I have just spent the last few days at the New Zealand Learning at School Conference in Rotorua. Unfortunately I missed the Andy Hargreaves keynote as my plane didn’t get in on time but from all accounts he was well received and his content was relevant. I will catch up with his keynote when things settle down a bit.

After quickly meeting up with some of my Twitter/blogger mates I launched into my first breakout session with Tony Ryan. I took a quick screen grab of one of his slides which was an excellent quick resource as to what I need to do to move on some of the sparkly ideas from the conference. I agree- you have to integrate what you want to do smartly or it will get gnawed away at by AsTTle tests, planning for camp, Meet the Teacher meetings ……. I have already moved on a couple of things so all is not lost. Best quote from Tony to me mid breakout session- ‘It’s all right, I can speak louder than your cellphone.’ Note to self- gotta put it on vibrate for next time! Thought of Jamin who last text me mid-keynote in Tauranga last month to ask if I had remembered to switch my cell phone off and to find out where I was sitting!! Congratulations Jamin and Jamie on the birth of your son, Noah. Love to you both.

✩ Next up was a spot of Blue Screen Magic. Like most things- its a lot easier when you have friends to help you.

Jane left instructions for the ‘how to‘ on her blog so all the hard work was done there. Fun techy stuff that you could use with kids. Thanks David, Disa and Jane.

✩ Next up was my workshop on Free Adobe Apps on Line which was done in the heat of the day. Unfortunately participants didn’t have wi-fi access of their own so the session was limited to a show and tell- not as interactive as it might have been. If you want to see the slides in a Google Presentation click here.

✩ I was in awe when Wes Fryer turned up in my next breakout talking about making enriched pdfs embedded in Google Apps for Educators and made into digital portfolios. He live blogged the whole thing which was great. Thanks Wes- that’s never happened to me before!

✩ I had the privilege in attending Wes’ breakout session on Powerful Blended Learning. We used Chatsy as a backchannel which worked well if you had had wifi- which I didn’t!

Repeat after us…. Hyperlinked Writing Is The Most Powerful Form Writing There Is.

If you’re not sure that hyperlinked writing really is the most powerful form of writing try clicking on any of the words- they link to web sites randomly plucked from my recently bookmarked  Delcious bookmarks.

✩ Next was a taster presentation ‘It’s all about Learning’ talking about unpacking the Curriculum and engaging children in meaningful dialogue about what it really means for them as learners. Good stuff. I liked that they had examples of the kids work- all messy and real. They had taken direct quotes from the curriculum and de-constructed it- just like you could de-construct a piece of text in a story you were reading as a shared book. Thanks Lisa and Belinda.

✩ Pam Hook shared her vision with SOLO taxonomy. I have read about the rubrics before and frankly if hadn’t made a lot of sense to me but hearing her talk about it an and seeing videos of children talking about it all made it make sense to me.

✩ The last workshop was a one I aimed at beginners just talking about the sorts of things that I do in my classroom to foster a sense of community and collaboration with my class. During the session we quickly Skyped in with Brian Crosby from Nevada while he had a little classroom release time. I didn’t provide much in the way of a handout for this one but some of the key postings are here on a quickie wiki I made last year to show ERO some of the things we did. If you were in that workshop please ring me, email me or Skype me if you get lost or need some help.

Brian Skypes In You Tube Video

✩ A scary, fun, last thing that finished up the conference was Wes’ keynote. We sort of flashmobbed it with the Collaborative Dance Video that we made last year. Just as Wes was about to start we all leapt up and did our happy dance. Not to be left out Chrissy and a few kids from her class were able to join us via Skype at 6.45am from Bangkok International School. How cool is that. Wes was such a good sport about it all and joined in the fun. I am sure the video of Wes’ keynote will be on line soon but in the meantime here is a short clip of how our beginning bit went recorded on my computer with Skype and Call Recorder. If you are keen to find more look for the Flickr tag #lats09.

