C4

http://www.wordle.net/

TaraNet’s C4 programme began this term with 21 students from across 6 of our schools joining together to Connect, Communicate, Collaborate & Communicate.

We meet through VC every week and use our Moodle site to communicate between times. So far we have defined our theme of C4 and you can see by their Wordle above that there are more C’s than just the 4. Student’s are learning to find their way around Moodle by successfully logging onto the site (this has been a problem for even some of our senior students…. i don’t know why….), they have completed their profile & uploaded a Fact File to tell me more about themselves. We have had a strong emphasis on ‘cybersafety’ - appropriate ways of behaving when they are online, and protocols for interaction & publishing online. One of their tasks was to work through our VLN cybersafety module and we engaged in some interesting discussion about issues that surround being safe online. We have started to look at blogging to connect more widely than our small group & i have started the C4 blog to model this.

Everything we do seems to take so long – we are already into Week 4 & it seems on the face of it we haven’t done a lot. For almost all of our students they have very little time to involve themselves in C4 activities. Only one school has cleared more time in the timetable for them. Almost all these students (being the G & T kids) are involved in anything & everything else that is happening at school too. I think this is the age old de-motivator for these types of bright kids. More stuff gets layered onto them – when really the extension work needs to be ‘instead of’ and not ‘as well as’ the everyday school stuff. BUT fantastic attendance from all of these students :-) Its good also to get around the schools as each week i am VCing alongside our kids from a different school.

Our first project is called “Postcards from Taranaki” – a short movie or presentation about our place. We hope to share with students from other clusters.

Tandberg

Today i visited our eteachers at Waitara. We looked at connecting laptops to the VC for our Spanish student’s to present to their class. We also looked at how to download recorded VC from the Tandberg Content Server. All our eteachers have had their lessons recorded so that they can watch themselves teach & do some self review. I will also look at their classes & contribute some feedback. Below is a tutorial I prepared for them to help them through learning how to download for the first time. This is part of their appraisal process. There has been some interesting discussion amongst ePrincipals about the appraisal process for eteachers as initiated by Darren’s blog post “To appraise or not to appraise?” Whose responsibility should it be? The schools’ or cluster’s? I think that eteacher appraisal is about support & professional learning for eteachers & that ePrincipals have a role to play in this. See previous conversations about eteacher appraisal.

View tandberg_download tutorial here.

Wordspace

Today I chaired a Wordspace VC “Encouraging an Individual Approach to Writing.” St Mary’s students attended alongside me & were joined by students from Ashburton, Reporoa & Ruapehu. Writers Fleur Beale, Jennifer Beck & Brian Falk joined us from Christchurch. Thanks to these wonderful writers who shared so much from their own experience with our students. They had lots of practical tips from planning a story, developing character & plot, finding inspiration and getting published. They were very inspirational in their encouragement to be persistent & never give up if you wanted to be a published writer. One of their tips was for students to practise their craft & to publish where ever they could – online & enter lots of competitions. The Book Council has a Creative Writers Gallery where students can publish their work with the top five contributions being chosen every month. Writers Window was another good place for students to publish but with the redevelopment of TKI & English Online this has disappeared. Of course you can always publish your writing through your own blog or even publish & sell a book yourself. What is the future of fiction through Web 2.0?

TaraMaths Quizz

Today students from 5 TaraNet schools competed in our TaraNet Junior Maths Quiz. We structured it a little differently this year by having the Quiz running through Adobe Connect to allow students to continue to look at the questions online while they were jumping in on the VC to answer the questions. Of course you could run it completely through Adobe without any VC but is good to see and talk to each other. Although I tried to keep it firmly structured with maintaining everybody on mute unless they were chosen as first in to answer a question, it soon became like trying to ref a rugby game as some endsites didn’t adhere to this & were trying to come in over top of each other. The students were really competitive & i can understand their frustrations at being ‘beaten to the buzzer’. Improvements for next year will be that the answers will be submitted over Adobe Connect using the chat box – this will keep a clear record of who is getting in first & clarify any answers missed. We had one contentious question, thanks Justine our adjudicator for picking this up, unfortunately this one question made a difference to the placings which were very close. It’s lots of fun to be involved in these events & would like to branch out into other areas (maybe current events) & it would be good to have our teams compete against schools in other clusters too. If you have any ideas for quizzes, or would like to join a challenge, let me know.

The winners this year were Stratford High – well done!

Tara Maths Quiz

View more presentations from First Last.

