Cluster Schools video

Kootuitui ki Papakura AGM September 2016

My Quality Blog Post Learning

Quality Blog Posting: Word Cloud

Here is a word cloud I created using http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds, an easy app to use.

It was really easy to create by adding information and then to change the size, colour, layout, font. Then I saved it to my desktop and uploaded it to this blog.

Canva makes design simple

My first play with Canva was very easy. There is a range of templates, pictures, frames etc available, although some are at cost, to create graphic designs in no time. This tool could be used to graphically show the characteristics of something, eg survey responses, blog statistics, places in the world you've visited....the possibilities are endless.

Using voki to Record Learning

Voki is a great tool for students to share their learning by creating their own avatar, choosing a background and then recording their voice or using a range of provided voices to speak about what they have learnt. My short voki below explains one of the characteristics of a smart blogger.

Voki app

SAMR with Dr Ruben Puentedura

Apple recently brought Dr Ruben Puentedura to NZ to work with educators around his model for technological integration into teaching and learning - SAMR. I was fortunate to attend this professional learning day. Yes, it was an opportunity for Apple to showcase their products; namely their software for ipad and their new Classroom app which has many of the same features as Hapara Teacher Dashboard. However, it was wonderful to listen to Dr Ruben in the morning and do an activity with him in the afternoon. Notes from the day

Two ways to put a blog into a google site

I have recently discovered two ways to put a blog into a google site: adding a click through link on the navigation and embedding it.

1. The first is quite simple. You just go into the site and click on 'edit site layout' then go to 'add url', copy the url there and give the button the title. From the home page, the button will be on the navigation bar and when clicked on will open the blog in its own window. I also added a Google+ community the same way.

2. The second is more complicated and allows you to read and comment on the blog from within the site. Create a new page, give it the title you want and place it where you want it to be in the navigation bar. Go to the page and click on 'insert', then go to 'add a gadget' then click on 'public'. Type 'embed blogger' into the search, find it and 'select'. Copy in the URL, change the width to 100% and the height to 900, click on 'add a scroll bar' and preview. If it's how you like it, save and then save page.

Putting Screencastify and screenshots into a blog

Screenshots are best taken and put onto the desktop. With a mac this is cmd+shift+4 to take the shot. Then insert the image by clicking on the image icon and going to upload files. Choose the desktop and select the screenshot. What for it to upload and then 'add selected' into the blog. Here is a screenshot of our Google+ site.

For screencastify, first of all record the screen cast, then download it to your desktop and select the file in downloads, chose it and upload into the blog. It may take some time to upload so just be patient.

Manaiakalani Visitors' Day 15th June

    The day began with individual student presentations from many of the Manaiakalani schools: these children each did a speech about a particular aspect of their learning, eg an inquiry topic and its process, supported by video, slideshows, and explanation.
    After this, the Chef Executive of the Trust, Jenny Oxley, made a presentation. This began with the visit of the Hawaiian waka in 2015, which was a hugely important day for the cluster as the visitors spent time in Pt England school sharing the learning with students and teachers.

    Next, the cluster was explained via key labels and themes, eg decile 1a, geographical location, 2500 children, 13 schools, kura kaupapa, Catholic, and a special school and the paramount importance of equity. Links to the cluster include twitter.com/clusternz and manaiakalani.org. Followed by the members of the team, the trust (to provide more resources than the schools had access to), and the many commercial and philanthropic partners.

    The 3 main elements of the programme were then explained as:
1. Acceleration: children talking about their learning and using technology as a tool.
2. Whanau engagement: parents invest by paying for their children's device. The Trust makes this affordable via micro-financing.
3. Research: investigation of the effect of the programme on student achievement.

