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….”

The Power Of I Don’t Know

Nice infographic reinforcing that all teachers are teachers of Search. Students need information literacy and be deliberately taught how to search for reliable information. Google has some good resources for how to teach students to search effectively.

7 New Google Tricks from Shake Up Learning

Here’s a good, brief update of some recent feature additions Google has made to Forms and Docs (how about Voice typing in Google Docs!)

Tips, Tricks and Traps

Form Class – co-curricular involvement form

To keep track of what your tutees are involved in, you can print out this form and have students complete at beginning or end of year. Not only will it help you with what activities they are involved in but also encourage them to make the most of the opportunities available (for example if all are blank you can start a conversation with the student about getting involved in something.)

Form class Folder

One trick I have used is to have a clear file folder with one sleeve per student. In it goes all the bits of paper we get about the student (Academic coaching, CareersNZ, Co-curricular form). This has been especially useful for the Y12 Academic coaching where you can easily refer back to the documentation from Y11 to see what has changed.

More tips and resources @ TBC PL Website

Things that make you go hmmmm….

Digital citizenship

Teaching digital citizenship in a meaninful way is a challenge for any school. Here’s the thoughts of Colin Bridgewater from The American School in London on some of the challenges and solutions:

“Any time I speak with parents or students, I remind them that the TOS for most sites state that users must be 13 or older to sign up for or use an account. But I also explain to parents that this age limit has to do with complying with a US law about data collection from children. Instagram and Snapchat are pretty popular with our fifth and sixth graders, all of whom are under the age of 13. 

Just today the assistant principal and I did a session for MS parents about social media and children, and one of the points we made to them was that there are some 17 year olds who don’t have the emotional maturity to make good decisions online, while there are some 11 year olds who are wise beyond their years. Ultimately, it’s a family decision as to when their children are ready to be on social media and what sites they might be ready for.

Then, at whatever age they’re allowed to use digital devices and be on social media, they need the following from their parents and their teachers: modeling, communication, repetition, oversight. You wouldn’t hand the keys to a car to your child without any preparation. You’d model good driving technique in the years leading up to the time when they’ll start to learn to drive and would continue to model good driving technique while they are learning. You’d talk them through situations while you’re in the car driving and when they’re first behind the wheel (communication). They would get hours of practice (repetition) behind the wheel with you and their driver’s ed instructor before they could be eligible to take a driving test. They wouldn’t be able to practice without an adult in a car, and even when they pass their test and get their license, most US States require newly licensed drivers to have an adult in the car in certain situations for their first year (oversight). The same careful consideration and time needs to be given to the process of introducing children to social media.

When we’ve become aware of instances when children have misused social media accounts (whether they’re under 13 or over 13), we generally don’t treat it as technology issue. Instead, it’s usually framed around our school’s Core Values. Sometimes it involves consequences from the school, and sometimes it’s handled just by the parents. It really depends on the situation and how much it has had an impact on members of our community.”

If you’re interested, continue to check out NetSafe’s teacher resources.