PPTA ICT Task Force

A new look PPTA website is back online. This time more interactive with their own blog & opportunity to leave comments & join discussion within PPTA communities.

The ICT Taskforce is one of the communities here. As a member of this committee representing my geographical area Taranaki & i think also Wanganui/Manawatu please contact me if you have ICT issues you want to be followed up on by the PPTA

“The ICT Taskforce was set up by the  PPTA Annual Conference in 2004 and was charged with “monitoring, researching and reviewing issues around the implementation of ICT, liaising with appropriate bodies and reporting regularly to PPTA Executive and to Annual Conference “…(and to) serve as a clearing house for ICT development in schools by sharing and publicising best practice.”
With this in mind representation on the committee is deliberately broad with ten regional representatives, along with separate representation from low-decile schools, the Correspondence School, SLANZA (School Library Association of NZ), PPTA Executive and Te Huarahi.  
The Taskforce meets up to four times a year. At its meetings it considers ICT issues that members and schools have brought to its attention, prepares advice for teachers on issues around ICT in schools”

Font Conference

Watch Font Conference on CollegeHumor

I love this little movie found over on edu.blogs – Thanks Ewan.

Great characterisation of ‘The Fonts’ ;-)

Also on YouTube

Think Tech

Secondary Futures is launching a new website www.thinktech.co.nz with an online policy debate

“The ThinkTech site will be launched at Te Papa, Tuesday 31 March at 7.30pm with New Zealand's first policy debate, on-line and live. Radio New Zealand's Sean Plunket will facilitate an informal discussion: 'How will technology change the way we live and learn in 20 years time?' You can send in comments and questions, live by registering now.”

“ThinkTech is a New Zealand first – it’s a tool we’re calling a D-logue because it is set up to create a public policy discussion in the form of wide-ranging debate where all voices are equally heard and that can be owned by the participants in the debate.

Anyone can share their ideas and knowledge, upload reports or videos, join meetings, challenge thinking, chat to each other, and network - to have a dialogue.

Our goal is to share New Zealander’s vision for the Place of Technology in schooling by modelling the vision: that while the scope of new technologies defies prediction, they will undoubtedly have an impact on education, on living and on working. People need to keep up with these changes, talk to each other and think about what they might mean for Aotearoa and how that fits with our values.”

A Day in the Life of a DLO

  Trevor & Vicki (VLN ePrincipals) attended “A Day in the Life of – Digital Learning Resources” Conference hosted by MOE last week.

Thanks Trevor for sharing your notes with us:

“Due to fog at Timaru I didn't get to Wellington until lunchtime. A mini speech/introduction by Penny Carnaby, Chief Executive and National Librarian made me realise that much of the work on repository systems has already been done by the national library and Tertiary Organisations eg

http://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/get-advice/digital-libraries/introduction-to-digitisation

http://www.oarinz.ac.nz/index.php

We need to ensure that we gain maximum benefit from the $$$ and time that has already been spent by others.

Next was a speech by Yong Kim outlining a Korean Cyber Home Learning System that was a bit like the VLN but several orders of magnitude larger. Unfortunately the funding model was not obvious.

Repository talk by Brent Thomas http://repository.ac.nz/

Intersting talk about DLO metadata. They developed an NZ version of LOM, whereas the National Library use Dublin Core. If schooling uses the dublin core then alignment/merging of DLO's with national initiatives will be trivial (lol).

Wayne Mackintosh. Some people are inspirational, fewer of international importance and even less visionary. Wayne Mackintosh is certainly visionary with his aim of providing free educational resources for the whole world by 2015. The wikieducator project

http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page

is still under development but is one that I whole heartedly support.

If we can get teachers and schools to collaborate using wikieducator then this will be a significant gain.

Drinks and nibbles. As ever, the real conversations happened here. I had a long chat with Wayne Mackintosh and Jim Tittsler, sys admin for wikieducator about the work that jim has outlined here:

http://wikieducator.org/User:JimTittsler/Sandbox/OO-WE

One of they key ideas about sharing resources is that of contextualistion for repurposing. I have never found a resource that I didn't want to change in some way. We need to make resources easy to change and develop for local use (contextualisation), so when we develop resources for sharing it is important that we remove reference to /local/ stuff - we decontextualise them. I also think we need more formal policies on copyright and resource creation by teachers and that perhaps the MOE needs to take a lead here.