Here is Chrissy’s post and video about how it looked at her end. It was great fun for us all to catch up with Chrissy so far away in Bangkok and for her to catch up on our news!

After my heart had stopped racing at the scariness of doing a happy dance in front of all those people I was able to listen to what Wes had to say but again my battery let me down so I wasn’t able to record what he said but I am sure others were able to more eloquently than me any way but the two things that stuck in my head were…

Hyperlinked writing is the most powerful form of writing there is.

He aha te mea nui. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. ( In my own words- What is the most important thing? It is the people- we need to give kids the tools to be able to connect and learn.)

At the end of the day Wes, Glenda, Pesa and I had a great look around Whakarewarewa. What a nice way to end the conference- and I bought a beautiful possum and merino wool jersey for winter for half price when I went shopping on Saturday morning. Bonus!

There are a number of reasons why you might want to participate:
• To share what you value about twitter.
• To see what others value about twitter.
• To celebrate the power and wisdom of your Personal Learning Network.
• To find interesting people to follow on Twitter.

My choice for what to retweet with #gr8t will be a Tweet that I find interesting, or insightful, or humorous. It might link to something I enjoyed reading, or it might have something profound or even fortune-cookie-like that appeals to me:

There aren’t really any rules to participate: Find a tweet you value, and share it!

For Example, here is a Tweet I’d like to share:


And so I retweet it with #gr8t:

After my hectic return to Moturoa classroom at Appleby School following a year’s leave acting as ICT Facilitator I am really looking forward to meeting up again with virtual NZ friends at the Learning at School conference in Rotorua at the end of February. The photo is of my very tidy classroom before it came to be inhabited by a lively group of Year Four and Fives! Click on it to see my Flickr photostream.

A special highlight at the conference will be conversing with US keynote speaker, Wes Fryer- prolific writer, storyteller, podcaster and co-convener of the first free global K-12 OnLine Conference. Making the selection of breakouts is a massive task as there is such a range of wonderful selections to choose from. So after much angst these are my selections

Breakout 1: Digital Pedagogies Presented by Tony Ryan.

Breakout 2: Title A case of the Blues – Screening now (Mac). Presented David Young, Jane Nicholls & Disa McLean.

Breakout 3: Free Adobe Programmes for You and Your Classroom. Presented by me.

Breakout 4: Creating and Managing Digital Portfolios using Adobe Acrobat Presented by me.

Breakout 5: Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create, and Assess Presented by Wes Fryer.

Breakout 6: It’s All About Learning. Presented by Lisa Morresey & Belinda Havill

Breakout 7: How Do We Do It? Presented by me.

That’s plenty to be going on with!

Simon Evans hosted a workshop entitled, “Did you Know, New Zealand?” focussing on Karl Fisch’s video and we debating what it meant in a NZ context.

Simon used his interactive whiteboard to lead the discussion using DeBono’s hat thinking which was a good way to do it. He recorded the session with our handwritten notes in a slideshare which is best downloaded to read clearly. I was impressed with the technology.

Click here to see and download the presentation.

There was only six of us in the room F2F but more joined us via Skype and with the Cover It Live Blogging Tool. It was a very powerful session I thought on a variety of levels-not only with the way Simon facilitated the discussion, the way we brought in other people via the live blog commenters and Skype but also in the way the people in the room worked together to enhance the presentation.

As you can see from my screen grab it certainly made us keep intensely involved with the number of communication modes- listening, responding, researching, recording, typing, twittering. We really had to concentrate to do all these things at once.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Well done Simon. It was a ‘high risk’ session that paid off.

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.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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??????

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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.

Maybe someone can help me- Twitter is down at the moment so I am on my own. I inserted the code from Coveritlive.com and I can see it all happening in the visual edit window of Edublog but when I publish I can see nothing!