The Essay

Thanks Inka for sharing this with Mahi Tahi

Conversations with Writers

 

St Mary’s Writer’s Group join a VC through the VLN with other schools and writers Owen Marshall & Sue Orr to discuss ‘Short Story Writing’.

Thanks to Ken Pullar from OtagoNet & his collaborations with the Book Council to bring us regular conversations with a range of NZ authors. They are really great opportunities for our students to tap into a wealth of knowledge & experience. These students spent almost as much time after the VC, together with their teacher discussing the conversation itself. It was very thought provoking for all involved.

Next week’s VC will a discussion about “Encouraging an Individual Approach to Writing” with writers Jennifer Beck, Brian Falkner, and Fleur Beale. Contact Ken to find out more or register your participation.

Prezi

I like this one – Prezi - another presentation concept altogether & free version too. “Instead of slides, you create a large map, and zoom around to show your ideas.”  Explanation in video below.

You can download your finished presentation so it can be used offline – displays in Flash Player. Can’t find any embedding facility though beyond sharing the link to the page. Here’s my 2 minute play http://prezi.com/134912/

"Role Conflict - the expectation gap"

We had another good “Learning for Leadership” PD session yesterday with our eMentor Sue.

I really like the way Sue facilitated this session – posing questions to us ahead of our session and then guiding our discussion through a round robin of speaking, reflecting & responding to others in the group. One for my facilitation tool kit – thanks for modelling this so well Sue :-)

Underlying the discussion was the idea that the role of ePrincipal is still new & unique that for many in our schools that there are not clear expectations of what this involves. There is no previous point of reference. As we began in our role we were a little unsure ourselves until we developed into the role and as we fostered relationships with others in our clusters and our wider group and as we began to work towards achieving our cluster goals. I think every ePrincipal has a very clear idea in themselves now what their role is and the challenge is now to communicate this to others in our cluster.

Some of us experienced similar conflicts when it came to the expectations of others (& sometimes expectations of ourselves) about what was & was not their role. For a small few this was further complicated as they had other roles in their clusters and home schools (such as running EHSAS contracts, or some teaching duties).

Here are my reflections on my role:

What are all the roles that you currently carry out in your current position?
Consultant & advisor, elearning leader, staff development (eteachers mainly); pastoral care eteachers, students; negotiator & advocate; community spokesperson & liaison; connector & information conduit/filter between schools & the wider sector; researcher, questioner.

Are there any roles which you do not currently carry out but you do feel under some pressure to include them in your current position?  If so, what are they? Hands-on ICTPD with classroom teachers and technical work.
I haven’t got time to be a PD facilitator except for with eteachers, but do work in a consultative role with schools & lead teachers to organize & target PD opportunities – occasionally running workshops but not one-on-one – you can be continually chasing your tail doing that.
I am not ‘the computer person’ but will do some necessary stuff if it helps reduce the barriers to achieving immediate outcomes for what I am currently trying to achieve.

The Future of Education

My morning ritual after checking the inbox is to read through my rss feeds to keep up with my professional reading. This one is a MUST READ 

“ There are many startling statements and predictions that can be read in different ways. But one of the most astonishing things is the similarity of many arguments made by McLuhan in 1967 to those still made today, 42 years later:

• that schools are as outmoded as the mass production model on which they are based; and that forms of “mass customization” promise a radically different educational approach
• that "the demands, the very nature of this age of new technology and pervasive electric circuitry... will [unavoidably] shape education's future"
• that “the walls between school and world will continue to blur”
• that "Future educators will value, not fear, fresh approaches, new solutions."

Are McLuhan's statements prescient, premature, preposterous, or all of the above? What does this say about current predictions? Decide for yourself.”
From the blog of Norm Friesen.

 

For another thought provoking read Leigh’s latest post on myths of social media, open education.

• “So my question is this: What is it REALLY that is causing the teacher disengagement from something so apparently important to the meaning of literacy, teaching and access to learning? Why does it seem that the world's greatest encyclopedia, the most phenomenal video library and the most in depth access to first hand experience is made up by everyone except those wrapped up in the education system?”

Check out the rest of Leigh’s article also Scary School Nightmare video here.

NZ Maths Week Coming Soon

A heads up for Maths Week coming up in August. This is a great time to get your kids brushing up on their Maths Skills, at school and at home, with lots of online learning activities & challenges. The official NZ Maths Week site is here. With lots of previous Maths Weeks activities here

Mathletics also opens up their site for free for two weeks around Maths Week – check it out.