Summary: great one dayer. I wish you all could have heard Wayne Mackintosh.”

Students Experiences of Learning in Virtual Classrooms

ePrincipals & eMentors met with NZCER researchers Rachel Bolstad & Magdalene Lin to discuss the Interim Findings from an online survey they conducted with our students as part of a wider Research project of students studying through the VLN. This is just one stage of the research project. The next phase of the research process is to hold focus group meetings with elearning students & eteachers to dig deeper into the findings that are emerging.

Some key messages so far are about teaching & learning (this is relevant to face to face classrooms also) and about the importance of school support for our elearning students.

My Notes from our Meeting:

What sort of students surveyed? Majority of VC students like their teachers & like learning

What takes place during a VC class? Patterns show teacher directed. Exchanges between students were less common.

What takes during study time? Completion of homework, discussions with other VC students in school. More likely to approach teachers within school before contacting VC teacher for help.

VC in general greater independence in learning but at expense of feeling less supported & less confident.

I really liked Conor’s point about needing our students to be responsible learners as opposed to independent learners. As ‘independent learner’ has connotations that they are on their own – when we know that it is important part of the learning process to be able to collaborate & work with others.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostworld/2152048926/in/photostream/

Comparing VC class to least & most favourite classes:

Least favourite & most favourite classes comparision comes from Competent learners @ 16 Project – rationale for classroom experiences.

Closer to most enjoyed classes than least enjoyed

Half of students don’t like asking the teacher questions in VC (similar to least fav. Class)

Generally students having few opportunities to lead interactions.

Relevance of learning:

More willing to drop VC subjects than favoured subjects

Students missed the hands on & practical, outside the classroom and so this tended to be compared to least favoured subjects

Use of ICT relatively uncommon as in other f2f classes

Suggest improvements – more interaction with VC teachers – more sessions, Communication & feedback between sessions, checking up on them, offering support, more interesting teaching, clearer information about their course. More support from school – VC rooms, timetabling, books, teacher supervision. More contact with other students in class.

There was nothing unexpected in these interim findings. All of the issues raised are things that ePrincipals are working hard at to improve for our students and i believe over time we are beginning to make a difference :-)

Taranaki TELA Laptop Survey

In response to the BOT of a school, that will remain nameless, when they say "No BOTs in other Taranaki Schools pay for teacher laptops"

Check out the results of our Taranaki TELA laptop survey.

Approximately 90 Taranaki schools were invited to complete this survey. Over a third of schools responded (36). Schools contributing were a mixture of Primary, Kura, Intermediate, Secondary & one Area School.

80% of Taranaki Schools are funding TELA laptops for their teachers.

Comments from survey participants reflect the importance of access to teacher laptops not only for elearning but administration as well.

Schools were also asked if they would prefer to be funded to provide their own teacher laptops or continue with the TELA scheme.

Those who answered no they would prefer the centrally funded & organised model, commented that if they funded their own laptops they might end up with out-dated equipment if schools did not roll over laptop leases, that they would not have access to the level of technical support they currently have through TELA & they would have more administration if they ran their own schemes.

IMHO Teacher Laptops have been one of the most important ICTPD initiatives. They have given more teachers hands on opportunities to learn more about using ICT & so for many making them more confident in using them with their students in the classroom.

Inglewood eLearners

Today i met with the elearning students at Inglewood High School. They are enrolled in L1 Economics, L2 French, L3 Accounting & L3 Economics.

There is a little previous experience in this group with Daniel as a second year elearner taking 2 VC subjects this year. I suggested to this group that he take on the role of Student Rep for their group :-)

I was just checking up with them on how their classes were going, how they were studying in their non-contact periods and if they were online checking their emails & using their online class websites. It was very basic catchup stuff but beyond that we had some interesting discussions about online learning & what worked for them. I discussed the interim results of the student survey (talked about here) and they generally agreed with the main findings. Some of them went onto tell me about their L3 Economics Moodle site and what a difference it was making to their learning. They said they always had lots of work to do there, there was lots of Hot Potatoes activities which they found really engaging (even the essay question answer type), and they enjoyed working in this way. They said they were also motivated to keep up with their study by the responsiveness of their eteacher giving them regular feedback to the work they were doing online and also because they could see a lot of work had gone into creating this learning resource they were motivated to put the work in too. This is great feedback about the motivation & engagement of online learning environments. This is a class i would like to visit.

