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?

Stop Press - TaraNet eLearning Award

A big thank you to Gen-i who are sponsors of our inaugural TaraNet eLearning Award.

After 5 years of eLearning in TaraNet schools it is time to recognise and celebrate the achievements of a growing number of students who have risen to the challenge of being elearners.

It will be very hard to choose just one worthy recipient of this award as most of our schools have one or more students who fit the criteria.

The criteria we have come up with so far are:

• must be an elearning student from a TaraNet school 
• have shown a commitment to their studies (attendance & diligence)
• be a positive role model for elearning

The qualities this student will show are persistence, flexibility, a high level of communication, and a positive outlook. Some input from our students here would be good.
What are the qualities needed to be a successful elearning student?

Up for grabs is an Asus Laptop 
A great little tool for an elearner!

We hope to gain more sponsorship and trial these in our schools for more of our elearners.

We're Proud of our 'E'ness

ePrincipal's had a day together at the MOE office. On the agenda:

• eMentor's reporting on work going into the restructuring of the VLN
• Preparation for ULearn - who's presenting what - a number of ePrincipal led workshops will be offered
• Discussions with NZQA regarding our procedures in particular MOUs - ePrincipals are now on the NZQA mailing list so we can keep up with what's going on
• Correspondence School discussed their work with the FarNet in support of SchoolsPlus students. SchoolsPlus students get funding to enrol with the Correspondence School & so they are looking at how to collaborate with the VLN clusters to support these students.
• Ka Hikitia Presence on the VLN - Carolyn presented a discussion paper on this which outlined some key areas such as:
• identifying Maori students in VLN enrolments
• developing a strong pool of VC Maori teachers to cope with demand for enrolments
• accessing links with Maori students - eg senior tamariki mentoring younger in language, performing arts
• digital conversations with Maori role models
• Digital Conversations - Sarah from the Book Council to revive the WordSpace video conferences with NZ writers
• Proposal discussed- a shared Online Learning Environment
• Preparation for creating a Student Module for elearners at the beginning of the school year.

Thanks Lynda (& Vicki) for organising today & yesterday's activities. Though we live and work in a virtual world much of the time, I think it is really worthwhile meeting face to face as we did today.

Interface wrote an article about the VLN & ePrincipals you can read it here.

DEANZ Conference

ePrincipals provided a presence at DEANZ conference this year in  a conference that has traditionally been mostly populated by Tertiaries, academics & the Correspondence School.
It was interesting to rub shoulders with others in the field of Distance Learning in NZ but I left conference feeling generally underwhelmed and unchallenged by much I had seen there. Perhaps I am becoming desensitised to ideas surrounding innovative change (real or rhetoric) that I just don't get so hyped up anymore...

Michael Barbour presented a workshop that would be useful to use with our eteachers:
"about designing instruction for an adolescent and early adult audience and how the interactive can be used to help facilitate learning in this largely unsupervised environment."

Marilyn, lead teacher Waitara High School, attended Dr Ken Stevens presentation "Extending learning opportunities for high school students in rural communities: The replication of a NZ model in Canada". This was relevant for Marilyn as she has just returned from Canada where she was looking at some aspects of distance learning in schools. Here are some excerpts from her notes:
"We did it first! Ken explained how he used the NZ model from Cantatech and the Taranaki Experiment of the one-teacher primary schools from Strathmore to Taumarunui to introduce distance learning to New Foundland. Because rural schools are not able to provide high-class teachers for all of the subjects they would like to offer, distance learning is the method used to help rural schools survive. It requires collaboration!
In Canada, as in New Zealand, rural schools are struggling to attract the high quality teachers they need for all of the different subjects students want to study, and to prevent the exodus of students to larger city schools, distance learning has been introduced. Ken ran a programme in New Foundland for two years before the Canadian government intervened to find out what was involved, and then took on the programme and developed it into the nation-wide system used now.
Physically small schools have become large institutions via internet and virtual space.
Virtual classrooms are connected and collaborative, onsite and online instruction is given, open teaching and learning,
M Teacher – onsite mediator – we call then VC co-ordinators or DL co-ordinators
E Teacher – teacher of an online class."

Conor also presented a workshop session on behalf of the ePrincipals about the VLN following on from Dr Ken's presentation.

The highlight of the conference for me was listening to Marcus Akuhata-Brown speak in the closing keynote. He spoke of realising the potential in ourselves and others, removing barriers to achieving success (often our own self-belief & the perception of others) and having courage and instilling that courage in others to take on new challenges. Very inspirational. Marcus would be a great advocate for our students as we work with initiatives such as Ka Hikitia and here in Taranaki schools Te Maunga Tuu

PPTA ICT Task Force

I have recently been appointed to represent my region on the PPTA ICT Task Force and met with this group for the first time today. We had a full days meeting at Head Office in Wellington, which was quite handy as I had to be in the city this week anyway.