Humberstone Junior School

Humberstone Junior is a Year 3 – 6 school with a roll of around 400 students. We spent the morning visiting classrooms and talking to Sophie (Year 3 Head) about how they did things in their school. In many ways it seemed very similar to a small NZ school with it’s organisation into teaching teams, it’s colourful classroom displays, streaming of Maths classes, dance practise for school production and even the classroom management style of the Kiwi teacher we observed. It’s students were from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds. It was different in that class work was very much prescribed by school wide schemes of work that were separated into quite discrete subject areas. There was little ICT in the classroom (except for teacher Interactive Whiteboards). ICT was taught more as a subject in the school’s ICT room. Next year Sophie hopes to lead an initiative in the school to integrate curriculum.

Bowbridge Primary School

We visited Bowbridge School to see a school with a focus on sustainability. Their showcase is a new environmentally designed building. I was surprised to see this school has been surviving for the last 50 years in Army Huts and only just got a new building. The huts after being left by the army were then used by displaced people after the war until a council estate was built. The people moved out into their council homes & the children moved into their school. All Bowbridge’s families come from the council estate with 95% unemployment. Bowbridge has very strong links with the community through it’s  adult education programmes. This is one key aspect of all schools we visited – they all offered what was called Extended Services. It could be after school clubs or sport for students or classes for the wider community. Another difference to our system is that schools come under the Department of Children, Schools & Families (which would be like a combination of our MOE & CYFS) and also Local Education Authorities (a branch of local government)

While we were there they were having a ‘Great Outdoors’ Week with students engaged in lots of hands on activities outside. There is plenty around the school that is ‘eco- friendly’ such as it’s wood pellet heating system, playground map made out of recycled jandle plastic, rain water usage monitor, plants growing, amongst other things.

http://bowbridge.primarypodcast.com/

NCSL case study school around the theme of Sustainability. 

View Full Album

National College for School Leadership

Today we arrived at the National College for School Leadership in Notttingham, UK.

This is a purpose built facility to provide professional learning pathways for English school leaders & Principals. We are here for three days of pre-conference activities and school visits before we move onto “Seizing Success” conference in Birmingham. This centre not only provides residential professional development, but has a research programme & develops resources to support school leaders. I guess the closest we might have come to something similar in NZ would have been the PDPC which was closed at the end of last year. Leadership development has been identified by the NZ MOE to be an important area with recent developments in the change from LeadSpace to educational leaders website, Kiwi Leadership for Principals

Mount SPA on the Road

Mountain to Surf Taranaki Principals ready to leave Auckland.

Gypsy eLearners

From the newsreader this morning:

Not so much disruption for our students who are moving from one elearning school to another. One of our student’s family has just moved farms and schools but she will be able to continue two of her current online classes and maintain contact with her classmates from her old school. This is another positive about flexible, online learning – you can take it with you!

Google Books

Check out Google Books. I knew it existed but I had never taken the time to explore it until the day i really needed it. I have been fixing up an article that i have written for the DEANZ Journal of Distance Learning when i came across a reference with no page number ….. and i don’t have the book anymore. A Google search brought me directly to the book – most of which i could read online – complete with page numbers – phew! I have now started my library in Google Books.

 

Learning Languages

Today I had the privilege of watching Jarred teach French with his Year 7 & 8 students online. Jarred usually has two other schools (though only one today) linking in through audio conference and Adobe Connect. This is the beginnings of a pilot trialling this technology & collaboration between Primary schools. Learning Languages now has an increased focus in schools with the development of it’s own area in the new Curriculum and this type of opportunity has the potential to support schools (especially smaller rural schools) to deliver a wider choice of languages to our students. Jarred’s is the first class to work in this way and though Jarred is not a French expert he was confident to try out teaching in this environment so has been a great role model for others involved in this project. If your school would like to be involved and has a language expert (or any teacher with basic competency in a language) to contribute to this project, in return for their own student’s involvement in classes then contact Matapu School to find out more.

TaraNet Student Survey Online

Our online student survey went live today. Every year about this time i survey our students to gain feedback about how they are doing and areas we need to improve on. In the past our surveys have been very heavily focussed on them evaluating their VC lessons and the interactions and support around that. This time I followed closely CoroNet’s student survey which has more of a focus on problems they may encounter in their whole elearning experience and specific questions about their use of online learning environments (Moodle, KnowledgeNet). Every time i hear from our students i gain valuable insights into their ‘invisible world’ of elearning. I am really looking forward to reading their comments.

Our students are also involved with NZCER research with a focus group session taking place this week with five our students from across our schools and covering a range of levels in the school, subjects studied & prior experience as elearners.

