#EduCampHB

#EduCampHB

What an amazing day, well worth the 8 hours spent in the car (Good thing I was with some awesome people).
I had amazing professional discussions, sharing, collaboration and reflection time with some of my favourite teachers from around New Zealand.
It was awesome to fill up my Kete with new ideas and tools that I can begin using immediately and some that I already want to investigate further.
Best of all, I always enjoy refilling my happy meter by connecting and reconnecting with like minded educators and feeling like I am on the right track.

Thank you everyone for a beautiful weekend.
Thank you Richmond school for your amazing hospitality.
Always a pleasure.
Looking forward to the next one.

Tweets from the day:

Presentation from the day:

Things to try:

- Using Google Maps to create a digital mihi

- Have a play with Google Drawing 

- Look into effective ways to utilise the website 'If This Then That' - www.ittt.com

- Look into Māori Maps for students to find their pepeha

- Research about authentic uses of 3D presentations 

- 3D printing apps - thingiverse & tinkercad (Makerbot - leased through local tech company- Ricoh) 

- Look at and play with Fiona Grants Google Drawing templates. Investigate further what can be done with. 

#Ulearn14

Ulearn 2014

What an amazing conference!

It always is... but to have it in my own city just made it that much more special.

This was my third Ulearn conference and I can easily say it was the best one yet!

We were privileged enough to have our school Kapa Haka group preform on the Thursday morning to 1600+ attendees.

I was able to see and talk to ex students who were working at the conference and was even lucky enough to have one of my own students come and help our with our workshop.

I tried to summarise my experience in a tweet:

We were lucky enough to have 6 of our staff attend the three day conference. This meant when we saw something amazing we were able to discuss and reflect on how we could introduce that into our own classrooms and teams when we get back to school.

Highlights:

- Presenting on Minecraft - Sharing my passion with other educators and helping them on their journey

- Connecting, networking (Face to face and on Twitter)

- Talking and talking and talking about everything and anything with like minded educators

- Hearing the Poutama teams journey (Breakout 5)

- Steve Mouldey's creativity is not just for the arts

- Stephen Lethbridge's session on making way towards a maker culture

- Having so many of our staff attend!

- Sharing my love of Twitter with my staff & teaching them how to use it

- I won a t-shirt

Lowlights:

- Super tired now at the end of the week

- I don't have enough money to get all the amazing things I saw

- I never wanted it to end! 

Tweets from the last three days

Day One:

Day Two:

Day Three:

Goals

- To use some of the tools and models I saw during the breakouts to develop my students thinking and questioning skills

- Let my students have more choices - let them choose who to work with, how many they need in a group etc...

- I want to try use Trailblazer with my class for evidence of research in their inquiries

- Buy some robotics/electronics kits, get stuff from junk yards for student to have a maker session - get parents involved to

- Help change my staffs mindsets!

- Are our learning spaces being used effectively?

- Read the books Steve mentioned in his session 

My takeaway tips/lesson ideas/websites

-  The notion of creating problem finders

- What if statements - start engaging discussions and questioning activities 

- Creativity challenges

- Trailblazer

- New Twitter friends!

- Kahoot 

Our Minecraft Slides (Breakout 4)

Now I just need to find the time to sit down with my other staff and do our team reflection together.

This is my initial basic reflection.

As I go over my notes and resources I will continue to update this blog with how my goals are going. 

If I saw you at Ulearn or we tweeted then thank you!

Loved the connections and learning.

Ulearn13: Notes, Tools & Tweets

How can it be over already?

It feels like it was over before it began!

My mind is blown and I don't even know where to start. I almost need another week to digest everything and be able to communicate what I have learnt. I am going to use this post to organize all the tweets (notes) I took and the tweets from others. I will further reflect and share on this as the term goes on but at the moment my head is swimming.

In a nutshell the conference for me was about connecting, collaborating, sharing, and inquiry. It has motivated me to continue to push the boundary and go after my passion of gamification (I will definitely be doing an in depth post on this later). I want to continue using Twitter as a platform for improving my pedagogy and challenging myself and students.