I fired off an email to Coveritlive.com and got a prompt reply-

The consensus from edublogs.org users is that they do not allow iframes (that’s how our software appears on your blog) on the sites of their users. This is a very rare issue as globally there are almost no hosts who put this kind of restriction on their users. Many web based software applications are being delivered via iframe and we are hopeful they allow them in the near future. Your feedback to them would likely help the issue.

Here’s what the Edublogs help page says-

I want to embed videos, widgets and more in my posts and sidebar, but the code keeps on getting stripped out, what’s up? Unfortunately, for security reasons, you can’t paste code containing embed, javascript or iframes into your blogs… they’d allow hackers to bring down the site (they did at myspace!) so we need to be extra secure. However, you can click on the yellow ‘A’ button in your editor to embed pretty much any kind of movie and read the instructions in your ‘upload’ area (under your posting area) for how to embed other types of media.

Clay Burrell said that Wordpress is the same- at least I now know it’s not just something I’m doing wrong. Clay sent me this link to a discussion about iframes and why they could potentially be bad. Miguel Guhlin and Dennis Richards have it going OK in their attempts. Thanks guys- my network is awesome. I will try it again with Blogger and see how it goes. If it works I can just put a link from this blog to Blogger and go that way. I am impressed with the service from Coveritlive.com’s help desk.

Because it is a re-write you won’t get it by just updating the first version of Firefox. You will have to download it but before you do those of us who speak the Queen’s English should click on the ‘Other Systems and Languages’ link just under the green download icon. That will take you to a download for English as it should be written with centre, favourite, theatre, colour etc all spelled correctly.

Again as you first open up the programme it will import all your previous bookmarks, passwords and settings to make the whole process seamless. Being an Apple girl though I nuked the old Firefox icon in the dashboard and put the new one there instead. Don’t know if that was needed but did it all the same!

There are two really great features with the new version…

Firstly it puts links to your Delicious in the top toolbar which you could always do yourself anyway but is now done automatically through an add on.

And it spell-checks by putting a wriggly red line under possible spelling errors just like when you are in Word (plus the right mouse correction suggestions) when you are writing a blog post or comment or anything Web2.0 which is great for child bloggers!!!!

Speaking of who-my class of eight/nine year olds just started blogging with David Warlick’s Blogmeister blogging tool this week and they love it. I am having to check my approval tool often for new posts or comments from children and parents. The children are thrilled that they have their own password and can securely blog from anywhere. It isn’t as visual as Blogger but we are loving how we can all blog at the same time with our own accounts. Thanks Tom and Jody for their encouragement to give it a try.

If you know of any other add-ons or features of the new Firefox could you let me know through the comments.

Over the last year we have been moving from the more formal teacher-lecture type arrangement to more of a discussion. Children are invited to be the centre of attention and showcase some highlights of their learning throughout the term and set some new goals that parents can have input to.

This model is proving to be very effective- children are taking control and give insights into their thinking and learning that I would never have discovered if I had been doing all the talking myself.

The photo credits go to Kathy Cassidy from her Blogmeister blog. Kathy is a Canadian teacher who teaches Year 1/2 and links with Jody Hayes who teaches in Palmerston North who I met at the Learning at School conference in Rotorua earlier this year, who links with Paul Harrington in Wales that we link with from Appleby. Kathy and I have discussed technical issues of using speakers when Skyping.

On that subject has anyone got any clever ideas on how to avoid feedback when Skyping when you want the whole class to be in on the conversation. We are fine when we use headphones but it is tricky when the audience is larger?

This photo is of a Skype conversation we had with our link school, Cefn Fforest in Wales late last year. It was podcasted and shared but at the time only one child at a time could really join in as there was a lot of feedback without the headphones on!

This page is really a tribute to a little friend of ours who is soon to leave us on the second big adventure of his life. He arrived from 13,000 miles away from Cefn Fforest School in the valleys of south Wales through our podcasting friend, Paul Harrington. While in New Zealand he got me into lots of interesting places that I would not have got on my own. He has his own trackable number worn as a dog-tag around his neck which is his own personal web page as well.

