Top elearners

Today I did a lot of miles around the mountain and was a guest at Senior prizegivings at Opunake and Waitara High Schools. It was inspiring to see our students leaving school with such promise and hope for the future. It was great to be able to award a student at each school with an award for top elearner of their school. Each student received a certificate and an 8GB flash drive with Portable Apps installed. Our elearning students, & their teachers & me for that matter are often invisible in schools. It was good to be able to stand before the whole school community and raise our profile and celebrate the work of our students that for many is such an achievement to complete an online VC class that it shouldn't go unnoticed.

 
Claire - top elearner & Dux Waitara High

School Visits

I spent a couple of days this week getting out and about TaraNet schools catching up with elearning students, eteachers and lead teachers.

At Opunake Cody showed me his website he has made for his L4 Computing class. The challenge now is to find Cody another Computing course for 2009 that is going to extend on his talents & interests. He would really like to do the Otago Polytech Computing course which I tried every avenue to get him into last year but they wouldn't deliver to North Island students. It would be good to see one of our Northern Polytechs offer a course like this - I know there would be enough takers amongst FarNet, TaraNet & the Volcanics to make this a viable class...

Waitara student Duke showed me the work he had done on upgrading the Waitara High School website. He did a great job using Dreamweaver, Flash & Fireworks.  Very professional - a future in webdesign perhaps.

Coastal Taranaki has also now got its new website up and running - good to see a section on elearning :-)

At Inglewood I worked with Penny as she started to use her Moodle site to set up some work for her students. We went through the process of creating pages, links & a forum also practising how she would help her students logon for the first time. There is still a lot of work for me to do in our site to get some content in there but a handful of teachers around the schools are beginning to use it with their students (particularly at Inglewood). All TaraNet eteachers will be using Moodle to support their classes in 2009.

Moodling Along

Lead teachers and other interested TaraNet teachers attending a Moodle PD day at Opunake High School. Moodle is going to be used for the TaraNet Online Campus and has been opened up for all our schools to use for their own purposes also. A huge thankyou to Anton, WelCom ePrincipal, for facilitating this workshop for us and making himself available for any support queries.

Our site is currently hosted as a trial site with the MOE while we become more familiar with this online learning environment. When we are up and running well with this we will look for a permanent home whether this is with a hosting company or in collaboration with other elearning clusters. There may be something in the pipeline here so TaraNet sits in a good position to go either way. We are starting small to suit our immediate purposes without a shared strategic plan for a cluster-wide learning management system (such as WelCom) at this time. I believe that this would be the logical next step if all goes well and once schools pick up on the potential of a TaraNet Moodle site for collaboration and support for f2f classes as well as online classes. We have been going round & round in circles in the last few years in respect of adopting a learning management system for schools, let alone a cluster wide one, so there are still some in our leadership group who are not ready to commit.

Whole school adoption and cluster-wide collaboration requires that commitment to happen - i think that TaraNet is still feeling uncertain after limited success with KnowledgeNet in the past. All we can do is trial Moodle with a few motivated teachers and our online classes to show it could work well for us as it seems to be for WelCom, AorakiNet, Cantatech & WestNet. (Any other clusters Moodling?)

Supporting Student Learning

TaraNet Principals met at Opunake High School to visit their Student Support Centre & discuss how this was working in their own schools. "Personalising learning for secondary students working in a blended environment" was a reading we used ahead of our meeting and as a basis for thought and discussion. A special welcome to Te Aroha Principal of Patea Area School joining our group for the first time :-)

My ePrincipal report included our final student enrolment stats:

• 74 total student enrolments – 51 TaraNet students, 23 other cluster
• 27 students enrolled in TaraNet classes, 47 other clusters (Volcanics cluster our biggest provider)
• 12 students withdrawn – other subject choices, 2 VC classes too disruptive for other classes.
• 62 current student roll – another 25% growth from last year.

Podcasting Te Reo

Today Rangiroa & I had a play with a cheap mp3 player $30 from DSE, we downloaded Audacity & recorded sound directly onto the laptop also. The longer term view is that we will set up a podomatic account and develop a range of audio resources & activities to support Rangiroa’s VC class.
A google search on the above title gives very little in return. There is the Maori Avatar on podomatic, something ‘coming up soon’ on www.tewhanake.maori.nz , a range of podcasts on www.tangatawhenua.com and some on www.radionz.co.nz . Apart from North Loburn School there is nothing I could find that is student produced.

