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With nothing better to do in the school holidays, I signed up for the  GAFE Summit in Auckland. This ran over two days with a couple of key notes and 8 workshop sessions. Run by EdTechTeam, an American based organisation, the focus was on using Google Apps for Eduction (GAFE).

I was hoping to add to my skill set and understanding of using Google Apps since I use it a heap of the time teaching in the Inquiry programme.

Mark Wagner

First up was the keynote. Introduced by Mark Wagner, he gave an overview of the number of these type of summits his organisation had hosted (52 in the last 22 months).

Notes:

U2 quotes:

“Let uncertainly be a guiding light”

“Dream out loud”

Is your school future ready?

Keynote – Suan Leo

Summary image

Start with why – http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

Inspiring story of 3D printing arms

Trends in higher eduction – report

“Shift from students as consumers to students as creators”

Google search vs discovery. Discovery – all the other things that happen on the way. Ask ‘un-Googleable’ questions.

10 things Google know to be true

Planning for the last mile, not the first. Post by Jeff Utecht

Well, look at me-this week I decided to get all flash and start to study at the prestigious Stanford University in California. Sounds next level, but in reality is just an online course titled ‘How to learn Math‘ by Dr Jo Boaler. She has been a real math teacher in the US and the UK before lecturing in Math education.

The Mathmatician’s Lament is a thought provoking piece of work as you realise the ridiculousness of applying the same approach that we have with Maths to another curriculum area. But how can we create opportunities for students to ‘play’ Math? What does that look like?

Jo refers to Carol Dweck’s work on Mindset. There are two types-fixed and growth. So a fixed mindset would have a dumb kid saying they are dumb and can’t improve. This type of approach would certainly do away with the tradition of streamed classes based on ability as a growth mindset over comes any pigeon holing based on placement in either a ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’ class.

The growth mindset is a better concept to think of than just a simple work ethic. Students still need to work hard but that needs to be based on a belief that they can get better.

every mistake creates a synapse

Making mistakes is THE most useful things in maths

Concept of a Didactic contract in Maths learning: students want to be shown step by step, and teachers want to help; both lessening the ‘struggle’ and cognitive effort that will lead to deeper learning.

Attended a breakfast meeting this morning with a bunch of other Technology related teachers and IT professionals. This loose group sort of started last year with an initial aim to connect schools with people in the local IT industry. Out of that gathering came a desire from schools to get some better info from industry about what they were looking for in employees. At today’s meeting Joy Cottle from the Institute of IT Professionals gave a presentation about her oranisation’s work in this area.

The IITP offers presentations for school to attract students to pursue IT as a career. There is apparently a significant skills shortage and this is one way the industry hopes to address this. They offer 4 presentations:

1. General presentation to a captive audience about how awesome ICT is
2. Voluntary presentation by a local IT professional
3. Voluntary presentation by another local IT professional
4. Voluntary presentation by a person associated with a local tertiary trainer

Sounds all good and would definitely be useful at this time of the year when students are considering option choices.

To make best use of an inset day, Tom and headed up to Auckland for a 1 day workshop on Google Tools presented by Mark Osbourne. Started off with an overview of the basic features of Google Drive and the ways in which sharing and commenting can be used to enhance student learning. He made a good point that “we often forget how hard it is to do something if we are not good at it”.

He highlighted some work from John Hattie about things that make a difference in a classroom – feedback and co-opertative learning. One idea that we could implement in the inquiry programme is to have students share their draft report with another student and spend one lesson on peer editing using the commenting feature of Google Docs.

One activity that Hattie has identified as being useful in reciprocal teaching. I had the idea to use this in teaching metals to my mainstream science class. Here’s a brief plan:

1. Allocate an alloy to a group (2-3), create one document that they share
2. Group complete a description of alloy (image, properties)
3. Swap ‘alloys’ (re-share the document) and next group completes ‘Uses’
4. Swap ‘alloys’ (re-share the document agin) and next group completes ‘Innovative use in an interesting context’

5. Swap ‘alloys’ again, summarise the document an put into one slide on a presentation that is shared with the whole class.

Another idea is to create one document to share with both inquiry classes that includes short cut keys to make students more efficient users of their machine.

Teaching search was another them we touched on. There is more to search than just Google.  Some strategies are to introduce students to other search tools such as Google Scholar, Google Books, Social Booking marking (Delicious, BibMe), or dedicated research databases such as Epic. One task, as well as the Google a Day challenge is Googlewhacking.

Random notes:

Google takeout enables you to download all your files from a Google account to move to a new account.

Google Plus: Hangout is a live video feed. Plus share a document. Plus screenshare. Plus Screen capture. Wow. Will it take over the organising and sharing role of Moodle?

Quizlet: web based tool for quizes.

 MyPortfolio: This is a web based tool for aggregating content that students have completed. You can embedded Google Drive content so the student can provide evidence for a particular sections (such as an Achievement Standard). Teachers and others can comment on the students work. In four short words: Collect, Select, Reflect, Connect.