More on School Zone

Found the School Zone Wiki here is the blog:

Ramblings from the School Zone

An interesting article that explains the Qos that School Zone offers & the difference between SZ & ordinary Broadband - especially important for VC schools.

Wiki Schoolzone

School Zone now has a wiki site with all the information you need about managing your School Zone connection:

At Learning@School they announced some upcoming changes to how School Zone services will be 'unbundled'. No news on the wiki site yet but the plan as described to me was to split the services into three separate areas and to change the pricing structures.

A new School Zone will see services split into Connectivity (including Video for VC), Security (Sina blocking & filtering) & Web Services (Email & My Desktop).

This is good news for schools who have balked at switching to SZ just to gain the VC connectivity.

Also promised was improved speeds by the upgrading of copper circuits & enabling of fibre. The bad news is that fibre connectivity still has a huge price tag attached to it approx. $1500 a month.

The promise of improved connectivity must be linked to the investment in infrastructure by the Government.

A local loop here in Taranaki would be great - we know the fibre is there - just the cost of tapping into it is huge - who will pay???

Engaging Teachers in Reflective Discussion

As I prepare to have conversations with eTeachers around Performance Appraisal & Goal Setting I have been reading through some Leadership PD material from www.interlead.co.nz about 'Conversations for the Professional Teaching Career'

It discusses how to align conversations with the different stages of a teacher's professional career leading from more Direct Conversations with Novice teachers to more Reflective Conversations with Expert teachers, with reference to John Hattie "Distinguishing Expert Teachers from Experienced & Novice Teachers." This is particularly important for eteachers as though they may have many years of experience & possibly be an expert classroom teacher, with the change to being an eteacher they may find themselves feeling that they are right back at the Novice stage. 

One of the challenges for me is how to engage teachers in reflective practice without being judgemental while at the same time reinforcing the requirements of their unique teaching position and motivating them to change their teaching practice to better meet the needs of our elearning students.

Interim results from an NZCER research project highlight that from our student's perspective eteachers generally have not adapted their teaching strategies from the face to face environment. (unpublished)

There is a lot of work to continue with eTeacher PD & the development of their online classes. ePrincipals are currently beginning collaborative work on creating a shared framework for eLearning Design.

 

Picture courtesy http://www.conversationthatmatters.com/conversation-meter.htm 
(more explanation there)

Education is the Future - What is the Future of Education?

Thanks to Inka for sharing this info about an online conference for students 14+ on 23rd April

The topic for discussion at conference is Education is Future - What is the Future of Education?

Will be interesting from a teacher's perspective to listen to Student Voice on this theme.

I will be encouraging my students to attend & hook in myself to check out what students have to say & their recommendations on the Future of Education.

http://www.agenda21now.org/

This is a UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network

 

On the same theme of is our NZ Secondary Futures Project Worth a visit if you haven't been there before.

 

TaraNet Stats

Our enrolments continue to grow this year within TaraNet & nationally:

68 TaraNet students, 46 out of cluster students

TaraNet Subjects: Te Reo L1, Art History L3, Ag/Hort L3, French L3, Stats L3, L1 Spanish, Physics L3

Subjects from other Clusters: Accounting L1, L2, L3; Art History L2, Biology L2, Calculus L3, Chemistry L2, L3, Classics L3, Computing Y9/10, L3; Economics L1, L2, L3; Graphics L2, Human Bio L1, Music L1, Physics L2, Te Reo L3, Aviation Engineering L3

28 new classes available across the cluster.

Most classes full with 10 – 12 students & max sites.

VLN National Stats

Current Total Schools:252

Current Total Teachers:154

Current Total Courses:199

Current Total Classes:212

Current Total Enrolments:1401

Phew! No wonder it's been such a busy start to the year.

Summer - Just a Memory Away

By popular request from my colleagues here are the pics from our summer in South America.

We had an awesome time away :-)

I thought it would be hard to get back into work again but I have been so busy with new enrolments & starting up classes that this first month back has gone by in a blur. This must be the longest dry spell on the blog for awhile! But back into it now.

eHui 2009

 

TaraNet elearning students met at Stratford High School to prepare for the year ahead. It is good to see Stratford High has students enrolled on the VLN this year. Also a changing trend from previous years is the number of our own TaraNet students in our own classes. Last year we had only one, all others were cross cluster enrolments. Our Spanish class is completely made up of TaraNet students, followed by Physics with 6 of our own students. All other eteachers have one or two TaraNet students, except for Joel’s Stats class which has none.

