Term 1 Toolkit 2025

First Toolkit of the year was on Rich mathematics and Statistics tasks and how they fit into the NZC. It was a good workshop to put together as I was able to look for great web sites and apps that already have rich tasks or great activities that can be adapted. I was also able to explore the new curriulum and get them to unpack some rich tasks and create enablers and extenders. Also getting them to look at the teaching sequences and where the activities fit into. I needed more time as we didn't get to the last part of the slide. I was surprised by the amount of schools that have not yet completted the day one PLD for the mathematics and statistics curriculum.

National Mathematics and Statistics Facilitator Role

What a journey it has been, with a very long application process to apply for the role. It involved me having to also fill in an in depth application form. It was great to hear in late November that I had been successful in gaining the role of National Facilitator to role out the new NZ mathematics and statistics curriculum. It started off in December with a two-day training in Auckland just before Christmas. It was a bit of a reunion for me because of the 25 facilitators that were there there were only five of them I didn't know the rest of them I had worked for in my past mathematics and statistics facilitated jobs. It was great to catch up with everybody. The training itself was intense as we unpack and dived into the new mathematics and statistics curriculum. There are four days of training for schools over the next two years and we unpacked each of those days over the two days of training. It was great to get a lot of clarification and clear understanding of what the expectations are for rolling out this new curriculum into schools. The days are great having lots of hands-on activities, maths games with some talking and also unpacking of the front end of the curriculum. There were still a lot of resources and information under development that weren't ready for us to actually look at yet but we're definitely coming out over the next month being ready for us to start at the end of January. I am really looking forward to my new national role.

Term 4 Toolkiit

I decided in the school holidays to do a workshop around interactive whiteboards. With Jamboards being deleted on December 31 2024. December 31, 2024 Last day to migrate Jams to a supported partner application. After this day, they will begin the final shutdown process and Jams will be deleted over the next several weeks. With this happening I decided to look at alternative options. It was good to research what was available and at what costs. Being a very busy term and competing with Steve from google around Gemmini at the same time I had 19 register and about 10 turn up. I gave them all time to explore and try different options. I had also invited them to try some templates. It was a great topic very appropriate to the time of Jamboards being deleted.

Fundamentals of AI in Education By Craig Hansen

On Thursday 10 October I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the few Manaiaklani Facilitators to do the Micro credential course on the Fundamentals of AI in Education by Craig Hansen. We discussed, what are AI tools and LLM. We talked about prompts and he shared models, guides and posters. We went over the ethics and privacy. How to change settings to protect our data. He also talked about change and early adopters. About growth mindsets and teachers anxiety and nervousness to use AI. You need leaders of change and they showcase the good use and role model for others. You could use 5 minutes in each staff meeting for new applications, successes and real life examples. We talked about AI policies and who has them in their schools or workplaces. Craig shared some examples. We covered many different AI platforms and explored some of the great ideas and options available on some of these AI tools Scribe https://scribehow.com/signup Complete the sign up for https://school.summit-ai.app/ - go to the link, use the email address you used for this calendar invite and use hqf37&$ as your password. Set up your Authenticator app on your phone so you can use your phone for a one-time-password / code each time you sign in. Meta.ai (log in or set up with your FB or IG account) https://www.meta.ai/ Napkin Teachers Buddy. Notebook LM Brisk Teaching Chrome Extension Diffit.me ChatGPT EduAide Suno Questionwell Gemini Perplexity It was great to have the opportunity to explore and tail some of the great tools available in some of these AI platforms. We also had the creator, NZ guy Matt Abraham from Teacher Buddy. We had the founder himself show us around the tool and give us the background story behind the creation of it. How it relates to the day to day work of educators. If you are getting reports or feedback on students don’t use the names as it goes into the AI tool. Use pseudonyms. He is also happy to present to schools. matt@teacherbuddy.com. It will be integrated with Canva soon. Driffit- creates lesson plans, and worksheets. ChatGPT- in settings make sure, improve the model for every one is off, security-log out of all devices. Loved the tip- type in the prompt “Give all the above to me in a word document”. Then a highlight blue option is available to click on and it opens in a word doc. It retains the formatting. Brisk- we explored the next steps, the feedback component. The grow and glow option. You can also upload your own rubric as a pdf and it will analyse work to your rubric. It was good feedback and a good starting place which will save a lot of time. Perplexity- gives you the readings that it uses to analyse your prompt. With the option to get videos and images. It is great at summarising your questions, prompts, and documents. Notebook- had options to create a podcast of 2 people talking about your creation in the AI. Also timelines, study guides, and briefing documents. The podcasts where fun. We also had Benny Pan model Snorkl, a multi modal instant feedback platform. Great for student feedback. I was introduced to it at ISTE. Gammi- was great for the presentations they created that were very professional. You could also create web pages and documents. Suno- creating songs was really fun. Summit built with Grot uses 10% of energy used in GPT. Closed box no data goes into AI. Can build data sets and your own multi language model. You do need to check them as there were mistakes and prompts needed more detail. Craig also shared with us his prompts for the E ASSTle writing and policy and academic data. It was a great day, a bit rushed at times. Gave me a good introduction into some other parts of AI tools and some AI tools I have not looked at. I was impressed with how you can use them to analyse data.I now need the time to explore these in more detail. I wish this was at the beginning of the holidays so I had that time.