We use survey monkey for our online surveys.

Boards of Trustees – their role in eLearning

 

Tonight I spoke to the Inglewood High School Board about their schools involvement in TaraNet and what it means for opportunities available for their students. I went through my standard promotional presentation about TaraNet and the VLN and outlined the educational landscape of elearning in New Zealand of which they are a part of.  Boards of Trustees are vested with a lot of power and decision making in the strategic directions of their schools and the allocation of resources. For this reason i think it is important for all our school’s BOTs to have an insight into elearning activities our students are participating in because they contribute to this with the purchase of equipment, allocation of staffing and resources. So often these students are invisible in their own schools, tucked away in the VC room, library or study room working in cyberspace that others can’t see so easily. Inglewood are the first of our schools to confront the need to replace their costly VC equipment (they are currently using borrowed equipment) so some support from the BOT will be needed to keep them going. We are currently looking at options for this which may include the trialling of desktop VC as opposed to a dedicated unit and upskilling our teachers in a variety of other technologies (such as Moodle & Adobe) to supplement more fully their VC classes.

eTeacher ToolBox

The ever growing & varied range of collaborative Web 2.0 tools freely available never ceases to amaze me. What a great tool box our eTeachers have to choose from.

Leadership in An Environment of Uncertainty

We had our second Learning for Leadership VC with our Mahi Tahi group & eMentors Sue & Maurie today. Thanks Maurie for sharing your wisdom & experience with us :-)

The focus of today’s session was “Leadership in an Environment of Uncertainty”. This topic is important at all times i think, and for our group, especially now as the Virtual Learning Network & elearning clusters determine their way forward to a sustainable national network beyond eLCL funding.

Important notes for me were:

Know who you are & be yourself I thought these things were important as a leader: Have a clear vision & purpose Understand the bigger picture Make a difference Effect change – influential Walk the talk

What Leadership Style? Visionary Affiliative Commanding Coaching Democratic Pace Setting

 

Support for Educational Leadership:

Kiwi Leadership for Principals

http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/

Leading Learning Module from Core Ed

Keep students at the forefront
Be prepared to use the moral high ground – whose interests are being served?

Relationships 80% of your job
Emotional intelligence is important
Listen to listen & not to talk
Manage & practise difficult conversations
Manaakitanga
What do you truly believe? This shapes your actions
Keep professional learning conversations going beyond the ‘nuts & bolts” (move beyond task focus to pedagogical focus)

Don’t water the rocks – don’t spend time worrying about things beyond your control.

Put your own oxygen mask on first!

One whakatauākī I have had above my desk for many years that inspires me in my professional work & relationships is:

“Before you speak, listen.
Before you write, think.
Before you invest, investigate.
Before you criticize, wait.
Before you pray, forgive.
Before you quit, try.
Before you retire, save.
Before you die, give.”

William A. Ward

Oh really – for many schools getting it to the gate is not the challenge (see our Taranaki broadband map). Getting it connected & into the school is the trick!

Gifted & Talented TaraNet

TaraNet GATE (Gifted & Talented Education) teachers met this afternoon via VC to discuss what they were doing in their GATE programmes with a view to future sharing & collaboration. We are lucky to have Ingrid from Patea Area School to lead discussion as in her previous life she was a GATE advisor.

Ideas for shared GATE activities:

• another Maths Quiz
• Coastal students to share experience from their GATE project with other students
• C4 TaraNet project to run Term 3 & 4

A good example of a cluster collaborating to provide GATE opportunities for students is CoroNet’s Year 10 ProbLit programme

FarNet comes to the Naki

Carolyn, ePrincipal, FarNet is spending a couple of days with me in Taranaki. Today she spent some quality time with her elearning Accounting students at Waitara High School. We will be collaborating on some work on the VLN over the next couple of days & swapping notes on developing our Moodle sites.

Oneeko

Chatting with Ken on Skype and he introduced me to Oneeko

Oneeko is a screensharing tool that works with Skype as quickly and easily as sharing a link. Screenshot of our conversation above & features below. Ken is so taken with this great little tool that he has subscribed to Pro & uses it with his online class. Cool :-)

Computing & IT Secondary Teachers – New Subject Association

“The New Zealand Association of Computing and Digital Information Technology Teachers is a new association created to advocate for our subject. The aims of the association is to create a warm friendly community of teachers where we can share resources and speak with one voice to get our subject area recognised and supported.”

