I was working at Pinehill School yesterday.  The staff were all issued with an iPad each last week and after a week of owning one, we ran a staff meeting to allow staff to share their thoughts and share the apps they had discovered and used in class.  I decided to run a ‘Genius Bar.’  I set up my Apple TV on the large TV that is mounted in the staffroom and started the meeting off by showing the staff how they could turn on mirroring on their iPads.  The staff were then able to take it in turns, or not and bump each other off from the screen session to demonstrate the apps that they had been using over the last week.  It was a great session and it also showed to the teachers how an iPad and an Apple TV in their class could be used as a collaborative tool with their students.  The iPads became a multitfunctional mobi.

I have just completed a project to integrate 2D animation into the curriculum.  I have organised the resource by curriculum area and in year bands in order that teachers can see the kinds of activities they could contmeplate undertaking with their students, in particular curriculum areas.  The resource caters for students from Year 1 through to Year 10.  In this first iteraction of the document I have just concentrated on Literacy, Numeracy, Science, Social Studies and Te Reo.   I have no doubt that I will be adding more ideas to more strands of each curriculum area and to other curriculum areas over the coming weeks!

The screen shot above shows how a teacher of years 7 and 8 might want to use animation in a science lesson.  In the resource I have sometimes given  a simple over view of the ideas for activities (as above) and then in other cases more complex and detailed ideas for activities.  Each idea has been graded by level and curriculum strand as well.  In addition I have listed the kinds of tools that would deliver the outcomes stated in the activites as well as stating where the students should save their work to and how a teacher might then re-use the resource created by the students for futher learning.  Finally I have indicated where each activity might have other curriculum area integration potential.

Now that I have done this document I will be turning my attention to other elearning activities such as integrating digital cameras, video camears, capturing student voice etc and how these can be integrated into each curriculum area and year level.  Watch this space.

I have spent the summer creating the first tranche of resources for an integrated elearing planner for teachers.  The resource is web based and is designed to be stored on a school’s intranet or LMS.  It is designed to be adapted to the individual needs of a school and is not an off the shelf resource.  We will adapt it to mee the specific needs of any school.

As part of my facilitation work I see that the biggest stumbling block for those teachers who are not those at the leading edge of elearning is making the conceptual/pedagocial leap into elearning.  For this strata of the teaching profession they have adopted the strategy of regarding ICT/elearning as an extra, almost a treat for the students in their classrooms.  What is more, when the going gets tough, ICT activities can be withtdrawn, shelved, put on ice etc.  In addition the classroom strategies adopted by these teachers ensures that the type of ICT work that they have the students do is almost always enrichment type activities.

The resource I have created is designed to scaffold these teachers in thier journey towards elearning integration in their classroom.  The image above is a screen shot from just one of the pages.  I have taken an existing units of work and have created age appropriate, curriculum specific learning activities that include suggested elearning tools that teachers could use (Arrow A).  In the next column (Arrow B) is a list of suggested elearning tools that teachers might like to consider using, each has their merits and the idea is that a teacher will select a tool to achieve the learning goals, based on their own comfort levels.  In the third column  (Arrow C) there are links to interactive tutorials that I have created, that teachers can use to learn how to use the tools suggested in the second column.  I have always said to teachers that it is not important whether they can use the tools I suggest that they might like to use in class.  What is important is that they know what the learning potential these tools can facilitate and plan accordingly.  So equally this column and the interactive tutorials they point to, could be shared with students so that they learn how to use the tools.  The final column links to other documents to demonstrate the integration potential of the activities highlighted.  At the bottom of each learning activity I have also coded the  activities as being E, P, C or PS for Enrichment, Publishing, Collaboration or Problem Solving activities.  The purpose here is for teachers to be able to monitor what kind of activities predominate in their class and to set goals to make the elearning a richer experience in their classes as a result of their audits.

Over time I will add another column to this resource, one which links to videos of best practice; best practice with specific tools being used in classrooms by teachers.  I have long been a champion of schools retaining their Intellectual Property and think capturing teacher best practice is a good way to ensure that this happens.  The added benefit of doing this, when combined with the resource that I have created is that not only is IP actively farmed, schools create an induction pack for new staff that can be used by individual schools to project a philosphy of how they do elearning.

Perhaps the best beneift to schools is that over time they are creating their own training resource, specific to their school.  It will be a truly JIT (Just in Time) training resource for new and existing staff.

I am happy to talk with you to discuss your individual requirements for this resource to work in your school.

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.