I have been working with Helen from Woodford Schools, Plymouth, UK for a number of years.  Back in 2007 we started to collaborate between our schools in New Zealand and England.  We used tools such as Skype, Dim Dim, Skrbl to collaborate and I spent many late evenings remote teaching her students in the UK from my desk via web cam here in New Zealand.  The students were not at all phased at being taught in this manner, it was the adults in the room in the UK observing this who had the hardest time!  The collaboration only worked because the two of us at either end of the asynchronous communication plan had energy, vision and drive to see it through.  We had never met, but decided to write and present a paper on our collaboration.  We presented at the VIASL IFIP3.5 conference at the Charles University, Prague in June 2008.  You can read about that here. We wanted to prove that remote teaching and asynchronous collaboration between students could work in a meaningful manner.  I have always been and remain fascinated by the potential of remote learning to reach out to students in remote locations to enable a rich, bespoke and meaningful curriculum for them.  I am currently working on a side project to facilitate such opportunities for students, I am currently dubbing it a school of passions.

I am now about to embark on another round of  remote collaboration with students.  Again I am working with Helen and this time Megan from Wakaaranga School in Auckland.  Our aim this time is to see if students can collaborate, negotiate, design and construct a game in Gamemaker.  They have already been organised into teams of four, two students from the UK and two from NZ.  This team of four will be designing and collaborating asynchronously.  A wiki has been created for them as a staging post for them to share their work.  It is from here that the students will collaborate.  The students will work on their Gamemaker program once they have agreed the objectives and plans for the game, locally on their computers, then usin tools such as Jing or Cam Studio they will take screen shots of the work they have done and submit those to the wiki.  They will then communicate with each other using Talkwheel to monitor what the other groups are struggling with, to share ideas and successes.  However, rather than typing their messages the students will be recording their messages using Audioboo so that they will in effect be leaving ansaphone messages for all to listen to via a hyperlink.  The project is all prepped and is about to commence.

I have to say a big thank you to Patrick at Talkwheel who has been very supportive in setting up student accounts for us and providing me with some training and also to Kate at Audioboo who has offered her help towards this project too.

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I am starting to see some of the fruits of my labours in the different range of schools that I am working in currently.  The video you see here was taken in a school recently, when a student who I have worked with a couple of times came up to me wanting to share his latest creation.  When we last met he showed me the stop motion video he had created using a webcam and some LEGO characters, it was excellent.  He had done the work in collaboration with a friend during their lunchtimes at school.  It was not part of any project related to school, it was simply something that they wanted to do.

He is the kind of student that once he has got his teeth into something, he will not let it go.  In other words he shows remarkable resilience and tenacity.  When we met again recently he showed me his LEGO NXT creation, it is in short brilliant.  He told me that it took him “…literally hours to work out the bugs in the programming.”  But he stuck at it, and the video results speak for themselves.  I have now suggested that he adapt the shooting mechanism to not fire pellets but rather to trigger a digital camera.  In other words turn the attack robot into a surveillance robot.  I have no doubt that he will do that and I look forward to my next visit to this school.

What this student has shown are many of the key statements in the NZC vision statements.  How do you plan to create situations in a classroom that engender resilience for example?  A tool such as the LEGO NXT can and does do this as do tools such as Gamemaker, which I am starting a unit on in another school this Friday.  I have long been a fan of LEGO NXT as a teaching and learning tool and have posted about it before on the Supertanker It is these kinds of scenario enabling tools that should, I believe, be given greater prominence in classes to build capacity for resilience in our students.  Not to mention the quality of thinking, collaboration, engagement and authenticity that these tools provide.

The latest edition of Interface Magazine is about to hit all schools in New Zealand in time for the start of term 2.  In this edition of the magazine is my latest article written for them.  You can read it here http://www.interfacemagazine.co.nz/articles.cfm?c_id=26&id=432 The article discusses the huge potential that gaming and problem solving has in the classroom.  I have just spent a week in the South Island on the westcoast in Greymouth and Westport working with students and teaching them how to problem solve through using Gamemaker as a vehicle.  I have encouraged those students who I worked with to send me their completed work and have promised to publish their work onto the wiki that I produced for the event.  One student has already sent his work through and you can see his work and download it for your own gaming pleasure from the following wiki:  http://westcoast2010.wikispaces.com/Gamemaker Whilst you are there you might also like to look at some of the other work that I did whilst I was there.  I am currently uploading to http://blip.tv a video of one of the presentations I made and will embed this into the relevant wiki page in due course.

I have spent the last three days in Greymouth.  I had been invited down to the Westcoast by Gurden Consulting as a result of them seeing one of my presentations at Ulearn last October.  I flew into Hokitika on Sunday in what has to be the smallest commercial aircraft I have ever travelled in!  The first officer was doing everything, welcoming us on board, closing the doors etc.  It was a narrow, short, noisy turbo prop plane that did its job and flew me from Christchurch over the southern alps to the west coast.

Once in Greymouth, via Hokitika airport I have been working every day.  I have run four student workshops on Gamemaker and have also run a single workshop on Pencil Animation.  In addition I have also given two presentations, one to the local community and business leaders of the Greymouth district and one to a cohort of local teachers.  My presentations can be seen on the wiki that  I have made for the occasion.  My exploits on the coast have also made it into the local paper the Greymouth Evening Star!

After my final presentation today, I have been driven up to Westport to repeat the program again.   I love this part of New Zealand and it was a real treat to drive up the coast as the westerly whipped up the surf on the Tasman and watch the sun go down.  I am normally driving, so this time it was a treat to look and not concentrate.  I saw plenty of Weka on the way up.  It is a magic drive.

Tomorrow we start again.