    There are 5 Outreach clusters of about 40 schools throughout NZ, of which Kootuitui ki Papakura is one, being supported by the Manaiakalani vision, structure and pedagogy. There is also another group of schools that has taken onboard different versions of the programme.
    Next came the goals of the programme followed by the background from the beginnings and the shift in student achievement. The opportunities for teachers were discussed in relation to the digital teacher academy, the innovative teacher programme, the professional learning groups, the toolkit sessions, the GEG groups, the annual GAFE Summit, the Google ClassOnair, the annual hui, f2f opportunities and the relationship with Auckland University. The Trust is thinking about establishing a housing trust which could benefit teachers as well as whanau.
    Participants were told about the cybersmart curriculum, the use of Blogger as the platform for sharing learning, and shown the circular model which combines LCS and the principles- visibility, ubiquity, connectivity and empowerment. There was quite a lot of discussion around the principle of visibility for both teachers and students. Once a student goes digital, parents can be disadvantaged if they don't have access because the opportunity to view bookwork may have disappeared. 
Dave Winter, Outreach Delivery Manager said, "Privatisation restricts the opportunity to improve. Visibility and Kawa of Care sessions also reestablish the relationship between parents and schools, as schools may have been unpleasant experiences for them in their childhood."
    GAFE, Google sites, Google+ Communities and Hapara were discussed and how they operate together. Also, how the work may be referenced to SAMR and technology is implemented into teaching and learning. Everything in Manaiakalani has Creative Commons so can be copied and repurposed.

Next, it was time for school visits. I meet Fiona Grant, the Lead Facilitator, at Kura Kaupapa Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa o Puau. The children were working on their digital footprint and public/private. The resources are in their class folder and there was plenty of discussion.
    Everyone met back together again for the afternoon session. We listened to 3 teachers about their digital 1:1 teaching-learning environment. 

The first was a year 4 teacher from Pt England School, Room 11, where she'd been for 15 years through the journey. She was in her 6th year 1:1 with both ipads and chromebooks. The approach was to chose a student and follow their learning through the class site. The 'Teacher Notes' were on the site accessible to the teachers and management, not to the students. The student had watched the videos, done a writing task, resolved comments by the teacher, loaded the learning to his blog and by 9.30pm his parents had commented on his blog post. The average child posted about 1-2 times a week. The teacher put folders on her site which contain photos and pictures she has taken through the day.

    The second teacher was a junior teacher in Room 19 at Pt England who used ipads with Explain Everything in her class. She started by working through the tools and then followed up with rewindable reading activities which took the whole lesson eliminating the need for a reading rotation. All activities had audio instruction so that the children didn't have to continuously come up to the teacher. Writing was still done in a book with a pencil, but 
augmented with an ipad and stylus. 


Lastly, we met a teacher from the high school who is a 
participant in the Google ClassOn Air. She talked about applications with the SAMR model and that the ClassOn Air lessons are potentially to be used with training teachers while at training college. Discussions are continuing with Auckland University Teacher Education Department.

This was a very enjoyable and interesting day. It confirmed the journey that Kootuitui ki Papakura are on. I could understand the presentations, the class facilitation and the teacher presentations due to my learning over the last 6 months. Even though our cluster is much younger than Manaiakalani in its digital enablement journey, it is still a work in progress that we are all collectively on. Thanks Jenny, Dave, Fiona, student and teacher presenters.

Creating a video on Magisto

Video

Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust

Here are most of the members of the Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust at one of their recent meetings. They are community representatives working together for positive change in the lives of families and young people in Papakura. As the name suggests, the programme interweaves education, health and homes, to build social infrastructure and deliver life outcomes for children in the low decile schools of the area. The trust sits at the nexus of a number of collaborative endeavours:
- the collaboration among six schools with the implementation of digital pedagogies;
- the collaboration with health providers;
- the collaboration with local government, local community organisations, businesses and support agencies;
- the collaboration with corporate sponsors and philanthropic trusts.
Through the formation of the Trust, the framework has been established to provide leadership for the community from within the community. Finding local solutions from within is a partnership model in which all participants are invested in the outcomes and therefore have a huge stake in ensuring these are positive and significant. It gives agency to this community to determine and take their own actions without having to continually be on the receiving end of assistance from outside. Which even if it is well-intentioned, it does not take account of the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".

Students' Digital Footprint and the 'Cloud'

