Today was my last day at Wakaaranga for 2010.  This school has come so far in one year.  When I started working there at the start of the year there was an overt climate of cynicism about the potential for e-learning.  The staff had been fed a diet of unreliability with the network and had no real clear vision for the power of e-learning.  When I made my presentation to the staff back in early December 2009, the climax was a tangible Tui moment of “Yeah Right!” But a year later, the staff, the school and now the parents all want in to the e-learning programme.  So although this is my last day, I can not wait to get back in there next year to work with a new crop of now willing and not cynical teachers who also want to integrate e-learning into their class programme and witness the increased student engagement, attainment and enthusiasm to learn that other teachers have experienced this year.

Working with Shumba today, she wanted to share her progress this year, unbidden.   Her one condition was not to be videoed, so I recorded her using Audacity.  Listen to what she has to say here:

shumba-reflects-on-2010

Yesterday I gave the following presentation in breakout 2 of Ulearn 10:

Yesterday I presented in break out one of Ulearn10, the following presentation:

Continuing the Open Source software theme.  I have been attending a course on 3D animation for the last 10 weeks, it came to an end this week.  I attended primarily to bring my Blender skills up a notch or two.  I am self taught and am well aware that while this method can work well it is also a recipie for engendering bad habits!

The course was at the Freelance Animation School here in Auckland and their program of choice is Max 3DS.  As is usual at the end of these things we had to complete an evaluation.  I thanked Mark our tutor for teaching me more about Blender in the previous weeks that I had learnt in a long time.  He was confused as we had not even looked at Blender!  It got me thinking and we discussed how using Open Source 3D animation would be a good choice for adult evening classes.  At this point his boss walked in and we had a discussion about why Open Source software should be offered as a short course option.  I believe that offering short courses in Inkscape and Blender for example to secondary school teachers would be able to provide foundation courses in these programmes in school which would teach the pupils the basic principles of the programmes that in courses such as the ones offered at Freelance, students would arrive with a better grounding and with a skill set that could be easily transferred to the commercial variants that the work with at Freelance.

Mark’s boss seemed very impressed by this notion.  We are currently investigating how I could put together a programme of lessons for their tutors, alumni and existing students in such open source programmes as Blender, Inkscape, The Gimp etc and have me deliver them.  I have already drafted out a series of lessons and skills, I will be meeting the school again in a week or so to continue the planning.

I am currently working with two schools to design and revamp their sites.  It is interesting work designing websites for schools as each has their own ethos and philosophy.  A website should be something that acts as a mirror, especially for institutions such as schools.  As such, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for schools.  I have seen several school websites recently that have been ‘templated’ by the same company and they look just that, die cast.  In fact the more you look at these sites, the more you see the company that built them than the school.