It was interesting to meet a whole new group of people, the only other person I know in this group was Phil, ePrincipal, CoroNet. The representation across this group is mainly ICT/Computing teachers/ Heads of Departments (although there was a Head of Arts present, it would be good to see a broader representation but I guess this is indicative of the pigeonholing of elearning into ICT departments in Secondary Schools). PPTA staff (Deputy Secretary General & Field Officers) were also there as well as Murray Brown & Paul Seiler from the MOE who joined us for part of the day. Areas discussed were:

• Digital Technologies Guidelines
• Screenrights - all schools which copy TV or Radio media (which is probably all schools) should hold this does yours? Find out the process here. 
• Role of the ePrincipals & Future of the VLN
• Support for elearning lead teachers (this falls on staff in all our schools with little time or recognition to fulfil the role - suggested that the funding for Specialist Classroom Teacher could be used here)
• Internet Safety Conference
• Local Loops (Nelson & Christchurch), Government Shared Network, KAREN, National Education Network
• Regional Broadband initiatives - regions have funding through economic development groups for this - what is happening in Taranaki? Need to follow this up.
• SMS/LMS - Paul Seiler covered some aspects of the Road Show held earlier this year, of interest was the work that Kaymar is doing with Moodle interoperability.
• Student laptops in schools - protocols around this were discussed and examples of school procedure & student user agreements shared.
• TELA laptops - they are meant to be cleaned by TELA before being sold - some are slipping through the cracks - make sure your laptops are thoroughly cleaned before they leave  your school.
• Operations Grant, Software Licensing,Subsidised Internet Management Systems
  This links into the Review of School's Operational Funding: ICT Resourcing Framework
  This document clearly signposts changes are coming in the way ICT services have, in recent years anyway, been supported by the MOE ICT team, not only things like infrastructure, TELA laptops but also ICTPD.
  

eTeacher Observations

One of the more interesting parts of my job has been to sit in on our VC classes. Lesson observations are part of the Performance Appraisal for our eTeachers and this week I completed the last of them.

Here Ross examines potatoes under the document camera with his L3 Ag/Hort students. One of his students was the 'spud expert' & could tell us the difference between any sort of potato and what they are best used for.

I have enjoyed being a fly on the wall in all of my eteachers' classes. The challenge for most of my teachers though i think is not so much during VC lesson time but all of the other things that sit around the roll of being an eteacher. Things like being organised, communicating with students in between class, creating course material to be available for students to be working on between VC classes and organising for assessment & timely feedback.

Digital Story Telling @ Inglewood

Teachers from Inglewood English Faculty, Stratford & St Mary's joined me to learn about Digital Story Telling. Inglewood English Faculty requested this PD session so we opened it up for the whole cluster to send teachers.
We explored how Digital Story Telling could be used across the Curriculum and had a play with PhotoStory3 to create our own stories based on key words from a poem and using Flickr pics. We also spent some time looking at sites online where you could tell your stories such as:
Voice Thread
JumpCut
EyeSpot
Scrapblog
BubbleShare
Bubblr (Comic Strips)
I look forward to hearing back from teachers about the digital story telling they do with their students back in class :-)

This was a great session for the teachers who attended, it would have been good to see more schools take advantage of this free opportunity for ICTPD...
Workshop notes for Digital Story Telling & PhotoStory are here.

 

Fleur's Digital Story (Fleur you can download it from here)

New VC Gear, New TaraNet School?

I picked up some VC Gear from Puke Ariki today. This equipment has been sitting around gathering dust for the last three years from the time it was used by Venture Taranaki when they were part of the TaraNet ICTPD project. I worked with Puke Ariki Learning Centre staff a couple of years ago to get this equipment up and running at the museum with a view to having Virtual Field Trips similar to those that Rotorua Bath House Museum used to run. With other ICT & elearning initiatives starting up at Puke Ariki at the time the VC never did get off the ground.
I managed to track it down and get permission for TaraNet to take it away for permanent loan to a prospective new TaraNet school. Wahoo :-)
At the moment it is sitting in the Stratford High VC room where i spent some time working out how to reconfigure it to SchoolZone and testing out all the bits. Thanks Asnet for your support in doing this.
Watch this space to see how this VC gear can make a difference in another school.

Digital Students @ Analog Schools

I found this student 'testimonial' while searching for examples of student work for our Digital Storytelling Workshop on Thursday. A message more teachers need to be taking on board.

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?)

Coastal T@T

Teacher's at Coastal Taranaki School hosted my 'Heads up ELearning' workshop presentation for one of their regular monthly Tech @ Three PD sessions.

