Game Dev

In term 3 and 4 we have been supporting interested teachers to start a Code Club at their schools. Gisborne Intermdiate, Ilminster Intermediate and St Mary's schools have all taken part in the training days and implemented their learning to lead a Code Club.

The Game Dev sessions with teachers were led by Dave and Dan from Gamefroot. Teachers attended these sessions so they would be able to lead the Code Club at their school. Coding Clubs have been started in after school time at their schools. Links to some of the games that students have built are here.

This is an exciting project for these these schools and one that we are looking forward to supporting. 

Tract Newsletter

 

Passion and Project Based Learning

Passion is contagious yet personal. By osmosis, seeing others' passions brings out your own.

 

Your passion gives you a reason to keep learning -- even when things get difficult. This month, students in Lynnie, Diane and Jane’s classes from Kapakapanui School followed their passions together by completing How Artists Use Color Psychology when Creating Logos as a group. I was so impressed by the quality of the projects and the unique individuality of each creation!

 

 

 

 

View More Awesome Projects

When Kids Teach, They Learn, Grow and Get EXCITED

Aristotle once said teaching is the highest form of understanding. As students translate their passions into creating their own video lessons, they not only increase their subject matter comprehension but they also build self-confidence, creativity, technology, and communication skills. Starting this month, all students can teach their classmates on Tract and work toward earning Creator Partner status.

Students created lessons on Minecraft mods, Creating your first game on Roblox, Solving the Rubik's Cube, Sketching using scale, How to Be The Best Rugby Player, and more! One standout student -- Leytonh -- even earned Affiliate Creator status after publishing 5 learning paths with excellent school engagement and quality.

 

Congratulations to Leytonh and his teachers Barry & Kaitlyn at Gisborne Intermediate. Be on the lookout for his new lessons!

 

 

Inside The Movie Sonic The Hedgehog

Created by Leytonh

 

 

Sketching With Scale

Created by gayesham

World Teacher Day

We celebrated World Teacher Day on October 5th by giving out DOUBLE COINS for students who showed their appreciation! Anne’s classroom from Woodlands Elementary made it very clear that she is a 1 in a BILLION teacher with some heartfelt messages and creative displays of thanks!

 

 

Students Give Back

This month students gave back in a BIG way, donating 128 meals, planting 10 trees, protecting coastline, and helping kids go to school, cope with cancer, and heal from abuse.

 

Our biggest giver this month was Gisborne Intermediate -- as many of the students chose to spend their hard-earned coins from the Oh My Gourd contest on others. Leading the way was tflamwell from Olivia’s class who donated 8 meals.

 

These micro-donations add up, and allow each student to own the decision to give back, gain awareness of the UN sustainable development goals, and start thinking about these important world problems. I’ve heard countless stories of dinner table and classroom conversations that started from 1 simple action.

 

 

Gisborne Intermediate enjoyed their Spooktacular Tract-sponsored pizza party after winning this month's Oh My Gourd! Award contest

Product Updates

We released a new Class Hub and Navigation experience that makes browsing Tract and finding what you’re looking for much easier! You’ll notice all the main navigation routes are on the top bar, and a secondary navigation when you click in to find nested information.

 

The “Classroom” tile is replaced by “Teach” in the top navigation and here you can see all your classes and student work. We now support adding co-teachers and editing classroom names. Students can also now find their classmates in their avatar profile dropdown menu.

 

 

We exposed the Learning Path builder (aka course creator) to all students. Now, students can start their journey as a Creator by clicking “Create” in the top navigation. This provides an entry point for students who do not need the structured support of our #CreatorAcademy and just want to start teaching!

 

 

What's On Deck For Next Month?

If you thought October was FUN, wait until you hear about what’s cooking for next month:

1. Bigger, Better Creator Academy
2. Fun New Product Updates
3. Our Biggest Contest Yet...

Not Yet Started On Tract?

