GAFE-Ignite session

The final event at the GAFE summit was ignite talks speaker have 5 mins and 20slides to share their message and idea.

Beginning code switching by Jim Sill
After 30 years of driving, Driving on the left instead of the right has caused a switch because not the cars on a different side and when you go to turn the windscreen wipers go on.

So we need to be aware that we you try something new you should expect not to be great at it first time.  When we go back to our class we have to remember that our children are code switching when they change teachers.

This book may help you to understand this ideas more, Hardwiring Happiness-Rick Hanson PD

Reaching the Summit (and surviving) by Stuart Kelly

What does it take?
Citizenship-You have to be united and a family.
Culture-Each person has a culture they bring with them and culture can be supported and promoted with digital technology.
Connectivity-Connecting allows us to do more and do all of the things we have learnt today. We all need Wifi.
Celebration-We need celebrate our success, Ask your students is it work? Celebrate by sharing.
Cash- infrastructure is everything You need to spend on the important things.
Communicate- Talk about it, as soon as you start thinking talk about it.
Recognise the talent within your own school.

Students, Students, Students, Think move a grow it teams to do the best for them.

My digital Journey-Angelnella
She is a year 11 student. She is the first student at her school to buy and bring her chromebook to school for BYOD. When she was little she could never imaged having her own phone and chromebook or being at a full digital school. She feels support by her school and teachers to use her device and connect. Students can share away from a normal classroom on the field, at lunch or at home. Robotics is a subject taught at her school and taking this subject is something that she wants her future to be focused around, this opportunity came from this school subject. This subjects helps her to learn from mistakes and proved that technology can help solve problems and hope is important too.

Make Mistakes, Learn from them!!

As children we believe in many things and things we can make them possible.

Trust Us! give us as students to use our devices and trust us with our devices until we prove you wrong!
"In the future I hope to see flying cars, hoverboards and all of you." I know that I want to see you again too, surely doing amazing things.

More than a coincidence? Chris Betcher
When you hang out with people that want what you want you have a pretty high likelihood of mixing with the right people to get what you want.
It is who we know!
Think about all the people you have met today and think....
Who did you meet?
How will you continue to connect?

I won an awesome book by Richard Wells. Yay!

GAFE-Session 5&7

Today I followed Jim around GAFE.

First I went to his session on-360 images and Google Street- Jim Sill
The street view app is a really cool way of viewing exciting places and looking around them. It allows your learners to be there using the magic of digital technology. The even better thing is that you as an educator can add to the bank of 360 images or make images that you can keep them private. You can use a normal camera or use a 360 camera. For more information click on Jim's name to go to his resources.

Exploring Google Expeditions with cardboard- Jim Sill 

You don't need Google Cardboard for expeditions but it makes it better. You can buy cardboard really cheap but they won't as good as the just a little bit more expensive ones $7-10. Test the lenses and the quality of the cardboard.

Google expeditions uses street view so you can visit locations as if you are on a fieldtrip.
-It shows children a world outside of their backyards.
-Allows them to connect with the learning.
-Connect emotionally with areas and topics.

There is teaching material on the expeditions that teachers can use to support student learning. You can point children to different things to look at. You can see what the children are doing. It has guiding questions (With answers YAY!). As a teacher you can pause it but as Jim said if you pauses it the kids will get grumpy but it may have its uses.

The kit
It does not come as a kit but you may need to build a kit.
-You need phones or ipads
-Cardboard (not necessary but good).
-Teacher device (Tablet or Ipad)
-You need a network, local wifi network using a router. The local network because most schools block pair to pair sharing.

Jim Lead our expedition to El Capitan. Climbing up this huge mountain was a great experience. Jim had the ability to point out anything that we are talking about or things that kids might want to talk about.

Within expeditions you can search for them by subject.

Presentation two- Leading Learning using Google Sites

This session was about how we use sites and what learning looks like in our classrooms. It was another great session. Thank you to our wonderful open minded audience!

GAFE Day 2- Opening Keynote

To start the we were so very very privileged to have the amazing Aorere College Barbarshop group 'Fa Man'. Thank you to the four very talented young men who shared their passion with us it was wonderful.

Day 2-Keynote
Richard Wells presents 'Let learning TRUMP teaching & tech'

Richard started by saying I can tell the future I have been telling my children for years all you need to worry about is TRUMP.