Great turnout & discussion helped along by a great afternoon tea, leftovers courtesy of the TaraNet Principal's meeting we held at Coastal earlier in the afternoon.

Tandberg - Serving up the Content

 
Our eteachers are beginning to use the Tandberg Content server on a more regular basis to record oral assessments. I worked with Marg today to show her how to access her recorded VC session. This will be useful so she can take her time & revisit the assessment of student work, it could be used for moderation purposes, and copies will be made & sent to students for feedback/feedforward.

I tried to access the VC recording that Rangiroa made at the end of last term by using the url direct but am having a heap of trouble with any of my Tandberg passwords working. The server is a bit confusing with a variety of admin & user passwords. Yet i can go straight to the front page of the Tandberg Content Server and view or download this video without any Tandberg password (except for the one i originally set on the video) How crazy is that? I don't really want to direct students to this page - i thought a single url would do it. But after wasting a whole afternoon on this it looks like i'll have to. I think we need to revisit how Tandberg is working for us with Asnet the providers of this service. We did have some meetings around this earlier in the year but many of us were only just beginning to explore Tandberg then and hadn't encountered the vagaries of the system by then. How are others finding Tandberg now we have a bit more experience with it?

Film Commission VC

 

Marg & I talk to Jeremy Macey from the Film Commission. We were joined by English & Media Studies teachers from around the country (Northland, Roxborough, Twizel, Mangakino & Tokoroa), to discuss the role of the Film Commission and plan for some Digital Conversations with our students. Deb Thompson (Media Advisor) also joined us - her experience was invaluable to our meeting. As well as advising in schools, Deb looks after the TKI Media Studies Community.
Teachers discussed what opportunities they would like to pursue through future VCs, Jeremy offers his industry expertise & connections & Deb will be a useful person to pull this altogether into a coherent and relevant programme. I will give my time to plan and facilitate future VC sessions.

Previously CWA planned & hosted VC Digital Conversations - it would be interesting to find out how this was originally resourced and if it could be supported in a similar way in the future. There is a lot of work to put together VC conversations for students, more so when you want to record & share video from those conversations. Other ePrincipals are also working to bring together these sorts of opportunities for our students - another thing to do in our already hectic workload...

We are planning a VC later in the term for Media Studies students with Jeremy discussing  and answering questions about the Film Commission. Then plan for a programme of student VCs for 2009. Watch this space :-)

eMentors

Most weeks I have the opportunity to talk to my eMentor, Grey Tuck. Grey is recently retired Principal of Kurunui College & lead Principal of WelCom cluster.
Grey is someone i can bounce ideas around with towards meeting the goals of our TaraNet contract. His expertise is really useful to tap into both for myself and my cluster where he recently spoke to TaraNet Principals at our last meeting.

Another person I always have questions for is Eddie. Eddie is Senior Advisor with the MOE ICT Unit responsible for the VLN.

Patea First VC Class

  I visited Patea Area School again on Monday this week. Kathryn has taken over the role of VC Coordinator so I spent some time with her discussing her new role, looking at how to use the VLN, and using the VC gear.
We practised by VCing into Carolyn (ePrincipal, FarNet) who has just got her VC online in her home office. Carolyn is nearly an hour from her closest school and is also an eTeacher - having VC access from home is a huge enabler for her to be more effective in her job. It was great to take control of the far end camera and have a nosey around Carolyn's office and zoom in on a beautiful view down a bush clad hill to the beach below. The best of both worlds - the world at your fingertips & the beach 5 minutes away :-)
Discussion with Carolyn gave Kathryn many insights into what were some of the issues our students faced as elearners and how we could best support them back in their home schools.

Patea students engaged in their first VC lesson today as 5 students are participating in a Beginners German class, along with students from St Mary's, Opunake & Stratford. Their first VC went really well, with lots of emails buzzing back to me about the experience.
Courtesy of phutran on Flickr

Promoting TaraNet to Year 8s

Many of our schools have had their Open Days for prospective Year 8s.
I attended an evening at Stratford High where my own daughter will be going next year. I talked to parents about what TaraNet was all about, how our students can now have a wider range of curricula choices as good as if not better than any of the city schools. I also talked about some of the elearning opportunities for students aside from VC distance learning.

Principal, Warren Purdy, writes about the Open Evening on his new blog.
Great to see Warren using a blog to communicate with our wider school community.

Waitara - Virtually There

With another storm predicted today I thought it best to stay closer to home. My two meetings scheduled at Waitara went just as well via VC without having to dodge any falling trees. In some ways i think a VC meeting can be more productive than a f2f meeting - you have a clear purpose, are more focused with less distractions, and a limited amount of time within which to cover your discussion.

