I spent a good deal of the summer holidays in the South Island. It seems from the people that I have spoken to on my return, that it was a good thing that I did! The weather up here in Auckland was less than summery and was very wet. In the South Island we baked, it was great.

I have created a time lapse video from the trip and you can see it below. Why share a ‘holiday’ video on an education blog? There are free apps for the iPad that enable time lapse projects to happen in class. A web cam and Sam Animation will turn any computer into a time lapse camera. The point being that from recording how the earth rotates to watching flowers bloom, takes time.  Time lapse allows students to see what might be an abstract concept happen because this slow process can be sped up through time lapse.  Sure there are plenty of time lapse videos for them to look at on the Internet, however if they were to create them for themselves, they would have a greater understanding of the time frames involved.  The advent of digital cameras, web cams, free apps and software now make this once technical skill a simple reality in the classroom.

On a different note, each scene in the following video represents an hour of time, where I could do nothing but relax, let the camera do its stuff and marvel at the beauty around me.

South Island Time Lapse from David Kinane on Vimeo.

As we come to the end of the academic year, teachers who I have been working with all through 2010 at Wakaaranga School are reflecting on their personal growth with e-learning this year and the effect that this pedagogical shift has had upon student learning outcomes. In this interview with Megan, she also sets herself some interesting targets for 2011. I will be working with the staff at Wakaaranga again next year and as a result will be tracking this continued progress.

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Kelly is about to leave St Joseph’s, but here she is reflecting upon the impact of e-learning on her classroom practice, classroom management and student learning outcomes.

In an earlier post I quoted the “Aha!” moment of one of the teachers that I work with.  She has put the computers at the point of learning and in her case this means on the desks where the student sit in her class.  This is a direct response to the kind argument that David Jakes makes in his slide show which I featured in a June post.  The feed back from Maureen is that this simple act of moving the computers from the isolation point of the wall at the back of the room to where the students sit has had an immediate and dramatic effect upon the students’ learning and engagement with the tasks set.  The images below demonstrate how this is working in Maureen’s class.  Maureen has now requested from me the e-learning planning templates that I have developed in order that she can better plan to integrate a wider spectrum of  meaningful e-learning interventions into her term 4 planning.  I for one can not wait to get back to her class to see how her students are flourishing under their new layout.

I have already shared how Mel at Westmere has taken my suggested idea of class experts and has created her own experts wall.  She even went to the trouble of creating and sharing a template for others to use.  I have been promoting the great progress and innovation that Mel has been achieving at Westmere and it is obviously paying dividends. I was in Buckland School yesterday working with their lead teachers from the cluster and they took me to one of the rooms that is powering ahead with e-learning.  To my surprise and delight, there was Mel’s experts wall template and my experts idea thriving on a class wall that neither of us have had input into.  Proving that great ideas need spreading.  The slide show above shows the images from Buckland.