Unfortunately Coastal & Patea were unable to join us today but we VCed into Patea so the students there could join in part of the day & experience a VC with other students.

We followed the usual agenda of discussing expectations of what VC learning is all about. See above the students collated PMIs. They have a pretty accurate preconception of some of the ‘characteristics’ of being an elearner. Certainly more accurate than students contributions to this discussion in previous years perhaps an indication that the VC & elearning is registering on the radar of our schools’ community. This is the first year we have had students sign a contract to acknowledge what is required of them as an elearner & also to assure them of support they will receive as an elearner. This is useful also as it  involves parents as they take it home to discuss with them. Most VC students are responsible learners but occasionally they need a  reminder to keep them on track.

Also during the day we went through technical procedure of using the VC equipment, invited an experienced elearning student speak with them and explored the TaraNet website and the VLN Student Module.

Managed Learning Environments

If you missed the MOE consultation round, like i did, you can catch up on what the talk is about by viewing Paul's presentation below.

These developments will be great for all our schools but particularly for our elearning classes that are trying to work through all of these things yesterday.

Managed Learning Environments: School Consultation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mle lms)

Planning for 2011 & Beyond @ Patea

 Patea Area School 2011 & Beyond by Rachel

TaraNet's Top eLearner

Congratulations Toni at Coastal Taranaki School who was awarded Top TaraNet eLearner. Thanks again to Gen-i for their generous partnership in this award. Toni received an Asus Laptop in recognition of her commitment to her studies. Next year Toni continues to be an elearner taking two classes online - Chemistry & Physics.

 

 

 

 

 

eteacher Joel, myself, Toni & Coastal Principal Allan.

Cybersafe eStudents

Some of the ePrincipals have been preparing student resources for a beginning of year module for elearning students to prepare themselves for the year ahead. My contribution was in the area of cybersafety which i have done a lot with students f2f. I adapted my material for an online learning environment using exe editor. I had a few problems getting exe editor to run but after reading the help forums i found there was some conflicts with AVG. It worked fine after i had deleted all the AVG toolbar files from my Program files. (Thanks Anton) I have hosted this on our Moodle website for our students & shared with other clusters. I have also put it here so that anyone can access it.

Mahi Tahi Hui

We had our last Mahi Tahi VLN meeting today for the year today.

I used the audio pin to dial in & though i wasn't seen on the VC had just as much opportunity to contribute & participate. Neil Riley from Live Wire learning came in to show us through his website.

This site provides content & activities for a range of NCEA subjects. This would be a great resource to support for VC classes as I know many of our eteachers find it a challenge to create online learning materials.

We also talked some more about our upcoming Online ETeacher Conference coming up on the 28th January at a VC room near you. Derek Wenmoth will be keynoting and there are a number of workshops to choose from. If you are an eteacher who would like to attend & haven't been sent any information about registering for this contact Lynda

TaraNet Video Workshop

Another successful PD workshop today. Teachers from Patea, Opunake, Stratford, St Mary's & Inglewood attended this session. This time we focused on Video with Mark Bellringer from DigitalStory facilitating the session for us. Mark has many years experience in this area within industry and in education. He tutored Graphic Design at Polytech for many years and has worked with teachers & their students in many Taranaki Schools over the years. It is great to have someone with this passion and experience in Digital Imaging to work with our teachers.

This was our programme for the day:
A look at “the gear”
• Cameras
• Sound equipment
• “Other stuff”
• Computers
• Software

What are you going to do?
• Documentary
• Drama
• School video magazine
• Allowing students to “see” themselves - sports, speechmaking, experiments, processes
• Students documenting work
• Teachers documenting work, assessments etc
• EOTC

A process
• Planning
• Types of shots

Capturing and Editing
• File types and jargon
• Different software
• How to “get it” into the computer
• Using Moviemaker

Publication
• To computer
• DVD
• The web

A step-up from Windows Movie Maker but still an affordable option for schools is Adobe Premier Elements. This can be bundled with Photoshop Elements and has educational pricing. Find out more from the TKI Software for Learning site. (Though this site has been recently upgraded it seems they haven't upgraded the content - still showing Adobe Version 3.0....)

