pakiki.net

A chance for some of the presenters to wow the audience with quirky tips and tricks.

1. Bitmoji: App and Chrome Addon. Include in Gmail’s as well.
2. Corgiorgy: Make your own by uploading GIF’s and add Youtube music background
3. Linewize: yawn
4. Google Tips posters: nice
5. MyMaps: Using the draw polygon feature, we can see Australia is bigger than Greenland
6. Colour picker add on and Paletton to select matching colours.
7. Omnibox: Add different search tools to Chrome’s omni box. Search GMail, twitter, Drive, Youtube.

Plus one more – copy a list of names in http://primaryschoolict.com/random-name-selector to select a random name!

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…