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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach wrote an excellent post that reflects what has been festering in my mind since taking up the ICT Facilitator’s role this year. I have attempted to ‘make the shift’ in my classroom but how can I best encourage others to make similar moves in the way they learn and teach. She highlights nine principles needed to make a shift to 21st century learning pedagogies.

If I can quote her- “Real change, transformational change happens when there is personal ownership of the new technologies and concepts. Today’s new economy is all about human capital, which starts with the educators in a school and then extends outward to all members of the school community.”

1. People- change is best sustained if people are able to support each other on their learning journey if they can learn in supported groups- we are not islands and the collaboration we strive for in our classrooms needs to be modelled by ourselves as adult learners. This is where action research can be such a powerful tool. He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata.
2. Leadership- because any sort of change can be threatening the support and guidance of those in leadership roles can be critical- the process can be so un-necessarily difficult when classroom teachers are not well supported by those they look to for leadership.
3. Including all members of the learning community- everyone is part of the process- efforts need to be made to bring all on board- whanau, support personnel, professional colleagues, the wider community.



4. Developing a shared vision for how things need to be- the need to make sure that teachers together articulating the core beliefs. Our new NZ curriculum statement goes some way to addressing this issue.
5. Own it- this phrase has been very powerful for me since I first heard Sheryl say it at TUANZ last year. It’s good to use 21st technologies personally before ‘going public’. Become familiar with them, practise and become used to them. My first experiences with communication on line was through the use of email- personally with relatives overseas- because I could see the immediate uses of it I became better at using it.
6. Communication- we in NZ at the bottom of the globe can be as connected as anyone globally- geography has become less of an issue through UStream, Skype, Twitter etc. Communication with teachers and students outside of your classroom. I am able to communicate with people from UK, Australia, USA, Canada, Uzbekistan- all over.
7. Know your culture and try to anticipate trends- Sheryl says that participatory media has a tendency to ‘go viral’- we need to try and think ahead of the possible consequences of giving these tools to children. A number of children in my class now have their own personal blogs not moderated by me. I endeavour to have given them the skills and common sense to be safe on line.
8. We do not know what we do not know- new things will come along that are totally random- we can expect the unexpected. We will need to be able to run with these new challenges.
9. The power of collective wisdom- we all learn together. We are all learning and what each of us thinks matters.

Thank you Sheryl for insightful post. I encourage my readers to read Sheryl’s blog in its entirety as she is able to write in much eloquently than I but I wanted to write my own version to help me move my own thinking along by giving it my own ’spin’.

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Yesterday was a big day with a very early start to drive over the Whangamoa and Rai hills to the Marlbourough Colleges’ Cluster Day- it was a major undertaking- they had closed the colleges for the day and given the kids the day off- the day before Easter Friday. 160 or so teachers came along to hear Greg Gebhert speak followed by two two hour workshops. With lessons learnt from the previous Lead Teacher Day I heard little of Greg’s keynote as I was busy making my computer behave and connect to the network before feeling comfortable that everything was going to go smoothly. I was presenting sessions on blogging with newbies- two hours was a good length- long enough to spend some time showcasing what a blog can be used for then long enough to actually play and make one.

I used our Moturoa class blog and our Blogmeister blog as examples and my Bling4yrblog blog resource with pdf handout on how to get started and how to add a few extras. The sessions were really humming along and I got a good buzz from the groups which was superb.

Photo credit: Marlborough Express On Line

Then it was off the Warren’s place for help with a migration of my 12inch Apple G4 iBook that I had won in a radio competition to my brand new nearly all paid for 15 inch Mac Book Pro with RAM to burn! Things did not start out well and there was a few nervous moments as disks failed to be recognised but it all came right in the end and after a drive home in the dark I spent till 2am playing! Not to worry- the long Easter weekend looms.

The sensible path was not to migrate the applications downloaded off the net but to re-download the latest versions with Leopard fixes and the like. Everything is going smoothly and I am re-populating my dock. Only a few little question marks- KidPix and Microsoft Apps to replace. Click on the photo if you want to find out what made it back to the dock and what missed out!

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I have yet to locate the install disks for KidPix and Microsoft and then I can take up Ben’s kind offer of Parallels and we will be underway.

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Skitch did give me a little grief until I remembered our slight change to the SYSTEM PREFERENCES- NETWORK- AIRPORT-DNS settings of the additions of these two numbers!

Kudos to here for help to do this and to the soon to be departing Chrissy who pointed me to it last year and to my Delicious who let me store my bookmarks on any computer which made it very easy to re-locate that much needed web reference.

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I have had a very busy week and realised I haven’t introduced you to the last of my 14 schools- Mapua Primary School.

Mapua is an Apple School so using their wireless system was a breeze. The school looks very styly with a mixture of older buildings, shade trees and a new administration block.

