My Vision for Teaching & Learning

In response to a FB discussion, my 2C worth: "Many of us are working hard to support our teachers and students with concepts and practices related to 21st century thinking.... MLEs, blended learning, student agency etc,etc. What comes next for schools? "

I think keep extending on learner agency and push past the classroom walls & school gates. Children will learn from many people and places and not just the teacher in their own classroom or school. Look for more community involvement supporting learning and sharing of expert teachers across schools. More opportunities for tuakana/teina and students leading learning. More global education, where our children learn from others and develop cultural understandings. Children will access personalised learning pathways - learning what they want, with who they want, when they want to. Our role will be to make sure they have sound foundation skills in place (literacy, numeracy, key competencies) to enable them to excel in their learning and to help them navigate and access a wider world of learning. This is my vision for a future of learning 

So what are you waiting for? Just do it!

See, Think, Make, Imagine!

I was very excited to hear from Emma Sherie from the West Coast who, while currently on sabbatical and studying for her Masters, has volunteered to teach with us. Yes a word we don't hear so much in this busy day and age VOLUNTEER - 'a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task.'
I was very impressed with Emma's attitude in stepping up to the challenge to further her knowledge and experience in becoming an online teacher. She is 'walking the talk' with developing her teaching practice to complement the learning she is undertaking with Massey this year.
Our maths teacher Rick has been doing this for the last three years & this year is preparing to write his dissertation based on the VLN Primary School. This is a win/win for our students, not only do they get access to some great teachers, we also get to feed into (& benefit from) research based around our learners.
So if you are a post grad. student focussing on elearning or online learning (or is you work with these students) - i would encourage you to get in touch with us to get some practical experience to base your theoretical knowledge on.

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Here is the class that Emma is offering, registrations welcome now!

See, Think, Make, Imagine!

Have you ever wondered how movies are made? Do you want to learn to make your own?

This is a unit designed for extension literacy learners in Year 7-8. Students will have the opportunity to explore areas of filmmaking while making connections with the literacy strand. It is an opportunity for them to explore film making in preparation for junior media at high school.

Students will be scaffolded while they acquire skills. This term the focus will be on;  storyboarding, camera angles  and editing. They will discover the different roles involved in making a movie and have a chance to hear from a New Zealand film maker. Students will be exposed to a range of apps and online tools to help them create their own short film using an ipad. They will have the opportunity to reflect on and critique their own work and other online participants.

Links to the curriculum:

Key Competencies;

Key competencies are inherent in film making. These include opportunities for group work and the competencies related to working with others, and managing oneself. Students learn to use media language, symbols and texts. They also discover how to be reflective and critical thinkers.

Literacy;

Processes and strategies

Students will:

Integrate sources of information, processes, and strategies with developing confidence to identify, form, and express ideas.

Purposes and audiences

Show a developing understanding of how to shape texts for different purposes and audiences.

Ideas

Select, form, and communicate ideas on a range of topics.

Language features

Use language features appropriately, showing a developing understanding of their effects.

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Course Co-ordinator and Facilitator;

Kia Ora,

My name is Emma Sherie I am an experienced New Zealand trained primary school teacher and I have a passion for e-learning, so much so that I am undertaking my Post Graduate in - e-learning this year.

I am also a self confessed “movie buff!”  I live in the remote West Coast of New Zealand and you will often find me outside “bush bashing” and practising my photography skills.

I am excited to be part of the VLN Primary School this year, having the opportunity to be able to offer students access to a wider range of learning opportunities, no matter where they live is very cool!

I believe that filmmaking and digital stories are a powerful way for students to demonstrate and share their stories. It is an opportunity for students to use a range of media to express themselves (not just in written form) to entertain, inform and educate us.

I am really excited to be bringing you this unit on filmmaking and look forward to seeing your creative creations as they develop.

Students will need access to;

A laptop

Ipad

Internet

Able to download “Silent Film App” for ipads cost is $1.29

*Students will be working on the internet and uploading their work. Schools need to check that students are working within the schools internet policy.

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Check out our Protocols of Participation that outline procedure & costs involved and use our online form to register your students to participate.

(Note if you already have students registered with us this year, please just send an email to primary@vln.school.nz expressing an interest to participate in this class)

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Global Connections #Participate!

From my inbox today - can't find the web version of this mail out so will reproduce here.
If 2014 was the year of the webinar for teachers perhaps 2015 will be the year of global classroom connections? (now teachers are getting more confident).
Get with it teachers so many wonderful learning opportunities for our students and a way to increase their global awareness and understandings. See 'Healing the World One Classroom at a Time' for some excellent reasons why we should reach out beyond our classroom walls & beyond our national borders.