Mathletics TaraNet Junior Maths Whizz Quiz

Teams of Yr 9 & 10 students from Patea, Stratford, St Mary's, Waitara & Coastal competed in our first TaraNet VC quiz today. Thanks to Mathletics for sponsoring prizes for this event. The winning team won its members 3 months individual subscriptions to the Mathletics site.This was a very competitive challenge and I had to be very attentive to determine which school had 'buzzed in' first to answer the question. Thanks to  Stratford High and Unka for preparing the quiz question and expert assistance during the VC. The quiz questions and answers can be found here.

Mathletics Tara Net Junior Quiz

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: quiz maths)

If you are not a SlideShare member you can also download this presentation from here

We look forward to planning similar events in other areas such as General Knowledge or Current Events and perhaps put forward our winning teams to compete with other regions...

Oh and the winning Whizzes - Waitara High School - well done team! :-)

Matapu Goes to Antarctica

Jackie's students at Matapu School joined a Learnz VC fieldtrip to Antarctica yesterday.

Read about it in the Taranaki Daily News and on Mr C's Blog - a great learning opportunity for these young students who have been studying Antarctica and a great promotion for VC & learning.

YES - Young Enterprise Scheme

Today i spent the day with Yolande from the Enterprise NZ Trust & a few other teachers  in some training to become a YES teacher.

It has been 5 years since i have been a YES teacher but i have mentored a couple of teams since then. Today was a good refresher about what YES is all about and how to support your students as they undertake this programme.

What is YES?
"It is a learning experience for young people, teachers and business people in which senior secondary school students form a company; become directors; develop products and services, which they market and sell. Yes is school based and teaches skills in budgeting, planning, interpersonal relations, decision making, reporting, communications; risk management and teamwork
Young Enterprisers

• add value to school based knowledge
• learn how to run a business
• learn value of being enterprising
• develop a "can do" attitude
• learn to take and manage risks. "

Next year Carolyn, ePrincipal FarNet & myself will be offering a YES class through the VLN.
Many of our smaller rural schools have not fielded YES teams in recent years because they have a small number of students wanting to join YES, limited staffing or teachers who are not willing to take this on as an extra curricular. Offering YES on the VLN will allow those students who have missed out in the past to be involved. I look forward to seeing what enrolments we get for next year and working with these students in an online environment. Watch this space :-)

More TaraNet Moodling

14 teachers from TaraNet schools including most of our eteachers for 2009 spent the day at Stratford High learning how to use Moodle. Anton, WelCom ePrincipal, VCed into us for a while in the afternoon & answered some of our questions and showed us a few things in Hot Potato. This was a collaborative workshop in that for most of the day there were no experts but a common purpose - creating a course in Moodle. Some teachers had some knowledge of Moodle from a previous workshop, most were completely new, I had a few things to show & share & then we worked towards our common goal & shared our learning along the way. A goal I set for our eteachers was to have a unit of work prepared before we meet again in December. It is a big ask for teachers to create digital resources from scratch - not so much the technical skills to do so, but the time to create activities to support their online classes. It would be good to get some collaborative teams together nationally to create core resources & course content across a range of learning areas to provide that curriculum support for new teachers & reduce the huge workload. Bringing our eteachers together across the clusters (as we did with our eteacher meetings this year) with the purpose of creating course content & resources together could be something the ePrincipals could facilitate on the VLN for 2009.

Hot Potatoes

Tomorrow we have a TaraNet workshop day on using Moodle. One of the things we will be looking at is Hot Potatoes.
"The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for those working for publicly-funded non-profit-making educational institutions, who make their pages available on the web."

Comic Life 4 Windows

If you were like me and thought Comic Life was just for lucky Mac users think again!
Try it out with your kids :-)

Thanks to Anita Year 6 from Matapu School for sending me her Comic Life story :-)

Just Playing

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

ePrincipal Profile

The profile of the VLN and it's ePrincipal group Mahi Tahi has been raised through a number of articles in this months EdGazette. Thanks CAM, Howard, Conor & Trevor for being our ambassadors. Great to see we also now have a link from the front page of the TKI website too. All this exposure will be really helpful in lifting this cloak of invisibility i feel often surrounds our work, the VLN and our eteachers & students. And should help move us more from working around the boundaries into an everyday part of our schools' cultures & ways of doing things.