Hmmm ‘warm & friendly’ huh. Maybe the language is a reflection on the journey it took to get thus far…

http://www.nzacditt.org.nz/

For Computing, ICT, TIM secondary teachers.

PDF to Word

Another file conversion challenge for eteachers who have resources in PDF and want their students to be able to work digitally with the file & send it back or upload it to moodle. You can either download a bit of software & convert PDF on your local machine http://www.hellopdf.com/ or you can use an online convertor http://www.convertpdftoword.net/   or   http://www.pdftoword.com/

Another Great Reason to Use FireFox

I am often asked by teachers how to download YouTube videos to use with their classes. It is often a problem for students and sometimes teachers (depending on their schools) to access YouTube at school. Sometimes too they can’t access the software or webpages that can download video so it seems everywhere they turn they are blocked. By far the simplest way to capture video from YouTube or any webpage with media embedded is to use this little Add On to Firefox.

Here’s a tutorial I made for my eteachers to show them how it works.

TaraNet Tinkering Around the Edges with MLE

2009 Mle Roadshow 4

View more presentations from Paul Seiler.

Ian Munro & Paul Seiler from the MOE were in New Plymouth to speak to schools about Managed Learning Environments. This presentation follows on from their consultation last year. Since this time the MOE have established a reference group, and tendered for and accepted preferred vendors. You can participate in the discussion around MLE by joining the reference group Google group. 

I think a lot of this session may have been  above the heads of many  unless they had participated in previous consultation sessions or had an understanding of online learning environments. It would have been good to see the presentation deviate online to look at examples that were discussed so the audience could make a visual connection to the tools & ideas that Paul was talking about.

TaraNet has been using an MLE – Interact & lately Moodle for the last three years to support our classes but i feel we have only been tinkering around the edges of what is possible. We are reaching a time now that TaraNet schools need to make strategic decisions about adopting an MLE (Coastal & St Mary’s have recently purchased KnowledgeNet). Whether they choose to collaborate and develop our own TaraNet site or choose another vendor and work independently, is another decision they will need to make. I have skirted this issue, trying just to focus on providing the tools for our eteachers & making it available to other teachers through Lead Teacher request. WelCom have made this the overarching goal & focus for their cluster with the development of their MLE and the support of teachers being their ePrincipal’s primary role. It is obvious when visiting WelCom that their goals are coming to fruition with a dynamic, collaborative space being developed that is always busy with students & teachers online.

I have been thinking for sometime that TaraNet schools, who haven’t already, need to make a strategic decision about adopting an MLE. The Moodle site we are currently using needs to move beyond it’s trial phase and off the MOE server and onto a hosted vendor site, which will be a cost to the schools. When schools start investing in an MLE they will want a return on the investment. So there will be a lot of professional learning needed. A new goal for TaraNet 2010 and another opportunity for other schools outside TaraNet to join….maybe.

File Compatibility

An emerging trend amongst my eteachers is a problem with different file formats now that some schools have moved onto Microsoft Office 2007 and others are still using 2003 version. Students are sending files that teachers can’t open or vice versa.

The best solution is having teacher laptops updated with MS Compatibility Pack If you don’t have access to install on your own laptop and are waiting for the school technician to get through their prioritised jobs then you could consider using one of these online file convertor sites.

http://www.convertfiles.com/

http://www.zamzar.com/

SchoolZone – Switching Proxies

 

I found this great tip on the nzist@googlegroups.com . Thanks to Nigel Friggens.
If you are a School Network Manager, ICT Lead Teacher, Computing or TIM teacher I recommend you join this Google Group!

For those teachers who are continually adjusting their internet setting between home & school.

“How to automatically switch the proxy on their laptop browsers between home and school.”

1) create a textfile "proxy.pac" and save it to the c:\drive of the laptop with the following script

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)

{

if (isInNet(myIpAddress(),"10.88.176.0","255.255.254.0"))

return "PROXY 172.31.232.250:3128";

else

return "DIRECT";

}

2) The 0 in the ip address acts as a wildcard and so long as the mask is correct the whole range will be included. Obviously you will have to change the numbers to suit.

3) In IE or Firefox put the following address in the automatic configuiration script window (ie: tools.internet options.connections.lan settings) file://c:/proxy.pac

Video Marking

I really like this idea gleaned through Stephen Downes “OLDaily”

Video Marking – a teacher describes how he uses screen recording software to record himself marking this students work and then students can use his video response as feedback.