There is lots of storm footage on YouTube - this one is cool not only as it made the National News but is the basis for a Viral Marketing version - where a Jeep follows along behind the car going over top of the fallen tree...(need to visit the site to see it) 
Whats interesting about the YouTube videos of the storms also is that there is lots of conversation going on in the comments sections underneath the video as people relate their personal accounts - communities of interest - when & where it suits :-) This is definitely something we should be sharing with our students.

Jing It

Have just begun using Jing (thanks Hamish for showing me this) to take my screen shots & in this case to do screen recordings. What a handy dandy little tool this is. So simple to use, can upload straight to screencast or save as a file.

ePrincipals are preparing to spend the day tomorrow inside Adobe Connect Meeting room getting our DEANZ conference presentation organised so this little tutorial is for Jan who is setting up our meeting. Hope it will play ;-) Click on the pic to play or download from here.

Heads up on the eLearning Landscape

I was at Inglewood today presenting an overview to staff on what's happening in the eLearning Landscape. There is so much going on to talk about in a short session and overwhelming i'm sure for those who are hearing some of this stuff for the first time. A message I tried to get across to teachers was not to get hung up on learning how to 'do' all of this technology stuff themselves but to be aware of what was out there and how they can enable their students to use this in their learning. This means things like - accessing appropriate resources, curriculum design and teaching strategies. Teachers sit on a wide continuum of capability & confidence in educational technology and its unrealistic that all should be able to become IT whizzes - there is just not enough time and also that's not what its all about. Its about equipping our students with the skills for learning in the 21st Century which means a change in shifting 19th Century teacher mindsets. Many of our students are quite confident & capable technology users, this is where the teacher/student roles change and teachers need to let go & let students take the lead in the classroom. I like this section from Hargreaves Educational Imaginary which talks about the roles of teachers & students. This point about teachers roles hit home to me yesterday when during our workshop session one teacher asked 'Well what do we do? What do teachers do?' If we don't need to learn all this ourselves but our students do... I guess this comes from teachers who have always mastered their 'subject' matter before they teach it to their students. Now its not just content knowledge - trying to fill a students head with all the important stuff thats going to be in the exam, but skills & processes are really important too.

E Learning Landscape

view presentation (tags: ictpd elearning taranet)

Expanding Learning Horizons

view presentation (tags: elearning vc taranet)

These presentations can be downloaded from http://www.slideshare.net/rache65 as there are a few links embedded in them. The following are the two videos we watched.

Shift Happens

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Windwand Sharing

A VC was scheduled for today for TaraNet teachers to share ideas & resources from the windwand miniconference last week. Unfortunately i was the only one to attend this meeting. How frustrating being an ePrincipal - it is so much like being the invisible woman. Because you are not physically in peoples faces all the time it is easy for them to 'forget', make an excuse or just let things go. This is something i have always battled with from eteachers to TaraNet Principals. Next term we will have more f2f workshops for lead teachers - maybe a more blended approach will get some more commitment to the cyberside of our activities.....

Links from our TaraNet wiki here.

An interesting one - Identity 2.0 Dick Hardt

What Learning Do You Value? Julia Atkins

I joined an excellent PD session with Julia Atkins and others around the country about focusing on Key Competencies in the Learning Areas. It was disappointing that noone from any of our cluster schools could find the time to attend this session - they missed a great learning opportunity. This session was recorded so i will download it & extract some of the key points for sharing with my colleagues. The following are some notes from the session:

We began with a discussion on how the curriculum has evolved over the last 120 years. How it has continually expanded & expanded with new subjects as different things have become important over the years. We haven't changed the curriculum in all this time except to add more things. Now to make this more manageable we have created  Key Learning Areas so we can group all these subjects. While we try to make sense of all of this the important thing to think about is "What is the educative purpose of school?" What is Essential Learning - Development of self & self for society.
The Integration of Key Learning Areas, Values & Key Competencies - this will help us achieve our educative process.
Questions:
How do we do this?
How do we develop 21st Century teachers from Industrialised Ages teachers?
How do we maintain the love of learning that our students come to school with at age 5?
How do we counter the challenges of assessment driven learning with the high stakes assessments of NCEA?

Bringing our Teachers Onboard - Professional Learning
Keep the focus on the learning needs of the students themselves, teachers work collaboratively (PLGs) in improving their practice.

Reframing teachers notions about their own learning before you can they can do that for their students.
Phases of development:
Tacit knowledge (don't engage, succeed with kids by chance)
Explicit knowledge - (they gain some understanding, are more open to learning)
Then can get stuck in the 'guru loop' - looking out to others to tell them what to do
Need to internalise their thinking and look to themselves than thinking an outside factor will change things.

Inspirational videos to get people to open up their minds (have used a few of these before ;-):
When I Become a Teacher....