Teachers and children often say in relation to learning:

"I hate it when he just keeps talking"

"I just want to work on the things I need to"

The thing that is interesting is that well teachers say this when they are the learners but as teachers do we still do it?

In England when he was at school, the school focused on letting children explore to learn but this didn't teach him the skills or strategies he needed to solve problems himself in reading. 

Maybe why children love playing games is because each person has a role and everyone knows their role and the rules of the game so they can manage and play and solve problems themselves. Richards ideas that he is focusing on in his blogging is giving kids strategies so they can play on the pitch without the coach (teacher). 

The classroom needs to recognise the individual learner not just the teacher. Here are some ideas of things people have given the kids to help them decide what they need to do. 

How to we adjust to make sure children always know what they are doing. How can learners get feedback from each other and support each other to speed up the feedback loop. 

Should they connect? How should they connect? Is one way of connect enough and what tools do they use to conduct these connections effectively. 

Richards Wells suggest that we need to give learners access to all five tools, here is his blog post on this topic.

This is Richards awesome tools. 

Relating to others especially when in confrontation, Well you can would together in Doc and Hangout students need to have tools and strategies for the students to do it.

Using language symbols and text, I can put stuff on a slide that no one can read. You can use text and images to really create and put children in the shoes of others using Google cardboard. 

Managing self, Some tools for managing self timers. Timers are important if you teach boys if they have a time limit you will get more work out of boys. You can use calendars to organise your week. Groups can allow students to organise themselves. 

Participate, The classroom should be a room where children feel safe and comfortable to contribute and participate. Google forms is like putting your hand up. In secondary school you can use Google+. 

The first thing you need before you add your Google Tool they students need to know the How to of the Key Competencies for the use of the tools to be effective. 

GAFE presenting

Today Karen and I presented a session on how to create Google Sites in classic sites. It was an awesome session with some amazing people who created the great beginnings of their future class or professional learning sites.

Below are our slide checks them out to help you start creating your site and using HTLM to make it amazing.

Thank you so much to Karen Belt for supporting me and sharing this amazing experience with me. 

GAFE session 4

Story writing in the digital classroom-Kimberley Hall

I have not quite finished animating my story. 

Writing choose your own adventure story. Using google slides to create your choose your own adventure story.

When you are doing this you want to plan because you are linking to things that are happening in the future.

GAFE Session Two

Session two- A-Z of lesser known Googley Goodness-Kimberley Hall

This session was full of great apps and ideas that are awesome for using for a range of things. 

We started the session by looking at Googlefeud which is like family feud but uses search results from google so think American when you play. 

My favourite things discussed. 

Androidify is a great you can made cute little character GIFs. Would be awesome for creating characters for a story.  

Google arts and culture allow you to explore art galleries around the world and zoom in on detail.  The world wonders section allows to walk along the great wall of China. Great way to get outside the classroom. 

Boomerang for email you can get emails send back to you. It even tells you how likely you are to get a reply. 

Chrome Experiments This is where new things that people are thinking about adding to chrome great for exploring cool things.

Quick, Draw This is a program that tries to guess what you are drawing.

Explore in google, You can use explore within the docs and slides using the explore function. In slides it will suggest slide layout. With sheets it will help you create charts and graph.

Geoguessr, This drops you in a random location on earth and you have to guess where you are based on the surrounds. Great way to teach problem solving. You can google things but there is no way to google the answer.

HelloSign for GMail Gmail extension that adds onto gmail allows you to sign things in your email.

CraftyRights Extension that makes sure you only get free to use images.

We always need music for movie making and here is a great was of getting free to use music. There is sometimes creative commons guy that means attribute which is the right thing to do anyway. Audio Library in YouTube.

MyMaps-This allows to to do loads of cool things with maps find the size of nz and find the percentages of other colours.

Piktochart- integrated into drive, for creating infographics.

Public Data- Data collects can be used for a range of purposes.

Rain Alarm- The extension tells you when rains is on the way great for making sure you are not outside when it rains.

The Great Suspender- Stops background activity on tabs that you are not currently on.

Great session, Wonderful ideas, Thank You so much for sharing Kimberley

GAFE- Session One

Experience a student-led classroom - today! Richard Wells

Share, Create, Critique- The idea of this session is to share and work together to create a resource that we can all use. 