      It came as a revelation to some students this week that everything they do online is 'visible'. We have started working with them on their digital footprint and this has raised some questions and discussion. Some students think that everything they write gets saved only on the computer they are working on and if they destroy it, then their activity will be gone. We explain that it is the opposite and that nothing they do on their chromebook is actually saved their local hard drive. All of their commenting, drawing, slide-making, and blogging etc is stored on a huge cloud, which by association is somewhere up high in the atmosphere, away from anyone being able to delete or destroy it. In reality, everyone's data must be stored somewhere though and the 'cloud' storage is on large servers in large rooms of large buildings on large campuses of large IT corporations in large countries.
      I was fortunate enough to visit one of these cloud facilities in August 2015, where I was shown the new Z Series computers which operate in the cloud. They are just huge black cabinets with lots of flashing lights, electrical leads and fans to keep the machines cool. There was tight security so just nobody could gain access, but they could be destroyed by natural disasters, fires and malicious damage. In addition, storage media can fail, large corporations can get hacked, and data can get deleted just as easily on a server as it can on anyone's computer.
      Even so, it is important to realise that living in a world of connection through any device, at any time and from anywhere in the world, necessitates that users understand the implications of both their passive and active digital footprints being able to be stored and accessed. This may be through the tracking of our IP addresses, web browsing, facebook, twitter histories, and leaving comments on blogs etc. Have you ever realised that data about you has been collected via the internet without your knowledge? Every time you answer a quiz, buy something online or use social media, machines, and by default people, are collecting information about you and this information can be packaged and sold was IP addresses, mailing and telephone lists. While this can be used for good and things you need, want and care about, other less desirable uses, from pestering to bullying to breaches of your privacy could result. Children need to understand the need, skills and tools to safeguard their online character and reputation in their ever-expanding digital world.

Learning - anytime, anywhere, anyhow

Well, today I had arranged a meeting with Grant, one of the Trustees of Kootuitui ki Papakura, to work with him continuing his learning about how to use his new chromebook (provided by the Trust). I thought that I had ensured someone would be at the school to let us in, but alas when I arrived no-one was there and all we could do was drive into the grounds and wait. I didn't have the caretakers number and the office administrator and principal did not answer their phones. So, we sat down at the outdoor table and started working. The wifi signal was excellent, so we continued working.
First, a parent drove in looking for a teacher. Next, the fire extinguisher man drove in to check the fire systems. But there was only Grant and I to meet them and give them the news that we were the only ones there. The man who worked for the fire protection company took this photo of Grant and I. We were happy to have visitors and get our training done. It was a cloudy day, so not very warm sitting outside under the dull, grey skies. However, our experience proved that provided there is wifi, learning can occur anytime, anywhere and anyhow - even in unplanned ways.

Working with students at Park Estate School

Today I worked with three students who wanted to write a post for their class blog. They decided to write about recent art work they had done. Only one student had finished her art so we took a picture of that to add to the post. Here is their post:

We learnt to do concertina art. It was fun because we got to colour the strips using colouring pencils. It was difficult because we had to put the picture of us in order and the strips in the right places. It was fun to see our finished art.

By Lile, Zidane, and Tamisha

Chromebook Launches

   A number of schools in the cluster have now launched their chromebooks. What this means is that the parents of all the classes involved in the 1:1 digital immersion programme have all committed to purchasing a device for their child/ren. This commitment is expressed in a $40 deposit and weekly on-going payments for 1, 2 or 3 years.
   When you consider that some families have multiple children in the programme, perhaps at both a primary and high school, this is a very significant commitment. These schools are all decile 1, bar one, which means that families have the lowest incomes, the most crowded homes, and the least education of everyone in the country. Just putting food on the table each day is a challenge, which some primary schools have responded to by providing a free breakfast, morning tea and lunch everyday for their students.
   The Papakura community is one of the poorest in NZ, yet, families have signed up for these chromebooks because they are intent on providing the same opportunities for their children as those in more wealthy communities have. One parent at a recent launch was seen to hold a chromebook and express the idea that now, her children will become the doctors, lawyers and teachers of the local community.
   These children indeed have their hands firmly on their own device for learning: for opening up to them the world of knowledge, of creativity, of thinking, of learning, of setting their own path into their futures. All credit to the parents and whanau for their support of their children and the schools. We are excited to be in partnership with you all.

Sponsorship Announcement Breakfast

Last week I was invited to a breakfast launch of Westpac's sponsorship of the Mana-a-Riki programme. This programme is run by the Middlemore Foundation which supports the Kootuitui Cluster through the provision of funding for aspects of our work. At this breakfast were a number of Westpac employees, people representing other community funding organisations, representatives from the Middlemore Foundation, the health sector and our own educational institutions.

There was an enormous amount of goodwill in the room to get behind this initiative. But as I looked around I realised one important thing: that the community all these people were here to support was not very well represented. Yes, there was the chair of our Trust, two school principals, two board of trustees chairmen. But where were the people of this community whose children attend our schools? While never under-valuing the leaders of our community who are driving this programme, it will be good to see the 'ordinary' people; the recipients; the mums and dads who are paying their $3.75 per week to purchase a chromebook for their child; in the room as real people rather than just statistics.

