On Friday I woke up crazy early (6am - I'm definitely not a morning person!) and headed over to Whakatane. Beautiful drive, Adele singing, me belting out the words as I drove carefully around each corner and tight bend.
I'd been invited to present at and attend the EBOP #digiday at Te Awanuiarangi in Whakatane. Organised by Jeanette (Hinerangi) Murphy and Jude Cornelius-Nuku as part of REAP for the EBOP.
It felt really really really good to be there, doing things Maori and giving back to whanau and our local community. Making connections (whakawhanaungatanga) and creating new pathways and ideas with old friends.
Listening to Waaka Vercoe, the hariru, the korero with Waaka afterwards - him noticing my badge before I did (it had our WHHS logo on!!) and mentioning how his moko was in my class (HTG last year) and how he'd just gone to the school down the road (RBHS).
Making these connections reminds me just how close we all are as Maori, how my students have whanau everywhere and how close knit we all are - particularly in the BOP. As my students' teacher I'm blessed to make these connections to not only build up the mana of our kura but also to continually and visibly assure the community we are doing great things by modelling and sharing and giving back.
I learnt a LOT from this hui. I would have loved to have gone to more breakouts and learnt from everyone. I really wish I had done a quick korero at the start though about using Twitter to the full room as there were only a handful of us tweeting the sessions. Hard to have visible learning when you don't know what was going on in other sessions.
Massive thanks to Stuart Hale (@stuartnz) and Steve Katene (@steve_katene) for their awesome insights and new learnings.
My main takeaways:
- devices while fragile, aren't really that fragile. They need to be untethered and mobile for most ubiquitous learning. Anytime. Anywhere.
- Because we need to be ubiquitous in our learning - desks are just not that important. We need to be 21st century - not stuck in 20th century frameworks, mindsets or spaces
- need to bust through the ceiling. Stop thinking that GAFE is the be all and end all. There is so much out there. Stop limiting ourselves. Tech can help us do so so much and we need to think about the way it can connect us, free us and ultimately improve and enhance the way we see the world and the way we Interact with it.
- 3 year olds are doing more collaborative, more experimental 21st century learning than I ever thought possible. So freaking amazing.
- Students need access. They need digital literacy skills. They need freedom to learn their way. To have responsive pedagogies. They need space to create their learning and more effective time structures.
- Developing new systems to connect directly with students is critical. There is always more that we can do.
- Why are secondary school teachers not interested in developing themselves and moving forward with what's happening in education? How can we provide faster, more effective PLD that caters to everyone's needs?
- I seriously want to work with Steve Katene in the future. Absolutely freaking amazing.
My workshop was good! Only three people came :( But I think it had the most effect. They were fully engaged. Didn't really need my updated slides, barely needed my help, just guidance and they asked ongoing questions which led to the next slides. Jude decided that I need to be doing this workshop at the start of the day to get everyone onto Twitter to enable that shared learning. Hopefully next year!
So impressed with Steve and the work that has gone on over at Richmond School in Napier. Wow. Awesome learning. Pushing kids like ours at Heights through the roof with their learning and then beyond.
My worry continues to be what will happen to those students when they go to high school. Their teachers aren't up at the same play. Their learning will spiral or they will take the skills they learnt at Richmond and apply them at high school. Luckily they'll be in the Matariki school cluster and hopefully will still have similar learning going on as Richmond are seen as leaders - which they most definitely are!!
Where are we currently? Where do we need to go? How will we do this? What will our learning look like for our students?
Need to keep reminding myself of the power of SAMR and Grant Lichtman's Stairway to Success model.
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