Enviroschools New Zealand

As you may well know, the Enviroschools programme is being shut down by the National Government in December this year.

I have been involved with a number of Enviroschools around the Dunedin area, and I have to say it is one of the most transformational programmes I have seen.

This IS education for our future, about learning to make the right choices now, so that we have a planet and a future that we want, not one that that is an inevitable outcome of the path we are currently on.

Spread the word far and wide...keep the Enviroschools programme running

The week that was

And here I am again...re-entering the blogosphere. I may bounce on impact with the atmosphere, so bear with me folks.

I was working with a teacher on her action research. She is looking at blogs and digital imagery with her junior syndicate. The issue she had was that she found it hard to keep her blog up to date, and said she would struggle to make a weekly post. I found this hard to swallow until I reflected that I have not made any posts this year! Oh the pot calling the kettle black...

So here I am grabbing a spare moment to share my week with you. I thought this would be a good way to share what I have been up to and hopefully you'll find something interesting in amongst it all.

Monday: Audacity with year 3 students at St Mary's Kaikorai. Lovely bunch, full of enthusiasm! We decided that since this was a one off lesson we would do something that they could use in the classroom and carry on with themselves. We chose to make readers for the year one kids in the class next door. So they practiced their best speaking voices, learned how to record, cut, generate silence and export the finished product as an mp3.

Tuesday: In the morning, comic life with year 4 kids at Wakari school, then working with my robocup team in the afternoon. They are a very keen, bright group and I hope we are on to a winner with our theme for this year's competition!

Wednesday: Spent some time at St Peter Chanel school, talking with their ICT lead teacher about action research, and audacity as an assessment tool. Great session and she was really enthused and ready to get stuck in to it! After lunch I was at Calton Hill school helping with their school website. They are using the Edublogs platform to create and manage their site (thanks to Greg at Outram School for his inspiration for this!), and are finding it really easy.

Thursday: Musselburgh school, talking Garageband with the music teacher. She had not had a chance to play with this tool and wanted to see how she could use it as part of her programme. Then talking blogging with the ICT Lead teacher. She is using Edublogs again for her classroom blog, and really enjoying it. She has a strong environmental focus on the blog (Musselburgh is an enviroschool), and the enviroschools facilitator just happened to pop in for a visit while we were chatting. We got to talking about my 'If I could change the world' project that I started in 2007. Lately we have got quite a few more members from around the world, and I was saying that we needed more NZ classes to join up. Hint hint....

The afternon was lost to a massive migraine....not pretty so I won't talk about it!

Friday: Had a super session with Opoho School teachers in the morning. They had taken a teacher only day to explore their english curriculum and I talked to them about ICT and literacy. I shared Suzie Vesper's slideshare presentation (Thanks Suzie!) and they scribbled down ideas frantically all through the morning. We looked at a few things in depth such as Voicethread and Youtube. Many of them were completely unaware of the usefulness of youtube channels despite being regular youtube users. Just goes to show that there are hidden depths to just about everything!

It's milestone time and all my spare moments have been used to oversee the creation of this document for our cluster. We use Google Docs to collaborate and it works really well (despite a few queries and worries over deleting other people stuff!). 

I had an interesting conversation with Jill Hammonds, our National Facilitator about milestone reporting, and showing change in schools. I now have a rubric made up that I put at the top of the milestone to help guide schools in their reporting.

As I was driving to school this morning, I was thinking about change in schools and how it was like algae. Yes, algae. 

Algae sits in spots around a body of water, and it is not until their is a change to the system that growth occurs (usually a rise in temperature). If you get the exact right change occurring then you experience an algae bloom...and the whole bay/stream/whatever gets covered in algae.

My point is that change usually happens in pockets in schools. There are teachers who pioneer change and run with it, teachers who come aboard slowly and those that struggle with ICT. This sometimes means it is hard for schools to report global change within their schools in milestones, and this leads to shallow reporting.

It is not until something happens to globally shift the mindset of teachers that an ICT algae bloom occurs, and an ICT contract does not guarantee change, just a hand in adjusting the environment to encourage change.

My question of the week is...what would trigger an ICT algae bloom in your school? Or have you had one and how did it occur?

Learning at learning@school

It's 3pm on day one of learning@school, and I'm listening to a teachers experiences with SOLO taxonomy and ICT. I think it is the first time she has presented and she is doing really well. It's a hard thing to present to a room full of silent people.

It highlights one of the key positives of this conference and ictpd in general, that it encourages sharing and collaboration, and that we all have something to share.

It is getting harder for me to pick my breakouts, trying to find new ideas, tools and concepts to take back to my cluster, so I'm usually really pleased when I can take a couple of things out of breakout. So far it's been a good conference!