He went home with lots of children and had his photo taken in all sorts of places. As I walked him to cockpit of the plane on the way to the Learning At School conference in Rotorua a fellow passenger recognised him- not me!

I told the children today that I was intending to give him to my friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach from Virginia, USA, when I meet her at the TUANZ conference on Friday. One of my Year 4 boys actually started to cry (and then tried hard to hide that he was) at the thought of him leaving.

I had under-estimated the power of the connections made through the use of Web2.0 tools- blogging, podcasting and Skype. For this young man his learning had become very personal.

I chose the screen capture as it links to our guy, Sir Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom in 1917. Rutherford was born about ten kilometres from Appleby School. Did you know that? The father of the nuclear age was born in Nelson! Even then he was worried that his discovery might be used for purposes that would not best serve mankind.

I liken it also to the forms of communication we are capable of when using Web2.0 tools. The resolution of the uploaded graphic is not great but if you click on it you get the enlared version and can see in visual form the inter-relatedness of human thought.

P.S. As I had this photo in my Flickr account, Mike Love, the creator of the web site, left a comment on my Flickr photo. How cool is that!!! From his comment you can read more from his blog. To add your own comment click on the picture which will take you to my Flickr photo. That is incredible. I am blown away by the power of RSS.

The highlight of the conference for me, apart from being able to share our learning about podcasting, was to hear David Warlick’s keynote speech about Telling the New Story in 21st Century learning.

He talked about trends in the expansion of information and how we need to shift from an education designed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. The 21st century needs creative, connected, collaborative people. He was really entertaining as well as informative. In this video he talks about ‘flat classrooms’ and how they might be when knowledge can be found in a click of a mouse.

Then on Thursday came my presentation on Podcasting- Getting Connected Globally

I made the wiki to support the people in my session when they got home. You can see it by clicking on the link to the right.

We got there really early so everything would be set up and ready to go. Unfortunately the entire internet network for the building went down and stayed down! I had prepared for the worst and had a back-up plan but it was un-nerving having three technicians whispering techno-babble to each other as to how to solve the conference centre’s problems as I was doing my bit!

Nikki took this photo as the internet came on at end of the presentation. I was so pleased it did as I had jacked up with Paul H in Wales to have a quick recorded chat in Skype to show people how it is done. He came through for me which was really great. See that lady on the edge of her seat and everyone facing the right direction!

People seemed really keen on the concept and hopefully the wiki can give them some links if they get stuck.

After all that hard work Tiny Ted our geocaching bear had a little light relaxation with a wine and cheese to celebrate our success!

This pou whenua graced the entrance way to the conference centre. It was a magnificent thing as it changed colour and dominated the foyer.

Then on Friday I went to workshop on digital literacy and using RSS to bring the power of the web to your computer. While I was there I put my laptop on the front podium and let Paul in Wales listen live to the presentation as Dave Warlick told us about Technocrati and Bloglines. I already use Bloglines and will investigate Technocrati some more. Paul later podcasted the talk and emailed David and asked him if it was OK to publish it. David emailed him back and said that would be fine as long as he told the story of how the podcast came to be. How is that for connected-ness???

Afterwards I was cheeky enough to have my photo taken with the man himself!
As the conference finished we flew back into the cold, wet wind of Wellington.

The conference was over and we had enjoyed every minute of it despite the exploding vehicles, lack of booked hotel rooms, the heat, the power outage and evacuation and the dodgy internet connections.

My next steps will be to create and edublog to record my thoughts on learning & teaching and to move forward the notion of getting a national educational podcasting network underway with the help of TKI and Learning Media! All made more possible with the connections made on conference.

What made the conference special for me was the personal networking I was able to do with ‘movers and shakers‘ from all over New Zealand and internationally. Dave Warlick talks of side trips in education being of value in education and these side trips are so valuable for me also. These are the extras we learn alongside the planned lessons in life!

And here we are! My edublog is born!