much wider audience, to be proud of their efforts and to share their learning. The MADE Awards, in partnership with business sponsors, seeks to reward the best efforts of entrants with fantastic ICT equipment which will further enhance the place of ICT in the learning world.”

I need to get back in a classroom to have go in one of their categories- commercial, music video, storytelling, curriculum and static image. Hope they do it again next year!

They will be judged in three ages levels to give everyone a go- Year 1-3, Year 4-6, Year 7-8.

The second to last week of term I facilitated a very powerful tour of local Nelson schools. We picked up a mini-van full of Discover IT Tasman teachers and prinicpals and headed for town. First up was Brightwater School- just humming. Brightwater principal, Janice Gulbransen, and her staff have embeded the inquiry approach and the use of ICT into daily programmes of work. Children are engaged and are able to articulate their learning. They use the Mark Treadwell inspired KnowledgeNet extensively as a hub for their on line activities and all classes are actively creating content on the web.

We visited Liz’s class and saw children locating on a world map where people are who make comments on their blog. Great learning in a meaningful context. It was great to be able to wander the school and have children able to tell us what they were learning and why they were learning it.

Next stop was Henley School. Henley is a large urban school. We were in awe of the art works abounding in the school and had a good chance to have a look at how teachers were using interactive whiteboards and see their computer suite in action.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

We then broke into smaller groups to have a look around Nayland Primary and Broadgreen Intermediate where they had a limited FM radio station in action.

It was very powerful for us to get out of our classrooms and schools to see how others are going- it was affirming for us to know how others are implementing the curriculum and building on learning experiences for children enhanced through the use of ICT.

A big day out.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to play with Microsoft’s Australian piece of software- Marvin before I got taught. I was looking for something new to do while I couldn’t use the internet much as my broadband allowance for the month is all used up and I have five days left of dial-up before I can be set free again.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Being Microsoft of course I had to fire up Parallels so I could work with it on my Mac but that only took a second or two. The software is as intuitive as Microsoft ever gets but the end results are visually quite stunning. I see some great possibilities for digital story telling and a way to give voice to children using the product.

After adding the background and loading your avatar you can customise your creation by having it do a variety of actions and speech. I didn’t try to have it record my own voice- I wonder if that is an option? When compiled it can animate on your screen or you can export as an .avi and upload to your blog like I have done here for my class blog.

It is a pity it is only a 30 day free trial before it expires. When compared to a Comic Life registration for $4 I wonder if it won’t be a bit of a novelty which wears off after a bit. Has anyone published anything created with Marvin to convince me otherwise?

I have been working with some schools learning how to take better digital photos and last week we were focusing on close-up photography. If you can touch it you can take a close up of it. We had six digital cameras to play with and achieved some stunning results to share and as our cluster website is still down this seems as good a venue as any other.

Download

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Also Jane from Ngatimoti showed this innovative way of using digital photography with her Year 7/8 children. She had the children take photos of each other from a not often used perspective- looking down from the top of the playground. The photos were then printed in black and white and children used their drawing techniques to shade and sketch themsleves form this new perspective thus avoiding the usual, ‘it doesn’t look real’ thing that older children seem to care about when drawing. To add further impact the drawings were then cut out and mounted in 3D so it really looks like the characters are reaching up- awesome.

At Upper Moutere we have been meshing their Topic “All Aboard” with use of Kid Pix and photography to make a stunning array of name badges.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!