The Breakout Notes:

Breakout 1: Game-based Learning #Gamification

Breakout 2: E-Learning...10+ Magic Moments

Breakout 3: Why Writing is More Exciting in the Digital World

Breakout 4: Putting the 'E' in Assessment

Breakout 5: Ulearn Unconference Smackdown

Speed Geeking

This was an absolute blast! 

I presented (very briefly) on how I have used Minecraft in my class to engage students and enhance their learning. It was very cool to receive feedback and share my experience. I love seeing other teachers become passionate for what I am passionate about. I have now connected with various teachers on Twitter that I am going to work alongside with to create a Minecraft Curriculum and possible present at a conference in the future. 

Breakout 6: The Story of Mark Oliphant College: Apple Distinguished School in 18 months from opening

Breakout 7: Modern Learning Environments: Machines for Learning

Keynotes:

Keynote 1: Ken Shelton: Inspire and Motivate Through Transformational Teaching and Learning

Keynote 2: Mark Pesce: The Sharing Nexus: Connecting, Learning and the 21st Century Educational Environments

Keynote 3: Dame Anne Salmond: Knowledge is a Blessing on your mind

Learning & sharing that was occurring throughout the Conference: 

Tools and Apps I want try:

• Mystery Skype
• Dragons Box - App
• Coding an App
• Making a Game
• Continue to Quad-blog in NZ - expand to international
• Work alongside my students to create our own assessment and learning programme

The Power of Twitter

I connected with more people this Ulearn than I could have ever imagined possible through the power of Twitter. I felt like I was at more than one breakout at a time, because as I was engaged in my session, I was actively learning and participating in discussions about another. I was able to share and receive resources and notes and even make plans for future meet ups and learning.

I was pretty impressed with myself to be able to get myself on the top tweeters list - @kasseylee11
It is definitely going to force me to step my game up and keep a presence on social media.
We teach our kids not to consume but to create, this is my goal for Twitter and the VLN.

Watch this space for how I implement the ideas/tools I learnt into my classroom this term.

Now I need to begin writing some reports. 

How do I feel about the VLN?

How do you feel about the VLN?

After many months of +Annemarie Hyde telling me how amazing it is I have decided to join.
I am apprehensive of the fact that I struggle to keep up with Twitter (I go from super inspired and active to non existent and back again).

I can't believe I haven't joined up sooner, I mean who wouldn't want free PD online, anytime and anywhere? The best part is it is all NZ based help, resourcing and learning. I can subscribe to what I want or need and comment and contribute at my leisure  If I really want I can simply read and hitchhike from other peoples ideas.

The downside of this is over time my email becomes clogged because I can't keep up with all the posts. I do feel some what pressured to get my intellectual side out and make some philosophical or in depth posts about pedagogy and education (sometimes I feel its a bit of a battle in certain threads). Instead I try to make posts on areas I feel are strengths.

I made my first post:

I am still having to actively engage myself in the VLN. A lot of the time I just go in read, I don't really know how to share my ideas in written form that make sense to others. I think as I develop my leadership side more I will be involved in more active sharing.

Does anyone have any threads that they like to follow?

Share them in the comments.

Reflecting with another BT

Reflection time!

Professional sharing is at its best once again. Monique and I both started at Mokoia Intermediate at the same time. I am very fortunate to share the beginning teacher journey with someone else and be able to bounce ideas back and forth and round and round. Even though we are in a small school we seem to never even have a chance or the time to sit down and share what we are doing.

Monique was kind enough to offer to teach me how to make sushi (my favourite!) and in turn I shared with her my blog and resources I am using in my classroom. I was able to get some awesome ideas from Monique (maths certificates and challenges + daily paragraph challenges). I shared with Monique my vast collection of resources (so many we ran out of USB sticks and had to resort to a hard drive) and my classroom blog, PRT blog and my evidence of learning blogs. 

It was so nice to be in a relaxed environment with all the time in the world to chat and reflect. We shared behaviour strategies, maths strategies, engaging lesson ideas and just had a good general catch up on how we have found everything over the last year and a half and what are next steps and goals are.