Pay Attention

Shift Happens

John Holts Model of the worlds we live in - the Nature of Learning:

4 Worlds from our most inner, to the world around us that we have experienced first hand, to the world which we know about but haven't experienced, and then the possible world which is a big unknown.
We develop our own mental models and they don't change until they are confronted.

Julia Atkins "Teaching for Effective Learning" presentation.

Current mental models in education  - 'Teaching as telling & learning as listening' (Yoram Harpez) emphasis on World 3 stuff - knowing about. "Chewing & spewing"
Important to do the experiential learning - need to engage them in developing and knowing.

 
What Learning Do You Value?
In the top model learning starts at the centre and across the worlds, the model below is World 3 learning.

A process to change: Help develop shared mental models of the skills & attributes we want for our students - develop ownership from all - staff, community - use the curriculum document as reference point.
What learning experiences will they need? What are we doing well? What do we need to change? Develop a learning model for your school?

Bill

Windwand ICTPD

8 teachers from all our TaraNet schools attended a PD day in New Plymouth organised by New Plymouth Boys High School & Francis Douglas Memorial College ICTPD cluster. It was disappointing for the organisers that Wellington airport was fogged in all day and a number of workshop presenters couldn't get here.
I presented a workshop on Flickr & one on Blogging. I really wanted to present about the virtual learning network and the opportunities we are able to offer our students with distance learning and video conferencing. But was turned down as this is not what they want to hear about they want to hear about Web 2.0. Though I did take the opportunity when introducing myself to do a quick promo for the VLN & direct them to the website ;-)

I have set up a wiki page for our teachers share their ideas & resources from the days PD.

Cool Things @ Coastal

Image courtesy of dcysurfer http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcysurfer/2469673205/

Coastal Taranaki School are moving ahead with ICTPD in their school largely due to the efforts of Hamish & his team and the work they are doing with an ICTPD Development Project with Oakura & Omata Schools.

This is a great case for supporting Lead Teachers in our schools. Hamish has a day's release each week to work with others in his school & to initiate and support ict projects. His enthusiasm, expertise and time does make a huge difference not only for his school but for how Hamish can work successfully with our TaraNet Lead Teacher team.

Lead Teachers Developing Critical Netstudents

 

TaraNet lead teachers met today for our regular termly VC catchup. We had a PD focus on Netsafety & Info Literacy. I presented a workshop session on Developing Critical Netstudents which was one of my first conference presentations. Presentation & supporting resources are all available here.
We discussed explicit teaching strategies & resources for educating our kids to be responsible 'cybercitizens' This ranged from modelled & guided use of the internet with our younger students, information literacy, to learning about issues such as plagiarism, copyright, cyberbullying, web evaluation,  our 'digital footprints' in a Web 2.0 world. The new look NZ netsafe site has started to provide some structure to this with their 'cybercitizenship pathway'.

Also of interest was a new resource supported by netsafe & other organisations - a 3D animated series 'see how the Jones family fares against the nastiest stuff on the internet'

Second Hand Wedding

Stratford High School Media Studies students met with Jeremy Macey, Development Assistant at the NZ Film Commission and Linda Niccol, Writer of the recently released NZ movie 'Second Hand Wedding'.

This was a great opportunity for student to learn more about the film they were studying with experts on hand to answer their questions. Hopefully this will be one of more VC conversations hosted by the Film Commission. Media Studies & English teachers are welcome to join Jeremy to discuss further VC opportunities Monday 4th August. Contact me for VC bridge & pin # number.

Patea's New Personalised Learning Centre

It was a buzz to hook in with Patea today and to see from the  VC room background that they had begun to set up and use their new learning space. Today was a good opportunity for all staff at Patea to experience a video conference and to talk to Ken from OtagoNet. The discussion was around what were the possibilities their learning centre would bring for their students and what were some of the pitfalls they may need to navigate. Having experienced and researched this at Roxborough, Ken was able to offer some practical ideas and insights. Between Ken and I we also gave staff a bigger picture view of the activities of the Virtual Learning Network and the opportunities available for our students.

MyPortfolio @ St Mary's

Jane (Careers) at St Mary's hooked into the MyPortfolio VC organised by Carolyn (FarNet). This was a VC promoted for Careers staff to explore the features of myPortfolio. You can register a trial for your school here. myPortfolio is a product created using Mahara opensource software.

My reflections on this and other recent VCs where websites are being explored is to make sure if you are a participant to have a networked computer in front of you so you can follow along on your own computer. The quality of visuals on computer screens beamed through the vc are really blurry and poor. Be interested to hear from schools who are using new VC gear if they have higher definition and quality than we are getting with our 5 year old equipment.

While at St Mary's i have met with lead teachers & the ICT team. Janette is wanting to promote delicious for a school book mark site, & to explore simple digital portfolios with some of her students to share examples of work with their families.

