2024

 Happy New Year!

Just like they do every year, the holidays have gone by to quick and fast. I am feeling very refreshed and relaxed after a very lazy few weeks. Lovely to catch up with my daughter and have her home for a few days. Also all her friends came over for a yearly catch up and school reunion. A very fun night had by them all just like they did when they were tenagers. Liam, my son, is still on crutches and will be for another 4-5 months. Good news: the bone grafts are growing. He is off for another operation on the 25/1/2024 for more bone grafts being added to the hip. Bill, my partner is also back to work today and he also saw his heart specialist last week and got a good report. So all are healthy for the start of the year.

Had a great Christmas at the Fairburns hall with all the Whanau a great catch up in the pouring down rain and hot humid weather. 

This year my exciting adventures are having a new school starting, Pukenui which I am looking forward to. Being on the trial for the maths Intensive Program. Also the countdown is on for ISTE in Denver USA 22 weeks and 4 days till we fly out. I have got my ESTA visa waiver and got some travel items in the boxing down sales. I am so looking forward to the adventure. 

Back to work today, emails all checked and to do list has been written. Booked into a couple of webinars, google back to school, Apple back to school, Australian Virtual Maths summit and Formative assessment.

I have been looking at all the AI tools and what could be useful for our teachers and myself. I just completed the level 1 and 2 course for Magic school and looking forward to exploring this tool and may complete a toolkit on it. 

Media Literacy with Julie Smith

 I just watched another great webinar online ditch summit. Julie Smith presented a great worshop on Media Literacy and the ever changing media world our students live in. She really made me think about how I work in the cybersmart curriculum we have and how our students world online and how they connect and relate. Our students live in a short form video world of flashy and exciting quick videos. Are we helping, coaching, and supporting them to understand the context? We need to stop worrying about the content and talk about the process. I also learnt what Smishing is, text message phishing the key topic is missed connections. We need to be teaching coping skills and how to deal with the ever changing tech world and how to keep themselves safe. Learn about the laws, the small print and rules of apps and games they are signing up to. How to self track, and use google reverse image search. A great hour of thought provoking and good questions to think about. 

Why is Tic Tok different in China than the rest of the world?

ISTE 2024

This year for the first time Manaiakalani announced 2 opportunities for facilitators to apply for fellowships to attend the ISTE Conference in Denver in 2024. I decided you had to be in to win, I probably wouldn't get chosen as we have lots of very good academic people that would write amazing applications. So with the wonderful support of AI tools Bard and ChatGPT I added the application questions and got some interesting answers and different ways of looking at the questions. So I pulled out the key points of both AI tools and then added my personal touch to the answers. I had just got back from my leave on Saturday and the application was due on Sunday. So I spent a few hours putting it all together and sent in my application. To my surprise I got an email from Jenny to tell me that I had been accepted and would be off to the conference. I was very shocked and also very excited. I danced around the house and rang my husband and daughter to let them know.

We leave on Friday 21 June 2024 and return Sunday 30 June the conference is 23-26 June so we have a couple of days to have a look around Dener. The countdown is on.

Term 4 Toolkit Mathigon

 After my BOI Summit workshop on creativity in Maths I decided to unpack one of the apps I modelled in more details. So in the holidays I choose Mathigon mainly because the manipulatives on there are so amazing and easy to use. So I upskilled myself by watching all the turorital videos and practicing all the fantastics opportunities to use this site in your maths lessons. Also another very attractive reason it is free and not only can be used in your brouser but also apple and android apps available that are also free.

Being term 4 I did not have a lot register my numbers where down to only 12 and knowing from the past that meant I would probably only get half turn up. This time I was wrong only 5 turned up. One registered person did do the professional thing and email me to say they could not make it. Thanks Penny from Paihia. The 45 minutes was probably not long enough to show everything as there is far to much but they did get a better insite into all the things that area available and the turtorial videos are there to rewind back to and watch if needed. 

Having my workshop at the same time as the Melbourne cup was on was probably not a good idea either.

Wananga 2023

 This year thanks to our convenor John and the embarrassment of only 3 of us there last year. We had a good turn out of representatives from the Te Hiku cluster, 7 of our schools were represented and Diane from the Te Hiku Trust. 

I travelled down on Tuesday night and stayed the night. This was much better than trying to get the early flight from Kerikeri. I was fresh and alert for the day. We went over the researches presentation as a group of facilitators. We also looked at the activities we would be supporting our clusters to complete. This was a good opportunity to ask questions and clarify things that the leaders would ask. Also a good opportunity to up skill ourselves in areas we were not to sure about or experts in. The bonus was our research team on the day was only a viber chat away. 