Get started in under 5 minutes by following our new Getting Started Guide!

Tract App: Peer-to-peer Education

This year the facilitators have introduced teachers to the Tract App.

Tract is a platform where learners can follow their passions and interests, learn more then create and share their understandings and knowledge. 

The vision is to empower "learners to think critically and independently and to solve the world's problems" by providing "On-demand, project-based classes and clubs designed to spark creativity and empower learners to develop the critical thinking skills they need to succeed as successful young adults."

We have some school locally using Tract with students highly engaged in creating and sharing their interests.

Gisborne Intermediate won a global challenge for October and recently were awarded a pizza party to celebrate this achievement. What a fabulous way to start our local use of Tract. 

You can read more about tract on their newsletter here.

Learn Create Share Term 4 Staff Hui

 This term we bring it all together in one hui. Teachers will Learn about Canva. They will Create with Canva and then Share in their school as well as in the presentation below.

Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. The app includes templates for users to use. 

View the creativity of our kaiako in the presentation below. 
Please leave a comment.

Create Empowers Learners

 This term our staff meeting is based on "Create Empowers Learners".  

In this term's staff meetings the teachers are involved in using Google Apps and third party apps to create. Their creativity is shared below on the slides.

Reading Across the Curriculum

At the end of term 1 we attended the Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day at Glen Taylor School.  The day was about exploring the topic of effective reading practice. The facilitators presented a workshop during the day and our Tairāwhiti team's work was about reading across the curriculum.

T-Shaped literacy is an "emerging research-practice hypothesis for literacy instruction" from the Woolf Fisher research team. This work has come from their many years of research on the Manaiakalani Programme. 

We wanted the participants to develop text sets for a topic or inquiry they will be doing in term 2, or to develop a text set for a resource they have already used. This was so they could use resources they have already at their finger tips and extend the text set to include multi-modal texts in a T-shaped literacy framework.

Manaiakalani Cluster Teacher Only Day - Keynote Speaker

On the last day of term 1 we participated in the Manaiakalani Cluster Teacher Only Day held at Glen Taylor School.  

The keynote speaker was Dr Rae Si’ilata. She is the Associate Dean of Pasifika at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work. Her presentation had strong provocations around upholding the development of languages remembering that we have diverse cultures in our classrooms. She spoke about bringing their world into the classroom and allowing them to be them, to be successful as them. 

points of note...

• Biliteracy - we should be adding English not replacing student's heritage language
• build from oracy to literacy to open up the linguistic space - Education Gazette article here
• power sharing in the classroom critical - students have rich heritages and cultural capital that can enrich our classes - allow them to bring them into the class so we can learn from them which shows we value them

"The culture of the child cannot enter the classroom

until it has first entered the consciousness of the teacher."

The presentation is full of thought provoking material for us as teachers when teaching literacy. Here is a  link to Dr Rae Si’ilata's presentation. There is a lot to digest in this presentation and I liked the way she connected to the High Leverage Practises from Woolf Fisher's research for The Manaiakalani Programme.

Her is an article with a bio of Dr Rae Si’ilata in this Education Central article.

Ubiquitous Learning is Rewindable

Our Whakatauākī for the term 1 staff meeting is about making learning accessible for every learner any where, any time and at any pace.

Teachers can harness the affordances of technology and provide instructional material that is rewindable, visible and audible. In our term 1 staff meetings, teachers are coached to adapt material from their class site and make it rewindable.

   

We have many tools on hand to enable us to do this. Check out what has been used in the slide deck below where we have curated "before & after" samples of the content in this slide deck. 

Welcome to 2021!

 

February already!  How did that happen?

As we settle into Term 1 of the new School year, we are thrilled to welcome Ilminster Intermediate, Gisborne Central School & Cobham School to the Manaiakalani Program Outreach here in Tairāwhiti.