Techhui08

Students from all our TaraNet schools travelled together to Wellington last week to attend TechHui08 "a day where students can learn about new technologies, exchange ideas, share knowledge, visit leading-edge labs, and observe courses at our two local universities". I vced with them today to find out what they had gained from the day. For many it was an eye opener to see the amount of access these students had to technology that they did not have in their own schools; they thought it was ironic also that on the day technology failed in some of the presentations; the lecture style of presentation was a huge challenge to them (as i think it would be too) & i was disappointed to see that there was not more hands on interactive stuff happening; oh and lunch was like a moshpit ;-) See their pics & comments on the TaraNetKidz wikispace.

The logistics of organising this amongst the 6 schools was challenging as far as getting the EOTC procedure right. I don't know that i communicated the process very well & this is something I need to review with TaraNet principals before we organise another event. Big thanks to Hamish & Janette, lead teachers from Coastal Taranaki & St Mary's Schools who took charge of this group.

The students really enjoyed having the opportunity to go away with others from different TaraNet schools. This has been a good start for our kids coming together outside of formal eclasses and an opportunity to promote student voice. Their next shared project is creating & gathering media for a TaraNet promotional video

Energizing the Learning Landscape

I'm tagging along on the last day of the NZEI Rural Principals Conference in Palmerston North. NZEI President, Frances Nelson, started the day by repeating the message given by Karen Sewell at the beginning of the conference: schools need to look for ways to be more creative with the money that we have and stop looking for more to solve our problems. "Schools told to innovate and quit grizzling" No matter how much money you throw at a 'problem' you will never achieve a silver bullet solution and the best way to move forward is to take an innovative and collaborative approach. I think this is where we need to go as a cluster - how can schools fully support TaraNet & the VLN and achieve sustainability without continually going cap in hand to the MOE. I know there are creative ways to do this "If you had a school of 2000 students what curriculum could you offer" & how could you staff and resource this.

On another note Chris Carter was keynoting as well. His speech was mainly a pep talk, lots of discussion around the budget & questions and answers from the floor.He promoted World Environment Day (WED June 5th) by talking about a VC launch yesterday, of a website aimed at partnering schools globally to participate in WED "Environment website links world's pupils"

Here's a great opportunity for some VC learning opportunities with other schools.

Opunake

A beautiful blue sky mountain day at Opunake as we all wait out on the field during a fire drill - This brings back memories ;-) 

Today i helped Andrea give birth to her blog http://kicking chemistry.blogspot.com
She was blown away by how easy it was to set up & get started. Andrea wanted to use this blog to engage in conversations with her senior students about some of the bigger ideas that they just don't have time to chew over in class. I would be interested in looking at how other secondary schools are using blogging. There is only one listed on the edublogs site so i have set up a new page on edublogs for secondary schools sites. If you have a site or you know some plz head over there and put up a few links.

Remote Woes

One for the ePrincipal toolkit - always carry spare batteries for the VC remote control! I was all ready to hook into a VC PD meeting & found these important items were missing from the remote. No VC - reschedule...

Budget Boost?

"Education Minister Chris Carter said the $171.6 million increase spread over the four year period included $65.3 million to help schools meet the costs of Information Communication Technology (ICT)."

What will this mean in $$s for our schools? Is it enough to make a difference for some schools who still have significant infrastructure needs?

Studyit

On Wednesday Colleen (HOD Maths @ Inglewood) and I joined the Studyit VC to find out more about using this site with students. I was hoping to get some tips on presenting pd online particularly in the display of webpages online. Unfortunately they had all sorts of technical problems, firstly we couldn't see them & then we couldn't see their laptop display. I think it was a real nightmare for the presenters but they soldiered through it. We were able to follow along on our own laptop (thanks to my 3G card) as they walked us through the site. This was organised by FarNet (thnx Carolyn) and there were schools from Kaitaia, Whangamata, Inglewood & Timaru attending. This weeks focus was on the Maths area & last week was English. Ben from Coastal Taranaki school attended the English session "It was great and I have since been plugging the site with my students. Well worth the time and I can highly recommend it."

Learning Centres - what does a good one look like?

Part of my time in schools is spent following up on the learning support for our elearning students. In every school i go to, the structure for this looks slightly different and i don't believe any of our schools are doing it exceptionally well and all have room for improvement.

I have talked several times about the Roxborough model as something to aspire to, and had Principals look at this and discuss this with a view to improving their own practise. Yet how do you push this along in our schools? How can you constructively criticize without some guidelines to show you what is best practise in this area. Time to work with our principals to set some criteria for this to help us move forward.