VLN Meeting with Tertiary Providers

Eddie invited a number of Tertiary Providers to speak with ePrincipals about courses they are offering on the VLN next year. There was a good turn out from a range of tertiary providers: Telford, NatColl, Northtec, Wintec.

Up for discussion was the outline of courses available, costs, quality assurance, monitoring student achievement and attendance and communicating with schools. We also talked about how we should be promoting these courses not only to our students but to teaching staff and the local community.

Telford Rural Polytech specialises in Agriculture, Equine & Forestry. They also provide Horticulure & Apicultue courses. They have been providing classes to our students across the country through the VLN for a number of years.Star Funding $19 credit for courses. Practicals are FTs funded $85 for all included (except for travel).  They deliver blended learning through VC & Moodle. Adult students can enrol in these classes (though they have to pay for it themselves - STAR funding doesn't cover)

Wintec also provides courses that can be Star funded
The Tourism course has been running for some time & is self paced through Moodle, will also use Adobe Connect & VC. There are also Floristry, ECE unit standards.
We have asked them to look at providing a L4 Computing course for our North Island students similar to one run by Otago Polytechnic.

NatColl  has a focus on digital media with a vocational direction.
In 2009 they will begin offering short courses  through the VLN using Adobe Connect as a delivery tool. First offerings will be basic graphic design (Introduction to Photoshop), no experience necessary but need access to a computer & basic computer skills; Indesign - graphic layout & design. Short courses (2 hours week/ 10 weeks) $200 - schools can use STAR funding. There are no NCEA credits attached to their courses which we thought would put off some students. I can see an opportunity for PD for our teachers - in particular many at Patea have expressed an interest in learning to use PhotoShop and teachers at Stratford who use Indesign and there is a small group of them who use it to create the school magazine.Open to requests for customing courses for schools.
NatColl also talked about their Creating Futures programme which Waitara has students enrolled in. (Thanks to NatColl for awarding a scholarship worth $5900 to our elearning student Duke  - who i wrote about recently) Another programme they are trialling is iCreate - a year long foundation course in digital media being trialled. Covering things such as animation (blender), moviemaker, photoshop etc.
There was some discussion around the concern about access to software - schools have educational pricing on this software & can use concurrent licencing. We expressed an interest in them developing more courses that used open source software.

Northtec cam along just an introduction. They are beginning to realise the potential of the Virtual Learning Network and will get back to us soon with some possible offerings.

So in Taranaki? WITT - what are you doing??? I visited them a couple of months ago to promote the VLN and opportunities to collaborate with TaraNet. They seemed really interested at the time and there was some talk about meeting the needs of Schools Plus. I have had no follow up from them since this time - perhaps its time for another visit...

We closed the meeting with some discussion around TEC rules of funding to regions. This has been an obstacle for Dunedin Polytech providing their computing course in other areas. Our students and others in the North Island have been keen to enrol in this course but unable to. Wintec talked about the protocols they have about not stepping into other areas & poaching students. The Tertiaries said that they try to work around this if they can & we need to lobby TEC to make this rule more flexible for those of us who are teaching & learning across geographical boundaries.

Adobe Connect

Video Conferencing is not the only way we can provide synchronous online classes or collaborate with our colleagues online. Adobe Connect is a web conferencing tool that the SILC (Southland) cluster uses for all their online classes and that many of us are using to work with others online. You may have seen this used in SchoolZone or eAdmin training before.
The screen shot above shows us sharing desktops which can produce this never ending mirror effect ;-)
If you want to have a look at how this web based collaborative environment might work you can visit my Adobe 'sandpit' and see. If you want access to use this tool for your online learners contact Eddie

Let the Horsetrading Begin!

It's that time of year again when ePrincipals negotiate with their own schools and begin talking with each other clusters about what classes will be offered in the New Year.

I have been trying to get my Principals to think more strategically about this by getting them to think about what their student needs are first and then discussing how they can collaborate to best meet those needs. We have 3 new classes starting next year from TaraNet that have been chosen because we have a need for them in our cluster: L1 Spanish, L3 Physics & YES.All new courses will be listed on the VLN from 20th November - go take a look what will be on offer.
(image courtesy of http://invivoblog.blogspot.com)

The Missing Link @ Inglewood

Congratulations to Michael from Inglewood Highs School, not only has he been a 2008 eFellow  but he has also won a Microsoft New Zealand Innovative Teacher Award. 