At a glance, here are just a few of the milestones achieved between 2018 - 2020:

• 14 member schools 
• More than 2,500 students have learned to be Cybersmart
• 155 teachers received in-class support (one hour per week for a school year in their own class)
• More than 25,000 blog posts written by learners in Tairāwhiti
• 45 teachers and education leaders attended Digital Fluency Program (DFI)
• Three full-time facilitators (Cheryl, Herman & Amie) are now employed locally 

As ever, it is always the people who can realize the potential of an initiative like this.  We have so much gratitude to the many supporters of this ambitious program.  Our sincere thanks to the HB Williams Family Trusts whose vision this was and without whose funding this would still be a dream.  We have also received funding also from the Eastern & Central Community Trust, for which we are truly appreciative.  Thank you to Work & Income, Manāki Tairāwhiti, Rongowhakāta Iwi Trust, Ngai Tamanuhiri, Te Aitanga a Māhaki, Te Runanganui o Ngāti Porou whose financial contribution to the creation of an Angel Fund to support more equitable access to Chromebooks for every learner.  

And a huge thanks of course to the dedicated team at Manaiakalani Education Trust - what a journey.  Together so much has been achieved!  Thank you for your expertise, passion, professionalism, and for the many collegial relationships which have been formed over the last three years.  To the trustees of Connext Trust, the local school principals, and our local Convenor Helen 'Perky' McGuigan, Kahui Ako Lead Principals, David our roving Ambassador, senior leaders, teachers, students and whanau - THANK YOU!  

Orientation & Connecting with Manaiakalani

This year we held our Orientation day with teachers who are new to our cluster. The Manaiakalani Orientation contributes to a programme of professional learning that supports our people to confidently connect with the goals of our education programme, including raising educational outcomes for our young people through effective teaching in future focused communities of learning.

Today's participants worked within the Learn Create Share pedagogy to connect with the kaupapa of The Manaiakalani Programme Outreach.

 

To experience the Learn Create Share pedagogy our participants explored online profiles and the Cybersmart thinking of how to advertise ourselves positively online. 

 

 They created their own online profile using a range of tools. Here are their profiles shared in a slide deck. Take a peek and please leave a comment. 

Summer Learning Journey

 The Summer Learning Journey (SLJ) is a programme run in all Manakaiakalani clusters in response to the summer slump which sees the achievement levels of students plummet over the long summer break. Students are given daily tasks to do then share them on their blog. This integration of literacy and other curriculum areas keeps them engaged in reading and writing in particular.

Every blog post is read and commented on my a team of commenters. Points are awarded and when school returns in February we will have prizes to present.

Many students in our cluster registered and have been blogging through the summer break. Below is Kylah's blog post that earned her bonus points. If you want to leave a comment about the post below you will find it here.

Gravity Defying Bucket and Cup Trick 

Today for summer learning journey Nanogirl task I made a gravity defying bucket and did a cup trick that meant I could turn the cup over and the water didn't escape!

I decided to make and edit a video on how to make the bucket. I really enjoyed making the first video about Tolaga Bay, I decided to try editing another video using Movavi.
Both tasks were nice and simple to follow. My favourite of the two was the cup flip trick. I thought I was going to make a mess all over the table! The cup and card trick is pretty cool! I wanted to know why it worked. It's to do with air pressure! With the card there is no air being pushed into the water so the water stays in the cup upside down! pretty cool huh! I have sort of discovered the bucket trick before by accident once when I spun my drink bottle in a circle and no water came out.

I'm getting better at editing my videos and it was easier to work out what to do. I didn't even need my Mum to guide me this time! I had to split the audio to the video lots of times to make the volume higher when it was going into time lapses and lower when I was talking so you could still hear me over the music. Next time if I was do do this task again I would make the string slightly shorter because I had to have it wrapped around my hand lots of times because I had made it too long. I would also make sure I was doing a task when my little brother wasn't around. He tried to grab the scissors!

 

Here are my videos.