I was rather nervous this week at the prospect of spending a couple of days helping individual teachers at the high school with specific ICT needs. As a primary school teacher I was concerned that the secondary teachers would need answers to questions that I didn’t know how to answer. I found out that their needs were very similar to ones faced in primary schools. I had never been inside Moodle before but the interface looked fairly familiar, with a few twists but we were able to work things out. Helping adults is very rewarding as they see the immediate benefits of putting the new tools to use so we spent the days blogging, Moodling, Photoshopping, recording, exploring Delicious, making Powerpoint sing and validating websites. Plenty of variety to be going on with.

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People have been asking me what this Twitter is all about? Today I was able to show them! I was at Tasman School showing them ‘Possibilities’- some of the incredible things you can do with a little imagination, a little skill and a little time- via the internet. We looked at blogging, wikis, podcasting, linking Skype, collaborations- the works.

I mentioned Twitter in conversation- not really meaning to go into it but got asked about it and found it hard to explain without a demonstration so put out a quick tweet asking for a hello. Within seconds I had received tweets from Brisbane, Sydney, Shanghai, Washington, Vancouver Island, Regina, Winnipeg and Wellington! Awesome stuff guys. Thank you.

On another Twitter related moment. Last night I got an iChat request- did I know how to get rid of the outside link you get when you upload a Powerpoint to Slideshare? No I didn’t!

I posted a Tweet asking for help. Simplyarun from Slideshare caught the tweet and gave me a hand to look good! He posted a fix for the problem within minutes. Awesome stuff, Slideshare. Well done.

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Via Creative ICT I recently came across Quickmaps- a Google Earth looking mash-up which lets you easily trace your travel paths. It would be interesting to add it to a Voicethread

Here, in blue, are the paths I travel in my working week. I feel a bit like I am burning dollars for petrol money but there is no chance of car-pooling or public transport owing to the varying timetable and no public transport any way.

David- I still intend to do the Amazing Journeys Commute Video- as soon as I get the new computer- not long to wait now.

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I had fun yesterday at Riwaka School discussing their ICT needs for 2008. Riwaka is one of New Zealand’s oldest schools but it certainly doesn’t look like it! They have an awesome Performing Arts Centre which must be such a fabulous asset to the school and its community. Look at the blue sky! It’s like that all the time in NZ!

And a highlight of today- an all day workshop at Dovedale. I was able to use the internet with my computer and the whole school (two classes) were able to connect to a wiki that I had made showing the children what blogs look like at junior, middle and senior schools. Children were given time to play in the blogs and share what they had found with others in the class. We even got the idea of how people communicate by leaving a few comments.

I am the Bloggers Cafe at L@S and John (sorry John but I can’t remember what your real name is now) asked what’s a blog?- This photo shows fellow blogger Lorraine Watchorn showing him and this blog post will help show the power of it- just like Mark Treadwell did for me a couple of years ago. All done in the seven minutes before the next workshop.

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This morning I woke up early so here I am all on my lonesome with my ‘I’m blogging it” T-shirt and no one else here to suck my bandwidth- YAY.

I wrote this last night after a good night out!!

Today was marred yet again by a lack of connectivity but enriched by the number of new friendships made. I got up real early as the people in the next motel unit did as well!! I thought I would walk down to the Events Centre early but turned back because of the drizzle. Jedd was in the same predicament so we decided to get a taxi. While we were waiting Jedd introduced me to a Richard, a lovely man with a voice like Sir Ken Robinson. Talking of voice Richard is keynoting on Friday so it was nice to be able to chat for a while- I didn’t realise that Richard had done the TUANZ circuit a couple of years back so he knows how things are in NZ.

Getting there nice and early I got my blog posted at the Bloggers’ Cafe before the bandwidth robbers turned up and started sucking my connectivity while they checked their emails. First up was keynote, Julia Atkin, who unfortunately lost me a bit there in the middle but summed up nicely at the end when she asked “What is learning?” and suggested that learning is…

a journey
a growth
constructing and deconstructing
creating and recreating
transformative
enlightening
empowering
enriching

Learning is organic, dynamic and responsive. Jeremy asked yesterday, “What do we know about learning?”

My first breakout after that was with @suziea - Lessons learnt as a facilitator. Suzie was so generous to us all talking about her role as facilitator in Petone and sharing her wiki frenzy of resources and giving us all a DVD of some of her best used resources- awesome Suzie. Thank you.

On the way back to the main venue from the concert chamber I cadged a lift with a lovely young lady from Insite who gave me a lift- bless her. She later made my day by gifting me this very way cool see through mouse from Insite that lights up in a range of florescent colours. It was a little bling for my little laptop as well.

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After a quick spot of face-to-face networking it was off to learn how to animate with Powerpoint- OK but half way through the internet came back on and there was a host of catching up to do- hotmail, twitter, email, bloglines etc so I stopped paying attention really.