Inglewood has a learning centre but this is mainly only used by Spec (here they call it Link) students. Distance Learning students, VC & some correspondence, are scheduled to study in the library & their attendance is monitored by the Librarian. They do have Lorraine to oversee them & liaise with their provider schools but they don't get the learning support that could be provided by the expert staff in the Learning Centre (if they had the space & if they had the time).
After visiting the Opunake Learning Centre & seeing how much is going into the Spec programme I wonder if Spec isn't draining our learning support resources (quality teacher time) into one programme at the expense of others. Has anyone else noticed a change in Learning Support Centres since Spec arrived on the scene?

ICTPD @ Inglewood

In the last couple of days at Inglewood, i have been catching up with my elearners but i have also done a bit of ictpd and talked to individual staff members about their ictpd needs.

One recurring response from staff was their biggest ictpd need was time to explore using ict & to prepare resources. Some wanted specific training in  applications directly relevant to classroom use & a request was made for a digital story telling workshop using Movie Maker and/or Photostory. I will have to organise a cluster workshop for this.

I worked with staff who had a wide range of confidence & capability on things such as: using webmail effectively, using interactive maths resources, & digital learning objects, exploring features of the smartboard, we also looked at flickr, wikispaces & blogs. (though a lot of our time was spent unblocking website categories - grrrrr) It was interesting to note that when we unblocked most of the categories for Henry his internet ran noticeably faster than it had ever done before. I wonder how much the sina filtering system is slowing us down...

My 3G network card has proved invaluable to me as i work in different places around the school - 2 schools out of 6 so far all working well - I will see when i have visited all of my other schools if this 3G is going to pass the test or not. I'm not sure how to check my datausage on it though - any ideas - Darren?

Who takes charge of the remote control???

I was watching our students getting ready for their vc accounting class this morning. And I found it really interesting that the one boy in the group grabbed the remote control as soon as he entered the room. The girls tell me that this is always the case & that he would have the control for all of the lesson. Hmmmm.... some parallels here about control of the remote.... Funny thing was that when Aotea College appeared in the VC class, they had 2 students, one boy & one girl - guess who had control of the remote..............;-)

ClickView Digital Media

Mike from ClickView demonstrates the capabilities of this digital media library & management system to staff at Stratford High School. We held this demonstration in the VC room to enable other TaraNet schools to hook in (though there were no takers this time).

I was impressed with this system and left the session wishing i was a classroom teacher with all of these tools at my fingertips...

Things that impressed me were:

• Learning Federation Digital Learning Objects can be stored and accessed through the clickview system - what a great way to make these learning objects more accessible to students than through the currently passworded TKI Digistore repository.
• 'Snippets' of video can be edited out of the video and into My Documents for including in presentations or uploading onto learning management systems
• Video can be bookmarked with a url - either a whole video or a certain starting point
• Digital media can be 'exported' to 'the school bag' so they can be played on computers that have the clickview player but are not connected to the school server
• Editing feature allows you to add subtitles to video
• As well as video & dlos, there is photo collections, podcasts & a section for sharing your own video.
• A feature for creating lessons - which can be accessed by all on the school clickview server. A great way to provide learning intentions, sequence digital resources and activities.
• All digital media comes with accompanying learning activities & resources that can be accessed through Clickview as word documents & are customisable
• NZ Exchange allows ClickView screens to share digital media (within the guidelines of the Screen Rights Licence)
• Online tutorials on using ClickView

Areas for improvement? Security permissions for teachers to easily upload media to the system. Only administrators working through the Management server can add new content. Quite pricey at $4 a student p/a & approx $1000 setup. Though if a school is serious about providing easy access to a wide range of digital media and providing the tools to integrate them into learning this would definitely be a worthwhile system.

Any system though is only as good as its users so a challenge here to see how Stratford High School staff will work with this digital media available free to them for the next 6 months. Watch this space...

Zooming!

This morning i hooked into Ceri's Art History VC class to work with her & her students in using their flickr site to hold 'conversations' around the visual images they are studying. I guided the students through logging onto the site, accessing images (using tags to find groups of pictures), using the notes to highlight & discuss parts of the pictures & using the comments section to respond, raise questions & discuss their work.

The challenge for me in presenting this was the poor visual quality of sharing my laptop screen through VC. Any pointers from those of you who use display well from your laptops would be much appreciated. I had my laptop hooked up through the document camera though I've been told you can connect straight to the Polycom unit through s-video (must try this & see if it improves picture quality.

I tried out a couple of applications to zoom in to my laptop display. One was Zoom it. This gave a good zoomed in image of my screen (pics & text) but the downside was you couldn't operate any applications while you were zoomed in (such as click on a browser link)

Then i tried QuickZoom a Firefox addon. This did allow me to click on the page but only zoomed text and not the pics & when you zoomed it changed the whole layout of the page.

ZoomFox was a cool little addon that opens images in a new window and has controls for zooming & setting their size. This would be a really useful feature for Ceri to use when doing close study of visual images.