You can read more about his work and achievements here.

Michael's website.

Smart Use of ICT

TaraNet eTeacher Ross talks about his VC class in the latest edgazette. Ross will be teaching L3 Ag.Hort. again next year. Hopefully we will have Taratahi back on board to provide a L2 Agriculture class for our TaraNet students. Just waiting to hear confirmation.

"Back at Inglewood, every week Ross beams live into three other schools to teach Ag and Hort via a videoconference hook-up.

"It's providing that breadth of curriculum in schools that might not otherwise be able to provide it," he says of the hi-tech teaching method.

Ross keeps in close contact with teachers at each school who supervise the students' work and turn to him with questions via email or video-conference. It is a system that works well enough for him to expand into remote teaching of level 3 achievement standards this year.

It is a case of new technology helping in the classroom, but Ross says Ag and Hort remains a subject where teachers tend to roll up their sleeves and get down to brass tacks, explaining how ideas apply to real situations.

"That's probably where the shift or challenge lies, how to use these new technologies best. They don't replace what we do but they might substitute part of it. It's a subject where if you stayed in the classroom the whole year you'd lose an awful lot.""

 

Ross - Ag

Promoting TaraNet

I have been doing some work in the last week preparing promotional material for TaraNet. Even after 5 years of operating elearning classes, opportunities for our students through TaraNet and the VLN are still a big unknown for many in our school community. I designed this poster for students & a flyer for the wider school community (particularly whanau). These have been distributed to half of our schools so far as I have visited them over the past week.

Why do we need to keep putting ourselves out there to our own school community? Until our students get regular opportunities to engage in online learning & VC it will always be an unknown. They need these experiences first hand. There are plenty of opportunities coming up all the time to be involved in Digital Conversations and for teachers to create those opportunities themselves. But to allow this for our students the 'Gatekeepers' in our schools have got to let them in. Teachers are the Gatekeepers to our students learning opportunities - for many of them VC and elearning is what eteachers do with their classes & nothing to do with them. When elearning opportunities are promoted to them they are too busy, too inflexible to change their programme, too scared to try the technology or don't care as they just don't see the relevance.

Who are the Gatekeepers in your school? And how are they creating barriers to our students learning (whether they realise it or not)?

eLearning an Option at Waitara High School

Waitara was the last of my schools on the Options Evening calendar. What I liked that was different  about Waitara's event was the number of other education providers that were invited to attend. It was run like an expo with a good presence from a range of STAR & gateway course providers. There was also some Careers options there such as the Armed Services. When i wasn't at my post I was out talking to the other providers about TaraNet & the VLN. It is great also to have the opportunity to speak to students and their families about the choices available to them. Having access to the internet through my 3G mobile was very handy as we were able to go straight to the VLN and browse around.

ULearn08

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robynwills/2922454397/

I have had a number of years coming to conference, including Ulearn. ePrincipals attended to hold their own pre-conference meeting and  were presenting a number of workshops there.
I think its really important to connect f2f, at least on occasions, with the people you work with so these conferences are valuable opportunities for this. For classroom teachers they are a huge PD event and one that i have seen have great impact on their thinking & ultimately to greater or lesser extent (depending on the individuals) their practice.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach showed this graphic in her shared keynote - I felt it represented our Mahi Tahi group so well as a Community of Practice. Read more about COPs on Conor's Blog.

The Ulearn media team interviewed a couple of ePrincipals you can see their interviews here

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.

St Mary's PLGs

Every week I have been attending St Mary's Professional Learning Groups. These are groups have an ICTPD focus and work together for 40 minutes before school one day a week. Today we had a sharing session with feedback from the different groups:

Wiki spaces – easy to use & free, www.wikispaces.com , problem was blocked at the time, survey monkey www.surveymonkey.com – design surveys. Need to try these out before hand. Use plans, b & c. Kids very positive.

Protopage – not for all, but interesting to play with. Embedding videos – again blocking problems (You Tube). Can’t upload whole documents. Photos sometimes not clear. Handy as a home page for students.
www.protopage.com

Discussion on trial of unblocking YouTube www.youtube.com Will focus first on teacher's use of YouTube and learn how to download and share video.