What a great way to give constructive & specific feedback to a student. They can literally ‘sit alongside’ their teacher (not in real time) as they mark their work, see and hear their discussion, comments & recommendations. Of course their work has to be submitted digitally for this to work effectively. The article mentions that the teacher is using Camtasia to record their feedback but Jing which is free would work just as well.

Another great strategy for our eteachers.

Learning for Leadership

Today we had our first “Learning for Leadership” VC. eMentors are facilitating a programme of workshops throughout the year for ePrincipals to support us in our leadership role. Today’s topic was ‘Difficult Conversations’ focussing on the preparation and strategies for conversations which are necessary but have the potential to be difficult.

It was great to get together with our Mahi Tahi team and focus on specific professional learning topics beyond the daily nuts & bolts of our work. We had lots of opportunities to discuss & share examples from our personal experience and to learn from each other. Thanks Sue, Maurie, Grey & Chris for your excellent work as eMentors.

Students Personal Laptops at School for eLearning

At the end of last term elearning students from one of our schools asked for support in being able to use their own laptops at school. What impressed me about these students was that they not only presented their problem but put forward some possible solutions. All too often we here problems & request for fixes but obviously these students had thought through the issues and been proactive about what to do next.

“We have been using our personal laptops during our VC classes and study periods to take notes, contact our teachers, download and submit assignments. Up until now (just over a year) we have been doing this very successfully without question, but recently we were pulled up for using the school's network for this this because our Cybersafety Agreement doesn't allow external devices to communicate on the network, and we've been prohibited from connecting to network, which includes internet access.

The school's concerns are that computers which are not officially setup by the technicians may cause a virus to propagate on the network and cause costly problems, and that this may become a serious issue as laptops for elearning become increasingly popular.”

I believe that schools need to address this so students can use their own computers at school and there are schools, such as Whangaparoa College, who are doing this successfully. It is definitely something that will be more & more important in the future (along with the use of cellphones & other devices). When many schools are struggling to make technology available in schools it would make sense to allow students who have them to be able to use their own laptops. Schools I have talked to have said that it is on their radar screen but they have put it in the too hard basket until there is more pressure from student demand. I understand that schools need to maintain a secure network but there are ways to work around this.

The following are the proposals these students have made:

- Students are encouraged to take advantage of personal technology to improve their learning.

- The Cybersafety Agreement is amended to allow the use of external devices on the school’s network on the condition that acceptable measures are taken on behalf of the user to ensure the safety of the school’s network. This may involve occasional audits to ensure antivirus programs are installed and updated regularly if appropriate.

- A procedure is put in place to regularly review the use of the school network with external devices, and as the use of personal technology in learning develops with the growth of elearning, the school’s network is adapted to accommodate needs.

The use of teacher laptops is directly relevant to this argument & teacher laptops are now ubiquitous and seen as necessary. These also are a potential security risks to school networks with teacher laptops if procedures similar to those mentioned above are not followed. I know many teacher laptops that have been used at home in risky ways, have peer to peer software on them & used by teachers children for all sorts of things….. Come on schools, work with your students & communities to remove these barriers.

Farewell Angela

Today we farewell Angela Gattung, Principal of Inglewood High School. Angela has been leading the TaraNet Principal’s Group for the last three years and has been a vital force in our group. As one of the last two remaining foundation Principals in TaraNet she has maintained our cohesiveness & direction in the face of a changing educational environment and with a clear sense of our vision & goals for the good of all TaraNet schools & students. Thanks Angela for all the support you have given me over the years and your contributions to TaraNet :-)

Broadband – the Last Mile

http://www.broadbandmap.govt.nz/map/
The blue line is the Telecom Fibre Optic Network – the icons are our schools.

With recent announcements about the investment in Broadband infrastructure & MOE funding for schools infrastructure there has been much discussion recently regarding the equity of access to broadband for our rural schools. There are a great number of our school’s in Taranaki sitting on this fibre network. How can we afford to go the ‘last mile’ & tap into it, who is going to pay for the substantial costs involved in making it available. Cities and large towns will have the numbers to justify Telcos investing in bringing fibre online – what about the rest of rural New Zealand?

JIng Screencast

I have blogged about Jing before. It is such a handy little tool for me to use quickly & effectively when i am working with my eteachers from a distance.

Little questions like “How do i upload my graded assignments to Moodle?” or “How do i backup my Outlook so i don’t lose all my mail?”

Can be responded to in minutes by recording the process in Jing on your own laptop, then upload & send the link to the person you are helping.

Easy Peasy!

Another Web 2.0 MashUp Tool

Something from the latest ICTPD newsletter

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.