That night we had our christmas dinner at the Panmure Yacht club and farewelled some very special people Makore, Cheryl and Anne. With a busy 2 days ahead of us I was not up to late night so we got dropped off by the wonderful Andrea in the van. 

Using the theatre this year was great to hear the speakers and a very big screen to view the slides. The theatre was comfortable and also stopped leaders from working on their computers. The presentations where to the point and perfectly timed. Then we moved to break out rooms to work as a cluster. We had great discussion and conversations around the data. Some leaders did need training in how to navigate their way around edpotentail. Our cluster realised the importance of 5 or more observations in each school to get school data and would make a better effort next year to achieve this. 

The first day was a great success and a nice surprise with an open bar thanks to BP tech. It was a real treat to sit outside in the sun catching up with leaders and colleagues over a few drinks. Then off to dinner in the restaurant which was beautiful. It was very crowded and hard to talk as it was very noisy. I snuck off after dinner for a early night with another big day ahead of us.

The next day our cluster at dinner had convinced John to carry on in the convenors role and Sacha would take it on in 2025. Which is great and I really enjoy working with John. He is collaborative and very well respected amongst the leaders and educators in Te Hiku.  

It was a fantastic event our cluster had great robust discussions and set some goals across the cluster for 2024. Our leaders that came really enjoyed the 2 days and felt they had a much better understanding of Manaiakalani and the great resources and oportunities there are available for the teachers and schools. They also realised how innovative and forward thinking Manaiakalani is and how lucky they are to be part of the fantastic program. I myself also came away feeling motivated and enthusiastic as our cluster is positive and paddling our waka in the same direction. 

Move over Jamboard FigJam is moving in.

 Google has announced that they will not be having Jamboard as one of their tools as of the end of next year. I am not a prolific user of Jamboard but I do model and use it as a collaboration tool in lots of my in class facilitation and in toolkits and presentations. 

It has been interesting to look at what is being promoted as an alternative to Jamboard. I watched an interesting presentation be Alice Keller, Laureen McCann and David Curran on Move Over Jamboard-Meet Figjam. I was very impressed with Figjam it can do so much more than Jamboard could do and it is free. You can also upgrade to the Education version for free and it was quick. You can add video and links, you can drag and drop images, google docs, slides, sheets. It has an infinite canvas which was the hardest thing to get my head around, it has no pages but you can add sections to your canvas and group them so they appear next to each other in a nice order. Even better and more helpful you can right click and get a copy link to the sections. There is also so many templates available for you to use. It had lots of fun with the extras like stamps that you can personalise, sticky notes and extra widgets and Plugins. A great tool that is easy to share with students and collaborate. A great easy to use tool. Now to investigate some of the other collaborative tools that are being suggested as an alternative to jamboard. Mural, Whimsical and Canva.

Bay of Islands Summit 2023

 This year the summit was held in the Bay of Islands and the venue was the Bay of Islands college at kawakawa. With a focus on inovation with tech, effective teaching practice and cultural capability. Unfortunaly we did not have the nice warmth of the Cook Islands. Also this year was the first 2 days of the holidays 25 and 26 September. I booked into the bay of islands accomodation and the hilghlight for me was Zana my daughter who is a teacher at Levin Intermediate was comming again and this time bringing most of her staff from her school. Monday started of with a very nice powhiri and the key note speaker was Edith the principal of BOI College. Then lots of great sessions to choose from and it was nice to choose on the day and not have to register before the event. My first presentation was creativity in Maths which was very popular and they where turning away educators as numbers where capped at 25 and the door was closed when numbers reached their limit. With lots of great feedback and thanks it was nice to have the first one over and done but also good to hear the relevance of the ideas and resources shared. The sun came out and the afternoon was beautiful as Zana and I headed off to the Waitangi treaty grounds to do the tour. Having been there many times to the education center and for eduction TOD I had not done a tour or had a good look around in many years. It was so special, the place has a very peaceful feel about it and so much Wairua. It was very suprising the amount of teachers that have never been there before. The Levin teachers loved it and where real tourists. The next day was another great day of wonderfull workshops and my other workshop Google Earth was also packed and well recieved by teachers. The panel disscussion was interesting with the big common factor being AI. Unfortunately no prizes won this year, after lots of good byes and hugs we headed home to Coopers beach in the pouring rain and very cold tempertures.  Lots of positive talk from teachers saying how good the 2 days where and how much they had got out of the 2 days I would say it was another very successful summit.