Powerpoint – steps of students making a product – photographs – visual instruction for students on the big screen.

Using the IWB – energy transformations – student were really engaged – manipulating objects to come up with an energy equation.

IWB – shared ideas, Created How To files on the Teacher Drive (Interwrite folder).

Digital Learning Objects – need to be clear about learning objectives. Front page of TKI, Digistore.
http://www.tki.org.nz/r/digistore/

These PLGs are a great way to slowly but surely bring teachers along in their use of ICT in the classroom by  making time for hands on ICTPD within a safe & supportive environment. Throughout the discussion this morning it was good to hear the connections were being made between what teachers were learning & trying out in their lessons and the benefits for students. All had to say the students were really positive, motivated, & enthusiastic about what they were doing - even when it sometimes didn't work as they expected :-)

Conservation Week

"Conservation Week is from 7-14 September 2008 and the theme is Meet the Locals, Tutakitia te Iwi Kainga.

To celebrate Conservation Week, the Department of Conservation will present a one hour virtual lesson each day from 8-12 September. The virtual lessons will help your students understand the native animals and plants, people and places that are unique to New Zealand.

You can also use DOC's Conservation Week education units to teach your students about conservation. Unit one is for years 1 - 4 and unit two is for years 5 - 8. Visit www.conservationweek.org.nz to download the activities for each unit."

Matapu School made the most of Conservation Week through the support of TaraNet and Telecom School Zone. They were able to borrow a spare set of VC gear from us and Telecom SchoolZone kindly sponsored an upgrade to their circuit to enable the connectivity required for video conferencing.

Here the students are talking to DOC education officer, Sarah Bond, from Westland about Punakaiki (Pancake Rocks)& the Glaciers. They also joined conversations during the week with DOC officers in Dunedin & Wellington and learnt about skinks & geckos and wetas. The VCs were the buzz of the school this week amongst students & their families.
Check out their blogspot.

Our local DOC education officer was invited to join us for these VCs but was too busy himself in schools for Conservation Week. Definitely an opportunity in the future for TaraNet to work with DOC and have  some virtual field trips coming out of Taranaki to the rest of NZ.

Matapu School have their VC gear till the end of this term - contact them if you would like to connect your classes through VC.

Heads up @ Patea

I met with staff at Patea Area School today and ran "Heads up on eLearning Workshop" via VC. Here are the staff at Patea in their Personalised Learning Centre watching 'Shift Happens'. I thought the workshop ran well from a distance - I was able to run through my presentation, including the movie without too much loss of quality (I think - that's the feedback I got anyway ;-) and engage in discussion with teachers. It was easier too to set up a presentation from the VC room than travel to Patea (save my carbon footprint), setup a data projector and try & configure internet access at the school.

Patea are looking to focus on ICTPD for their teachers & I will support them in working with their lead teachers, developing a vision & a strategic plan, goal setting and bringing in facilitators to work with staff in PLGs (Professional Learning Groups), regular in-class support & workshop sessions.

ePrincipals Meet

ePrincipals meet once a month in the forum of regular VLN meetings. It used to be Cam that had a penchant for hats but I think it must have rubbed off on Eddie...

One of the points for discussion was the enrolment process. It is coming up to the time of the year that we are all preparing for 2009 classes - new courses are due to go up on the VLN November 20th. We talked about the possibility of formulating a national enrolment policy to ensure we had coverage for the classes that students wanted to enrol in and to maximise the enrolments of existing classes - particularly those that had more than one class offered on the VLN and historically low numbers of enrolments. There is also concern for all of us about the uncertainty of confirming our students in VLN classes that are not offered by our own clusters. I think we do need to work strategically together on this but for our cluster anyway we are just beginning to try and work strategically at cluster level - let alone at national level. So far offerings of eclasses and eteachers has been pretty hit & miss. Schools want to be able to choose at will from the 'pick & mix' chocolate box but they feel hamstrung by what they can contribute as their own specialist teachers are not offered due to their own schools demands, and availability of staffing to release eteachers. If the MOE would come to the party and provide some .FTs to schools who have elearning students this would help with the flexibility of staffing and schools may be encouraged to deepen their eteacher pool. The Correspondence School receives funding for student enrolments - how can we achieve this for our schools?