A good ‘hands on’ session starting with a quick overview of using Google Draw to create infographics. Here’s the link to the presentation. Had some time to complete a drawing representing my PLN including resizing icons, adding images through search, connecting shapes and publishing. Here is the result:

Also had a great tip for creating family trees (my students do an Ancestry unit where they have to include a copy of their family tree). This link is a how to for using Google Sheets to add the data then insert a chart which looks like a flow chart. Use the = sign in Column B to indicate ‘son/daughter or’, insert a chart, un-tick all options and choose organisation chart from the chart type. Sweet…

I’ve followed Richard Wells for a couple of years and particularly like his use of graphics to explain education related concepts and issues. It was great to get along to see his presentation – here is a link to presentation.

Notes:

• NCEA is the leading world assessment system
• Vuja De – (as the opposite of Deja Vu). Growth mindset. What’s in front of me isn’t necessarily what I think it is. Heaps more resources including this link.
• Man draw – Michael Mcintyre

• Get out of the habit of providing really good resources.
• Kids choose to live in places where they fail often (Gaming). They don’t avoid complexity
• Finished with a quote from Adam Grant’s TED talk – Fail often, fail early

A small section of the big crowd in for the Auckland #gafesummit kicking off this morning. A big 2 days ahead! pic.twitter.com/OJWkQVVe5B

— Rich Lambert (@richielambert) April 17, 2016

Learning is a design challenge. Here’s an example of a design challenge (as seen on this TED talk) – Marshmallow challenge

Mindset, not skill set

Here is Google’s graveyard (Ben and Jerry also have one for their ice cream flavours):

What needs to go in our educational graveyard?

“Innovation comes from a problem you find fascinating” – Anne Gibbon

The Young Innovators Award is something I’ve been loosely involved with over the last few years with a couple of students in my class being eventually cajoled to submit an entry (one year we even had two finalists!) I have found it difficult to motivate boys to do more than a lastminute.com rush job and this year will try a different approach.

So it was with some enthusiasm I headed off to the launch breakfast held at Classic Flyers which not only provided a good feed and the chance to chat with other teachers, but this year they had arranged for a guest speaker followed by a teacher’s workshop. Anne Gibbon was an engaging speaker with a great back story. The opening quote was my take home message from her entertaining talk.

A new initiative this year was the teachers ‘turbo masterclass’ presented by Jono Jones. He was an energetic presenter that took us through a brief presentation of innovation and design thinking which was the underlying concept for the YIA. The great thing about this session was that were went through the design process with the challenge of how to ‘improve the staff room experience’. We went through a 5 step process:

Step 1: Brainstorm – what are some possible problems?

Step 2: Talk to people – to they reinforce your hunch? Is it a real problem?

Step 3: Set the problem – clearly articulate the problem.

Step 4: Heaps of ideas – generate some solutions.

Step 5: Turbo Makeathon – physical prototyping of a chosen solution.

So I took that task back to school, modified it and presented to students. Here is a link to my class room resource that I shared with the students – one per group. I made the mistake in the first class of not reinforcing the importance of defining the problem. The students went into a mass brainstorm of solutions – many were solutions to problems that didn’t exist. Here’s an example:

With the next class I focussed in on the problem and the student generated much better ideas. We will see if this flows through to some quality YIA projects…

From the TBC PL Google+ Community

New in Classroom: saving time while marking

For those of you using Google Classroom, here is a list of recent updates you may not be aware of:

“We built Classroom to save teachers time, and we know that grading is one of those tasks that can involve a lot of little time wasters. In fact, students have turned in more than 200 million assignments via Classroom to date, which adds up to a lot of grading hours. HERE IS THE LINK TO THE FIRST EASTER EGG

5 Chrome Apps for Student Creation

What some other tasks than just creating a document or a presentation? Here is a list of 5 really good content creation tools that students can use with the Google Chrome browser. I’ve used Powtoon in class to get student’s to create short explanations of scientific concepts and found it works really well.

Tips, Tricks and Traps

EDpuzzle: Google Classroom Awesome Integration

EDpuzzle is an online app that allows you to ‘push’ a video resource out to students, then be able to see who has watched it and you can even add in questions to check for understanding. It now works really well with Google Classroom and will ‘pull’ the class lists from Classroom (so you don’t have to add individual students) and can also automagically post to your Stream. Enough from me – watch the Video. Site is www.edpuzzle.com

E-Learning workshops 

If you’ve been to one of the e-Learning workshop chances are the presentation file is on this site. Feel free to link them in to your appraisal document.

More tips and resources @ TBC PL Website

Things that make you go hmmmm….

Teacher gobbledegook gets glossary

Appearing in the papers last week was news that education has a heap of jargon – wow, surprise surprise. Either go straight to the ERO’s glossary or read the news article.

“Digital natives have emerged from the cave to gather at the watering hole where they’ll ponder their cognitive wobble. Confused? You’re not the only one. Try translating systemness, digital immigrant and scaffolding from the classroom into plain English….”