Outreach Support and Collaboration

Yesterday, the Principal Convenors of the Outreach Clusters met in Auckland at Edmund Hillary School. They come together about once a term to receive the assistance of the Manaiakalani leadership. These meetings move around the the clusters and yesterday was Kootuitui's turn. There is a lot of serious talking to be done in a day, as well as a little socialising on the night of arrival, but it is a pity that the group do not have longer to visit one or two of the other schools in the cluster being visited. Principals have travelled a long way from the West Coast, Christchurch and Northland and yet they only get to meet the staff and students of one school.

Principals from the Ako Hiko Cluster (above) and the Hornby
Cluster (below) address the students at Edmund Hillary School.

Another thought I have was that there could be some benefit from the other principals of the cluster being visited meeting with this group. These people do not have to travel far and could perhaps spare an hour or two participating in one section of the Convenors' Forum. A form of leadership development or at least a session involving a wider number of the school leaders who have opted into the outreach programme. There could be huge benefits to offering a part of the Leadership
Forum day to all school leaders
when the forum visits their cluster.

A third thought from yesterday is that no secondary principals were present. I think there is an issue that all the Principal Convenors are from the primary sector.  In NZ, it is a disadvantage for our children that in our system the sectors are separated and that primary teachers and principals don't have a full understanding of how secondary schools work and vice versa. Secondary schools are different and need to be represented at the leadership level. In fact, the need for secondary school participation is nowhere more plain than for one of the clusters which does not have a secondary school member. Our children all pass through primary and secondary school within their educational lives and therefore secondary schools must be brought on board as full participants.

Thanks to Raina for hosting a lovely karakia with the delightful students of EHS, and for organising class visits, morning tea and "meet the staff" at the school.

Kootuitui logo

"Kootuitui means connecting/linking or weaving together. In this programme it is about connecting the dimensions of Digital Education, Students’ Health and Healthy Homes. The name has been chosen in consultation with manawhenua for Papakura schools participating in the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme.

The logo in the first instance is the result of collaboration between Year 7&8 students and a teacher at Edmund Hillary School. The teacher crafted the logo by combining the main themes and colours from students’ work. Edmund Hillary School’s business partners KPMG created the digital format. Then the teacher painted the logo in oils (pictured).

The logo depicts Uenuku, the Rainbow God, as the source providing clarity from heaven. The purple koru represents Education. The green koru represents Health and the lavender koru below represents Healthy Homes and Whanau. All three koru connect/link to the universe through the name Kootuitui. 

The three waves depicted in the purple koru represent kia ako (to learn), kia hanga (to create) and kia tohatoha (to share). This is the pedagogy central to the Manaiakalani Outreach programme."

na Kataraina Nock Principal Edmund Hillary School October 2015

Kia ora Kootuitui ki Papakura

I am so delighted to be appointed to the new role of Education Programme Leader for the Kootuitui ki Papakura schools' cluster. In my first two weeks I have visited five of the six schools and met the principals, attended three Manaiakalani and one Kootuitui professional development days, started working with Dave Winter, the Manaiakalani Outreach Delivery Manager and Maria Krausse, the cluster's Outreach Facilitator and spent time at my base school, Edmund Hillary School, with the Principal Convenor, Kataraina Nock, and her staff. What a dedicated group of professionals there are in this cluster and working with this cluster, all with their focus firmly on the children and their learning.

"He waka eke noa"

We are all in this canoe together and I am privileged to have been given a seat in this waka.

My blog is going to chronicle our journey. I will write about our plans, activities, successes, failures, and things we learn along the way, and discuss how these shape our direction. Along with the narrative, I will add my reflections and ideas, especially in relation to the quality of my paddling in the waka. 

Well hello Google! Since 2011, I have had just a few forays into the world of Google, sharing documents in Drive and forming circles in Google +. As Kootuitui ki Papakura operates in a Google world, I am busy getting to grips with this world so that I am conversant within it. I now have three 'user' profiles in Google so that I can separate Kootuitui from home and from my base school through which I blog. I have joined a number of communities in Google+ and shared into the Kootuitui site from other sites. I have started using Google calendar, had my first Hangout and have started learning the basics of a Google Site. Finally, Blogger is my first serious attempt at blogging.

I look forward to your comments and feedback.