The main reason we are in this session is that teachers work too hard, so let work out how we can get the learner to do the work.

Children must reflect on their own learning naturally and self-assessment.

What is the elephant in the room? The key word for educate is to negotiate, you must negotiate so that you avoid the elephant in the room.

To do with well we need to take a step back from the technology, like how do the children have a conversation.

Part of working in a student lead classroom is negotiating the rubric for the grading.

Richard Wells- has thinked the key competencies in terms of solo.

By Richard Wells 

If we think about Rugby as a design of learning, The coach is not on the field with the children they set the plays before hand and then let the game happen. How can we do this in the classroom?

We have created a google presentation Key Competencies

Computer games give feedback every 1.5seconds that is a small feedback loop. How can we make our feedback loop smaller?

GAFE 2017- Opening Keynote

I am very excited for my first ever GAFE Summit in Auckland. This blog will document all of the great learning from this amazing event.

Opening Keynote: Iteration and Innovation in Education by Jaime Casap

"What we need more than anything in education is a culture of innovation and iteration in order to take new learning models supported and enabled by technology to create student focused learning environments structured to help empower our students to build lifelong learning knowledge, skills and abilities." Description from GAFE website. 

You can connect with Jaime Casap on twitter: @jcasap

Why do we care about education?
Around the world we believe education is important because it disrupts poverty! Jaime linked this to his personal experiences he said "I get to be here today because of education!" The experiences he has had he has because of education. This is true for me and many others, the education we have provided us with opportunities and experience that we can treasure. If you work hard and get your education you can do ANYTHING!

No matter how long you teach for if it is 2 years, 10 years or more you can impact generations. To impact students for years to come. With this impact we have we need to take sure we take education very seriously. We don't live in a world where we can prepare children to sit behind a desk and do the jobs that computers do now. We need to take the best of education and take it to the next level. What role does technology and computer science have?

We keep talking about preparing learners for the 21st century BUT we have learners that will be working in the 22nd century. In New Zealand and around the world computer science and technology are hug job areas and for this reason they are becoming more and more the focus of education.

Jaime explained that we have been talking about computer and technology in education. So what is different now? We now have research shows how technology can support learning. We can now do more, personalise because of technology.

Technology is a part of everything we do today. It wraps around everything we do. Have you used technology today? Well you must of because you are here. There was a time when it wasn't so easy to use the internet but the children we teach never knew that time. That is not to say they are wired differently they still do two things at the sametime poorly, They just think differently about education. These children learn by going out and learning they don't wait for someone teach them. Yes they learn mistakes and we have to work on that and really think about what this generation is facing.

The technology we have now is not even close to what is coming. Children these days can put glasses on and travel anywhere virtually. We can merge the real word with AI. What does this mean for these children? Robots are replacing jobs even driving will be taken over by robots.

Skills needed in a technology world:

The questions we use to ask don't make sense anymore, for example what do you want to do when you grow up?

WE should be asking what problem do we want to solve? & what do you need to know to solve this problem? Who can you connect with to help you solve this problem?

Iteration is a result of critical thinking-Feedback and feedback loops allow for critical thinking they are more important than grades.

Collaborations is how we solve real problems, in a real world we have to work together to innovate and to solve problems.

We need to teach children who are digital learners, who think critically about technology.

We therefore need a culture shift...How do we take educations to the next level? When need to need to memorize things and when is does information become a commodity. We need to ask questions that google can't answer give learners real world problems to solve.

You can start Google anywhere but it takes time! The future classroom is tomorrow, it is what we do in our classrooms. What we take away from others and use to create change and support problem solving. We are only at the beginning, 40% of the world are online. We are at an exciting time in education. For a 5 year old the greatest technology we have today will be the worst they see in their life. Do we have the right process in place to help them place that they are doing to need to thrive and build the skills to solve the problem of their world!

Inquiry update

As the end of term one quickly approaches it is a great time to share what I have achieved in my inquiry this term. Term one has been a very busy term for my class with swimming and other events. This term my focuses group a long with the rest of my class have been involved in building the skills and environment needed to have positive discussions about numbers and how we manipulate them. 

This learning has happened within our maths groups as well as during our Friday maths challenges in which we work in mixed ability groups to support each other to build knowledge and key competency skills. 

I would love any feedback our ideas has to how I can further my inquiry.