Transform literacy and learning in your classroom Beginning on February 16th 2015, Skype in the Classroom is launching “Skype Celebrates Literacy”. This six week program will feature guest speakers from the publishing industry, lessons and resources to support and inspire literacy learning in classrooms around the world. Literacy remains a high priority on the global education agenda and a core subject for classrooms everywhere. Lessons that involve reading, writing, speaking and listening – from poetry jams and reading aloud to author visits – have always been popular amongst teachers using Skype in the Classroom. In 2014, you and your students travelled millions of virtual miles taking part in lessons around the world via Skype. Whether you collaborated with another classroom, played Mystery Skype, invited a guest speaker in for a Q&A, or went on a virtual field trip, chances are these experiences engaged your students’ literacy skills, perhaps without them even realizing it! Here's how you can get involved: 1) Invite a guest speaker: authors, illustrators and storytellers will be available to join your classrooms via Skype. To make it easy to find and schedule a speaker to inspire your students, we’ve created a way to quickly schedule these calls. These conversations can be scheduled via Skype in the Classroom beginning February 9th. 2) Participate in World Read Aloud Day events: schedule a call on World Read Aloud Day or World Book Day (both the week of 2nd March) to celebrate the art of reading and writing. There will be a wide range of partner-provided content, tools, and resources to help with traditional reading and writing, including digital literacy and internet safety content too. 3) Literacy projects: we will have some very exciting literacy-related partner organizations including School in the Cloud, Microsoft, Safer Internet Day/ChildNet, and some very special guest speakers through those partnerships all coming soon. 4) Create your own Skype lesson: get creative and post your own literacy lesson for other classrooms to get involved in. Let us know about it @SkypeClassroom and we can promote it for you. Using an online Reading Level site, Mike Soskil, a teacher at Wallenpaupack South Elementary School in Pennsylvania discovered that “Our 4th grade students, who have been using a curriculum of Skype experiences and blogging as part of their Social Studies curriculum this year, increased their writing scores on average by half a grade level from October to December. The students using this curriculum are either in special education or low achieving.” With a stronger focus on learning experiences that directly support literacy we hope to help teachers everywhere create even greater impact through the use of free accessible technology like Skype. We hope to see you and your students join in all of the new literacy lessons. If you are new to Skype in the Classroom, we invite you to hop on a tour hosted by our Skype Guides, teachers just like you who are excited to show you the innovative and educational adventures that await your students. Don’t forget to help inspire others with your experience via our Stories Page, Facebook andTwitter. We look forward to a fantastic celebration of literacy. Your friends at Skype in the Classroom education@skype.net @mysteryskype @SkypeClassroom #skype2learn

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Project Huia - call for student participation

Project Huia - Book Study - Extension Learners

This reading project was run successfully last term, with our Rural & Remote Schools students, and now is being offered again as an extension opportunity for all interested schools.
This project will run entirely through Google Classroom and our WeLearn website, with a couple of 'real time' scheduled Adobe Connect sessions, as well as a connection with the author Des Hunt.

Weekly activities are designed to encourage the students to engage with the text to extract greater meaning; to seek out, identify, understand and apply new and interesting words; and enable students to visualise the thoughts and feelings they have in relation to the text and to recreate these artistically and enable them to reflect and respond in a written manner.

Students will have reading and activities to complete each week to be sent to their teacher so schools will need to ensure that this work is integrated into their classroom programmes to enable the time needed. Please put forward students who are working at NZC Level 4. 

Learning Objectives

Students will be reading, responding to, and thinking critically about the text in order to work towards meeting the reading demands of Level 4 NZC.

Students will locate, evaluate and synthesise information and ideas within the text(s) selected, and have opportunities to generate and answer questions about the selected text(s)

Students will recognise and understand a variety of grammatical constructions and some rhetorical patterns (e.g., cause and effect; comparing and contrasting);

• using their prior knowledge, along with information in the text, to interpret abstract ideas, complex plots, and sophisticated themes
• identifying and evaluating writers’ purposes and the ways in which writers use language and ideas to suit their purposes;

Students will discuss word meanings and grammar or talk about how language choices and modes of delivery vary according to purpose.

Enrolments & queries to primary@vln.school.nz
New schools please check Protocols of Participation first.

Contributed by:

Keryl Kelleher

Makuri School

A conversation with author Des Hunt - Rural & Remote Students Term 2, 2014

Lets Go

'Lets Go' is an iniative at Eltham Primary School to prepare children for school and to involve parents in their children's learning. Year 0 - 1 children are provided with a pack of carefully selected learning resources that they can take home and keep - books, readers, pencil, pad, maths games & information for parents. Parents attend two sessions at school and can take home the 'Lets Go' pack to use with their kids. It has proved so successful that it is being extended into other areas of the school with the Years 2 -3 'Up and Running' programme (& learning pack). If you want to know more about this programme contact Jocelyn. Eltham is unique also in that it follows the Te Whariki curriculum in it's NE class.

Quick Links

Today i was at SPS working in Fiona's NE class who have just joined the school network. I loaded a few things on her desktop computer - ArtRage & Tux Typing and tried to load KidPix - tho am having real problems with getting this to install & run in the WinXP os (as i have with the other SPS junior classes) - anyone else know how to fix this??? (i think it might be a conflict in the text-to-speech Windows software...) We looked at some of the projects her kids had been doing & wanted to do & played around with some of these programmes.
I set up her access to the Junior reading resource , Digital Learning Objects & showed her how to make a Quick Links webpage.
Being able to create hyperlinks is a pretty easy skill to do with a very powerful result. Every teacher should be doing this! It allows teachers to easily organise access for their students to specific digital resources (i.e. particular websites or learning objects). I used to encourage teachers to find the web resource they wanted their kids to access & then shortcut it to the desktop but i got a slap over the hand from the network manager (again...) because too many desktop shortcuts load up the user profiles & slow down the system.
So How To? A bit like constructing a WebQuest. You don't need any special web editor. Just use Word - write in the learning activities you want kids to access, find the web address (of the site or the learning object or even a resource saved on your own network), copy the address Ctrl C, highlight the text in your QuickLinks file, Ctrl K to open up the hyperlinks box, & copy the address in Ctrl V. Save As a webpage where your students can access. You can make sure that your passwords are remembered so Juniors can just click straight in there. Easy peasy :-)