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.

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:

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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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I have been working at Wakaaranga School in Auckland for one and a half days a week this year.  I am now starting to see the fruits of my labours, as teachers reflect upon the impact of the e-learning strategies I have facilitated in their classrooms.  Katie, in this video, reflects upon the impact not only upon her own pedagogy, but on the impact on student learning outcomes, as a result of integrating e-learning into her classroom in 2010.

I like videoing teachers. It is a great way to capture what they have to say. I videoed Lesley today. I was asking her to reflect upon how e-learning is working out for her in her class this year.

To follow on from yesterday’s post I have been working in Wakaaranga School today and one teacher shared how she is managing the e-learning experts in her class.  She has not created an experts wall, rather she has made the display the students themselves!  With a collection of lanyards lying around from old conference registrations, she has got the students to make their own experts badges in the vein of the image below.  This is a brilliant idea.  The more expert you are the more lanyards you wear.  Which one of the students in her class will be the first to resemble the 80’s A-Team icon “Mr T”?

In my previous post I mentioned how gratifying it is to see the fruits of your labours blossom, especially when a teacher gets the bit between their teeth and goes for it, especially in an e-learning sense.  I work at Wakaaranga Primary on Fridays and in the dying weeks of term two,  I spent  a rushed session with Lorraine, she had been squeezed in between two other teachers and needed a bit of guidance with her wiki.  She had set it up, but was struggling with how to do screen captures, upload those images and then create links.  I helped her with this.  Prior to this point Lorraine had not been overly keen on the prospect of e-leanring, but the wiki had somehow lit a flame of relevance or authenticity for her and when I saw her last week she showed me where her wiki had come to in a few short weeks, mostly through the school holidays.  Her site has become an amazing tool for all year 1 and 2 teachers in NZ schools and you should pass on the url to as many as you can.  What Lorraine has done has trawled the Internet for Flash games relevant to Literacy and Numeracy for year 1 and 2 students.  She has then graded the games by level and strand, it is a fantastic resource and she is continually adding to it.  Her wiki address is: http://room3c2010.wikispaces.com/

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I have been working with Lesley for term 2 of this year.  When we first met she admitted that she was not a power user of computers or any e-learning equipment for that matter, but knew that they had potential for positive outcomes in learning.  I was working with Lesley today, reviewing her e-learning work for the term and planning ‘where to next’ for next term.  As part of this review and forward looking  process, Lesley started to reflect not only upon the tremendously positive impact that the use of Glogster has had upon her students and their learning outcomes.  She also shared the tremendous impact that integrating e-learning has had upon her own teaching pedagogy.  She almost went as far as to say that her pedagogical shift has been a renaissance in her teaching practice.  I was so impressed by the passion and energy that she has shown, that I asked her if I could video her and get her to say to camera what she had shared with me.  If you need to use this video to inspire your reluctant staff, please do.  I think that Lesley is an inspiration.