#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.

Connected Educators Month - Rotorua Pass the Blog

Connected Educators Month runs for the month of October.

Each school day of October a different class will post. There is a set list of questions and small list of protocols to show our digital citizenship. The hope is to have classrooms from all across the education sector participating. 

If your are a teacher in Rotorua please sign up 

P3's Blog Post:

Estelle
Tegan
Josh

1. What school do you go to?

Mokoia Intermediate

2. What is something special about your school?

Mokoia has an amazing fitness programme that we do every morning before we start our learning. We are very privileged to be able to try out lots of different sports and represent our school at a range of events and levels. I think our fitness programme makes us stand out athletes. 

The opportunities Mokoia gives us for everything. Sport going to Aims, camp leaders, house captains, house competitions and lots of learning opportunities like Rotomaths and news team. I think our school gets along really well together because we are quite a small school.

The sports opportunities are awesome. We can try out different sports and go to lots of events. We are such a small school that all the teachers and students know us really well. Even when you do something small you get noticed for it and I like that. 

3. What is something you have enjoyed learning about this year?

I have really enjoyed speeches. It is a different type of learning from normal and I got to choose my own topic. I chose to research and talk about ivory smuggling. I discovered that the items they make from ivory were beautiful but the slaughter of elephants is a tragedy. 

I really enjoyed learning about my exploration topic. I chose to research about hostile environments. I chose Caracus, Venezuela. I liked this topic because I like researching and planning out my budget to visit there. I used IMovie to present my work and I had never used that app before. 

I liked Genius Hour. Genius hour =  we chose a topic we would do for a term. It was our passion time to create something we were interested in. I chose to make a Hunger Games P.E. game. I got to work in a group with my friends and I enjoyed all the research and effort we put into this. 

4. What do you like most about living in Rotorua?

I love that it is a small town and I know a lot of people from different schools. I like being able to go and swim at the lake and mountain bike in the forest. I am glad I don't live in a place like Auckland because it is so busy all the time and too much traffic. 

I love living on a farm. I like spring the best because we get to have pet calves and lambs. I like using my farm to train for cross country. I really like the forest as well.

Swim training with Hank. This is all I really do because I pretty much do squad training every day.

5. What do you most like doing on your computer/ipad/devices at your school to help your learning?

I like Minecraft. It is helped me with understand co-ordinates, symmetry, maths (area/volume/perimeter), visualising, explain and design new modern structures and being creative. I love using quiz up in reading time it has helped me to read faster and my general knowledge on a range of subjects.

I like Minecraft. It helps me to be design buildings and lots of other cool stuff. I also like Quiz Up because I like to challenge other people. 

I like Kodu Game Lab. I like all the programming and seeing how things work inside the programme. 

6. Is there anything else you'd like to share about yourself, your learning, your class or your school?

In our school we all work well together, we have a strong bond and that reflects in our learning because we all help and support each other. This is not something that just happens in the classroom is happens during trips, camps and out in the playground. I am proud to be a house captain and to be able to take on lots of leadership roles.

I love our class, we all have lots of fun together. We have had lots of good times in our class. My favourite subject is reading and writing. My ambition is to be triathlete and a teacher. I am excited to go and compete in AIMs games this week on Sunday for cross country and next week for the multisport. 

We have got the coolest, amazing, fun teacher. I want to be a swimmer when I am older and I want to break world records. I really like to play with a ball at break times with people in my class. 

Teaching Our Pepeha

At the start of this year our staff went on a PD day to our local Marae. Once we there we talked about connecting our students to the local area through our school pepeha. It was great for us as staff to learn our pepeha and have it broken down. It was broken down into meaning of the words and understanding of each of the locations and their significance to our school and students. 

Our Pepeha:

Ko Whakapoungakau te pae maunga

Ko Pukepoto te tihi

Ko Waingaehe te awa

Ko te Rotoruanui-a-Kahumata-momoe

Ko Mokoia te Motutapu-a-Tinirau

Ko Puketawhero te papawhenua

Ko Whakaue te iwi

Ko Roro-o-terangi te hapu

Ko Mokoia te kura

Tihei mauriora

One of our teachers taught this to the students' during our camp rotation. She taught it to the students line by line. She started with our maunga and showed the students what it was, where it was and broke down the meaning of the word 'Whakapoungakau'. She then told the students to draw a mountain range on their paper and label it. She did this line by line until the students had a piece of art that reflected our pepeha. What I love most about this is the work my students came back with was all different based upon their interpretation and the way they visualized each feature. 

Professional Development Day - Saturday 31st August - Tataiako and the Registered Teacher Criteria

Time in school - 10am - 2pm

Tataiako and RTC

Two different documents that interweave

Looking for links by analysing and evaluating the key indicators for each and matching them against the criteria. 

Paired up with Glen to unpack both documents

Given opportunity to share our view, join up with another pair (Monique and Pauline). 

"Teachers need to take individual responsibility to meet the criteria and practice the cultural competency/provide the evidence ourselves."

Work in groups (Liana, Glen and I) 

What should this look like in practice at Mokoia in a classroom?

What sources of evidence can I provide?

Each groups will be combined to create one document.  

My version of Tataiako aligned with the RTCs (Criteria 1 - 4)