Next off to Digital Story Telling with Photostory 3- now this was more like it but I wonder if anyone can tell me a way to convert a .wmv file to something that will upload to Podomatic??????

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During afternoon tea I met up with @tonitones, @sarnee and @heymilly. Next time we need the organisers to put our Twitter personas on our name tags. Maybe we should add our avatars, blog titles and Second Life entities so we know who we are when we bump into Scrumples or Jojash!

After one too many red wines at the after-match function we ended up in a motel room surrounded by CORE- they were swarming. They were all very welcoming and the company convivial but we ended up having a lovely meal at a Thai restaurant before a wander home in the cool of the evening.

Looking forward tomorrow to the homegroup meeting with my cluster leader, 11:15 live blogging with @dragon09 using yesterday’s link to the bling blog, a session on action research which I am really looking forward to knowing more about and the big party in the evening.

Connectivity may be an issue at the Learning At School so this post may never see the light of day. The day started busily with a quick visit to Appleby for an interview with ERO about Professional Learning & Development and life & living at Appleby. The whole stress of an ERO review didn’t affect me at all- it’s a wonder what seven days at a new job can do for a girl!

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After listing your professional development completed in the last 12 months they asked good questions. I directed them to my Professional Development tab at the top of this blog- that saved me half an hour! Interestingly many of my learning experiences were in collaboration with my ‘connected’ friends who weren’t in close physical proximity.

Then they asked how these experiences had been effective in helping me make important improvements in my classroom teaching?

My big question that I am grappling with was how does using ICT make measurable changes in student achievement. I was heartened by their willingness to vailidate non-mathematical measurements erring more on the wisdom of the pre-school Learning Stories- I have heard great things about Greenwood Kindergarten’s work with this while in the spa last night so I will make arrangements to visit with them on my return to Motueka.

Moving on to Learning At School……

Ten of us from Discover IT Tasman are fortunate enough to come to Rotorua and learn together. I going to record my notes on

http://allanah.jottit.com/

and on Thursday at 11:15am I am going to try and do a live blogging session with Simon entitled “ Did you Know, New Zealand?” based on Carl Fisch’s video and how it relates to the New Zealand circumstances. Do join us if you have a minute on Thursday.

http://bling4yrblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/live-blogging.html

OK - off now to find an internet connection and do a little face-to-face networking. You couldn’t get a better job than this! Haven’t got time to make my post look pretty.

Today’s school was St Peter Chanel- a lovely Catholic school with well appointed and interesting classrooms. We are going to look at how to enhance the taking of digital photographs to better utilise the resources they already have.

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Then a short trip back to Motueka South. Thanks everyone for your comments on yesterday’s post. I am not the only one to go to through the angst of having things go ‘not quite right’ when preparing a presentation where the web is fairly crucial. The inimitable Darren Kuropatwa and Wes Fryer had a little meltdowns as well…

Today I did my very first ‘Possibilities of using Web2.0 in the Primary Classroom’ staff meeting at Motueka South. I turned up two hours early- just in case! I needed every minute- I had pre-bookmarked my websites on my home network before I left home in tabs in case all else failed.

My first option was my trusty Apple but I had to change computers as no one knew how to connect it to the network- got the cluster PC out- waited for it to install updates and got it connected via a really long ethernet cable that I had taken- just in case wireless wasn’t got to work. Thankfully I had already downloaded iTunes and Quicktime. I had bookmarked the sites with Mozilla but it wouldn’t connect so had to feverishly re-tab using Internet Explorer.

Podcasts and movies were pre-downloaded on the PC at least so no problems there as I had remembered to bring speakers of my own. Now to the data projector- no long power chord. Searched and found one- needed a double plug! Searched and found one.

The three o’clock bell went just as I got the data projector going and I ate my lunch and pretended everything was as smooth as custard ready for the teachers to stagger into the staffroom after a busy afternoon!

The session went well- I thought- after that rigmarole and I managed to inspire a number of teachers to follow up with additions to their blogs and hopefully some will take up podcasting soon.

I shared this Edublog with the staff and some were amazed by the power of my learning network of helpful support people and commenters- thank you guys.

Lessons learnt…

• Be prepared in advance and try to be self sufficient- power cords, junction boxes etc
• Flickr is blocked on many school networks- the photos I uploaded to Flickr for this blog didn’t show- use Skitch.
• Find out how to log on to a Smartnet server from an Apple- Learning at School may be able to help with this one- I will visit their trade display.
• Have a back up plan if all else fails.
• Don’t do too much in one session- try to keep it simple.
• Be really nice to support personnel- they are the support structure that keeps the wheels turning.

Can’t wait until I get my new Mac Book Pro with Parallels- won’t have to carry two computers around- one heavy like a brick.