Into 2009

I'm back at the keyboard again, ready to start a new year of blogging and learning.

I deliberately didn't touch the blog over the break...I guess thats why they call it a break!

This year I am lucky to be a co-facilitator in the Otakou Cluster for their final year of the contract. My partner is Emma Barker from Musselburgh School, and we should make a good team. Plenty of ideas to run with as well which is great.

I think we will go with action research as we did with the Hills cluster last year. There was such a great result both from confident ICT users and particularly from those teachers that were hesitant at the start but by the end of the year ended up with a published project! I still get daily notifications that this project or that has been made a favourite by someone on scribd.com.

I am continuing some ICT support as well for a few of the Hills cluster schools, with some interesting projects including environmentally friendly buildings, DVD projects, and collaborations between schools.

Jo, my lovely wife has changed year levels and is now teaching year 6. For those of you that read her blog (r6fairfield.blogspot.com)...it is no more. It has morphed into r8fairfield.blogspot.com!

This week I took my son for his first school visit. He is off to Fairfield as well, so there is no drama for him and he is keen to get stuck into school learning. In fact he was mistaken for a year 1 pupil...

Learning@School happens in a couple of weeks, and the Otakou Cluster is taking a big contingent of 20 teachers. It'll be great to share this experience with them, and we'll have loads of new knowledge to share when we come back. I'm presenting a Scratch workshop.

Look forward to catching up with you all over the year.

Ch ch ch changes

Change happens to all of us, if we wish it or not. I guess the challenge for us is to harness that change for our own benefit.

When I met my lovely wife Jo, she hated computers, in fact she didn't even own a TV. Maybe that's too harsh, she just didn't understand how they fitted into her idea of what learning was.

I used to step nervously into her classroom, and try to gently push her around to seeing how ICT could make a difference for her and her students. Today, she maintains a class blog (and it's a great one too!), is an expert on multiple intelligences and inquiry learning, and is using a wide range of ICT tools to support her classroom programme. In fact, I almost fell on my face when I went to bed one night to find her reading a copy of Interact magazine intently...and it was her copy!

I've been working on our cluster exit milestone for the past few weeks, and it has been amazing to reflect on the massive changes that schools in our cluster have undergone during the contract period.

When we started the contract, we had schools with older pc's, one interactive whiteboard in the whole cluster, some digital cameras and video equipment. There was a wide range of understandings of 21st century learning, inquiry and thinking skills.

And now? Huge...not just in hardware, and the use of that in classrooms, but in the understandings of teachers. Schools that have changed the way that learning is perceived and facilitated. The walls in our cluster walls have turned if not transparent, then quite translucent, with the understanding that learning is not something that is 'done' to us in a classroom, but something that is everywhere and whenever.

You can see some of the 'learning journeys' from our cluster schools on our cluster wiki, and also you can read through some of the action research that our teachers have undertaken this year.

It is exciting times, our contract is coming to an end, but the cluster continues. I look forward to seeing what will happen in the future.

Shift Happens NZ

I am preparing for a staff meeting next week, and as part of that I have updated the Shift Happens presentation with some NZ statistics. It's essentially the same but with some key data changed...

Unconferencing at Ulearn

Today I spent time at the 'unconference' sessions at Ulearn. An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants during the course of the event. It is a BYO session in which delegates can introduce a topic, discuss an opinion, or share a viewpoint about a subject.

The principles of 'Open Space' unconferences are:

1. Whoever comes are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. Whenever it is over it is over.

I connected with and shared about Netvibes. In 2005, netvibes pioneered the personalized homepage as alternative to traditional web portals. Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the Web.

I had a great discussion with Richard van Dijk from the Educated Kiwi about the wiimote interactive whiteboard. He had some great tips for pen design and shared how Te Puke High School are using them in classrooms. There is great potential here and I plan to go back and work some more on my own designs.

I shared Adobe Connectnow with Jamin Lietze. Connectnow is part of their Acrobat.com suite. It is a virtual meeting tool and combines desktop sharing, shared documents, whiteboard space and video chat all within the one tool. Our cluster will be using Buzzword, Adobe's online word processor to write our final milestone draft, so it will be good to see if we can use this tool in that process as well.

And finally I joined in a discussion with Neil Melhuish, David Young and Fiona Grant about the future of ICTPD in NZ. Neil was looking for feedback and ideas on the ICTPD contract. No firm view on what ICTPD may look like in the future...still early days yet.

All in all, this has been a great conference experience this year. A good mix of future thinking with some practical classroom tools and ideas to take back to my cluster.