Another simple tip that i should have thought of first & will try next time first is Set screen to highest resolution doh!

3G? We'll see...

I joined the 3G network today with a Telecom Mobile Broadband connection. I have watched the other ePrincipals use these devices (either Telecom or Vodafone) & seen how easy it is for them (in most places) to be connected anytime anyplace. I have had trouble in all of my schools working through their networks to get a reliable, fast connection to the internet and on top of this been frustrated by the filtering of sites. I am often working in all sorts of places outside of my kitchen table office. Telecom have a good deal on at the moment that lets you trial for a month (fully refundable) so what a great opportunity to try it out :-)

Windows Live Writer

In case any of you are thinking the same questions as Darren "How are you able to get your pics looking so fancy and uniform in your blog?  Does blogger allow you to do that or have you done it elsewhere?"

Great that you noticed.... i have started using Windows Live Writer for publishing my blog posts.

Live Writer installs on your PC & allows you to publish straight from your desktop with a whole wider range of formatting tools than you get with blogger wysiwyg editing (hence the photos are looking a little flashier) I also like the way it saves your posts locally on your own machine. I have always had blogger email me my posts (just like to have a copy of everything on my own machine) Pictures - you can just drag them straight on your page & they get uploaded along with your post - easy peasy.

Stop Press

Daily News reporter Harriet sat in on a VC lesson at Inglewood High School yesterday. Great publicity for us.
Read all about it here: Students get stuck into online learning

I checked all  spelling with her except for TaraNet!

Waitara

 
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flissphil/489563890/ PhillipC

I spent two days at Waitara High School this week. Just starting to get to know some of the teachers here. I had some catch up time with Lead Teacher, Marilyn; sat in on Ceri's Art History VC; visited David's graphic's class & shared Google Sketch-Up with them; and caught up with all of my elearning students :-) Waitara is struggling with a lack of infrastructure and the huge amount of funding needed to provide a networked school. Discussions with the MOE were not helpful as the subsidised infrastructure upgrades are no longer being continued. Have to sell a lot of cakes to wire this school...

Mahi Tahi Talks eTeacher Appraisal

ePrincipals had a great discussion in our VC meeting to discuss developing an appraisal process and standards for eteachers. Chris, an experienced Principal helped guide our thinking and had some great insights. This one is a classic: "A great appraisal system is like great sex. It should be consensual, continuous, mutually satisfactory, and lead to enhanced performance in the future." ;-)
Our discussions centred around appraisal being a process for professional growth and not a compliance exercise. Though we didn't like the idea of using checklists and measurement we did think there is a need to develop aspirational (professional) standards for eteachers. These standards would provide guidelines for setting professional goals, and be supported by self & peer assessment, student feedback & observation.

Mahi Tahi is the name we have given our group of ePrincipals & mentors. This literally means 'working as one' These pics are of us working together at the MOE offices last term; Connecting with Adobe Connect & chatting to Jodi from Colorado Online School. More Mahi Tahi pics.

20/20 ICT in Schools Report

The recently released ICT in Schools Report 2007 has a number of key issues as highlighted by Laurence Zwimpfer in an accompanying media release. They are the continued digital divide - varying quality of broadband access depending on where you live in the country, computers in homes, demand for increased bandwidth, the disposal of old computers, costs of ICT equipment. Positives noted were that 80% of all schools have now participated in the ICTPD cluster programme.

Some interesting results in relation to internet access when compared to the previous 2005 Report.

2005	2007
All schools have internet access.	Nearly all schools have internet access. 99% primary schools.
Broadband - 93% Secondary, 78% Primary	Broadband - 86% Secondary, 84% Primary/Maori Medium

Hmmmm - there are a small number of school now that don't have the internet anymore (maybe they didn't respond in the first survey). Considerably less Secondary Schools have broadband access than they did two years ago....... i wonder if this result is more to do with our increased expectation of what broadband should be - and the speeds we are getting now just don't count as fast anymore!

Personalised Learning @ Patea

Patea Area School are on the verge of joining our VLN . They have their VC gear up and running and are working now on developing a Personalised Learning Centre (PLC) to support students - not only those who may become online learners but all students who need a flexible learning space and support outside of the traditional classrooms setting for a whole range of reasons. It is really heartening to see Patea is putting the horse before the cart (learning before technology) and planning to have good systems in place before jumping into learning online. Te Aroha was really impressed with what is happening at Roxborough Area School and the whole staff at Patea have been involved in exploring the idea of a PLC and planning for its development.

We VCed into Turakina Maori Girls College to speak to Dawn Mitai-Pehi about how they are using VC in their school & with the Paerangi cluster. Though they are not currently running any VC classes they are using VC a lot for teacher PD, shared curriculum support & socialising for their students to keep in touch with whanau at other schools.