So when Rangiroa and his class get a handle on this podcasting then they will be up there at the leading edge :-)

Cool Kids Video @ Opunake

I was at Opunake today to attend staff briefing (bright & early ;-) and introduce myself to the whole staff. I need to do this in every staffroom soon now i am more regularly on deck in schools.
It is a great exercise to talk about elearning with the whole staff and scan the room to see whose eyes roll back in their heads......... and whose eyes spark up with interest.
One set of sparky eyes belonged to David who later showed me the work his students had been doing in his Y7 & 8 Technology class. It was a cool little video and as we watched it David pointed out all the learning outcomes the students had met in the production of their masterpieces.



Unfortunately we didn't get a lot of time for discussion as i would have liked to talk with David about using YouTube for student work. Should it have been hosted somewhere else where you don't get a lot of other innappropriate stuff appearing on your page?; maybe he was hosting it there - embedding it somewhere else; maybe teachertube would be a better option in this case. Then he could also submit his planning alongside the video for other teachers - that would be handy too.

Te Reo Online

Back at Opunake today to spend a PD day with Rangiroa. Our main focus today was the development of his course for putting onto his class website on Interact. We discussed the challenges of teaching his L1 Te Reo class of mixed abilities & ages - year 9 through to 12. There are students who are thinking this is too hard and others way too easy. We talked about how best to meet the needs of Maori students learning at a distance. There is an initiative running in all our cluster schools on raising Maori achievement so what about our maori students who are distance learners? We have talked about organising a VC hui for Maori teachers to discuss these questions. There is some interest from other teachers in the VLN schools but have not found someone with the depth of experience to lead and mentor this group of teachers.
A little googling shows me that there has been some research in this area but in the area of higher education. Maybe some of the answers can be found from the KAWM schools.
If you are or have been a distance learning Maori educator and would like to share your expertise with our teachers please contact me.

Teaching Under the Microscope

Another session with Rangiroa at Opunake today. His VC class has really highlighted to me the demands we place on our eteachers as they 'teach under the microscope'. Everyday class dynamics such as mixed abilities, student & whanau expectations, even behavioural management are all amplified in an elearning environment. Teachers have to be quick to adapt to new technologies, extend and adapt their learning resources & teaching strategies, and be on the ball with communication with a widely dispersed group of people. It is not an easy feat to balance with the face to face demands of a busy school life. I guess what would make this challenge worthwhile is that we can make a difference for our students who would not otherwise have this learning opportunity and that along the way we are developing as teaching professionals to the benefit of all our students.

It was good to see Mark having a go at developing a Protopage site to showcase student work in the technology faculty. Check it out.

Opunake Kuia Talk Tech - Cellphones

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Originally uploaded by rache65

Having a cuppa with Val & Rona @ Opunake. They were talking about what wonderful things cellphones were. Just to agree with them i showed them how wonderful they are at getting pics straight up onto the internet from anywhere through your phone. As well as being really useful for ringing ahead on school camps to order $300 of fish & chips ;-) One of our eteachers asked about the possibility of txt alerts to our students straight from our lms - thats a great idea but i'm pretty sure Interact doesn't have that capability. I have most of my students numbers & even tho i know they're not supposed to have phones at school i will still contact them that way if i need them in a hurry.
Any ideas about txt alert services through lms or maybe some other site. Something to find out more about...

Sweet Home Opunake

Its always great to get back to Opunake my old school. The place is looking great, colourful & comfortable with new paint work & carpet in all the classrooms - as an Opunake alumni & visitor i think it makes a big difference. Do the students feel that too? I wonder.

Today i met with Rangiroa our eteacher there and Cody who has just enrolled in a Computing VC class. As this was my first school visit this year most of our time was spent dealing with getting equipment up & running and for Cody learning how to use it as well. I also had time to chat with Mark - elearning leader & discussed his role as lead teacher - conversation centred on issues of workload & time management - something all lead teachers have concerns about i know. It was great also to talk to Mark (Principal) one of my mentors.
The VC gear at Opunake is situated inside a locked cupboard. This is good as it means the room can be utilised for other classes when no VCs are scheduled & it stops the students playing with the settings & the teachers pinching bits from it ;-) Though it is a hassle when the gears not working properly and you want to get in behind & work through all the cables & switches.

Around Te Maunga

A lovely morning for a drive to Opunake. I spent the morning with Mark M. looking at the Wonders of Web 2.0 and discussing how some of these tools could be used by students & teachers to share some of the great things they are doing at school. There is so many cool tools now & all with embedding html so you can put it into any pages - your own webpages, blogspot or protopage. Where do you start in bringing your school on board?
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) - one tool, one main purpose, one teacher in each faculty that knows what they're doing.... for a start.
Oh and not forgetting get around those *&#^% school filters!
(If you can't see the slideshow above click here)