Auckland Maths Association

Another great AMA Saturday morning of great workshops. We learnt all about the Kalman Prize and other fellowships available for maths teachers. Was great to hear from teachers who had won these and what they did with the money. The first workshop was Stories in Mathematics By Caroline Yoon from Auckalnd university. A very nice look at how parents are not teachers and struggle to understand why our children don't know things. Also how they can course miss conceptions. Her example and story she had created was all about place value and the history behind it and how to teach it with correct materials and language. Then I attended Rob Proffitt-Whites workshops on Routines. He shared some great resources and of course links to his work. It was great to hear the key messages about rich routines-excerise, unfamilar, application and open. Assign competence problem solving recall and reason. Rich Routines- move n prove, groups and pairs to discuss and defend. Formative assessment. 10-12 minutes to solve. problem, extensions and consolidations. Use the know of the curriculum Quick quizzes-revisit what students should know. Formative assesment and good consolidation. Reminded us of the great ARBs that are free. Learners first facebook page. Then I attended Census at schools year 1-3 Looking at purposeful learning. Context that matters to ākonga. Links to literacy learning and vocabulary. Key action or outcome purpose of investigation. Using the new PPDAC posters off the web site. All the resources are on the web site. Talked about investigations that tells a story across time (depends on the action) Our Lost teeth. Book to support Throw your tooth on the roof. Compare and contrust, create graphs, analysis most, frequent, altogether,Summary display. Another great morning of learning and keeping up to date with changes. This is a link to the AMA site.

AI Salsa Slam

I signed myself up to attend the AI Salsa Slam. I wasn't sure with the time differences if I would get to watch it live. But thought I could always go back and watch the recording. To my surprise it started at 9am NZ time and with my school away at a noho marae I was home and able to join the Slam live. I was so great to recognise so many of the names from ISTE. The 1 minute introductions gave you a good insight into what where the most valuable parts of some of the AI tools. A couple I want to look at further in detail are mirror talk for feedback and reflection. We got a free year subcription to the tool. Websim for creating web sites. Look at the AI apps in Canva mockups, cartonifs, image to frame. Claude AI using chatbots to create games and video games using artifact window. Eric Curts has a video on how to do this. TeachAid had countires curriculums on it including the NZcurriculum to plan lessons using our own curriculum. The Slam was quick and it was fast. But best of all they where giving away lots of swag and Tshirts and I was lucky enough to win a swag of lots of goodies. Can't wait for them to arrive from the states. Having joined lots of email lists form ISTE I get lots of invites to all of these wonderfull courses and resources. Looking forward to the next one.

 

The 5th Te Hiku Film Festival

We have just completed our 5th Te Hiku Film Festival at the Te Ahu cinema on Wednesday 11 September. There were 14 movies from 8 of our 9 schools. Pukenui, our brand new school to the cluster came down and watched the movies and will enter some next year. The movies this year had some juniors shown at the cinema and what an outstanding hit they were. This year I was lucky enough to have Natalie Samson from REAP support me on the day and also be the judge. She comes with a very extensive background in movie making, TV producing and educating others in the movie and TV roles. To spice up the event this year I created a photo frame and got some prompts and had a photo booth which was very popular. We also had the red carpet which adds the effect of a special event.

The students were there with the usual buzz and excitement of seeing themselves on the big screen. This is what makes all the organisation and hard work worthwhile.

This year Dave Winters also visited and sat in one one of the sittings. It was nice to have him visit the Far North.