Sunday, November 09, 2014

MITx 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology. Week 1: Ed Tech Then and Now

 “Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.” 
 
Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic
It took a while to select a current and past technology, as there is a range of educational technologies that have excited and engaged me, as a learner. I decided to focus on one of my passions, which is stories. As an educator today, I believe that one of the most challenging processes taught in the classroom is writing and that successful writers have spent much more time reading books than those who struggle with writing, or those that are labelled ‘reluctant writers’.
PART 2: EARLIER TECHNOLOGY
As a child, I vividly remember time spent with vinyl read-alongs, such as Masters of the Universe recorded on a 33 1/3 vinyl record. amazon.com/Masters-Universe-Danger-Castle-Grayskull/dp/B0035N1RC4
When I got a little older, about 5 years old, my mother started ordering a fortnightly installment of the Marshall Cavendish Storyteller collection. I devoured the stories and eagerly awaited the next installment. storytellerwebsite.wordpress.com/
Marshall Cavendish Storyteller is intended for primary aged children to be read alone, followed along when the cassette tapes are played, or read by parents. Each volume contains at least 2 poems, a classic story and 2-3 other stories (that may or may not continue in the next installment). The magazine format is designed to be collated in a binder that holds 15 volumes. The key goal is to share classic stories in an engaging format for children – to expose them to stories and to get them excited about the world of books.
I believe that the technology met its key goal. There is a strong community online today of those who grew up with these stories.
I am unsure if the related goal of interesting children in writing was unintentional or not, but, as a teacher today, I am passionate about stories: reading and writing stories for the joy of telling the story and sharing it with an audience.
PART 1: CURRENT TECHNOLOGY
I started teaching as a young parent, who followed my daughter into the classroom. She learned in a rūmaki reo Māori classroom (an immersion Māori language class) and there were two large challenges in meeting my goal of exciting children about reading and writing:
1.   According to Te Taura Whiri (The Māori Language Commission - tetaurawhiri.govt.nz/english/issues_e/reo/), there are about 50,000 fluent speakers of Māori and about 100,000 more people that understand the language, with 10,000 less fluent speakers than 10 years ago and a large base of older speakers, aged 55 and over. With such a niche language, I found it difficult to utilise online technologies successfully for writing. How do you build a community for your writing blog for example, when there are so few potential readers for your blog?
2.   There have been historic struggles with regards to the revitalisation of Māori language, but this is before the time of today’s students, most of whom reach the end of their primary school years and are starting to make the choice to speak English. All of the games and stories that these students are passionate about are in English and there is no bait that would make them want to choose Māori as a language they want to speak.
I have used a range of tools to meet these challenges:
-      youtube.com/watch?v=k7n7WxBHk7U – I made a video and discussed the magic of stories – emailing the link to colleagues, but, with only 92 views, no dialogue has been started as a result.
-      tuhimahorahora.blogspot.co.nz/ - I started a blog for my students (9-12 year olds). Once they moved on, I tried to keep it alive by starting to share some of the translation and some of the writing that I have done over the years, but, again, there has been minimal conversations started.

-      In class, we have used a range of tools, from authoring our own animations and stories, like the Story of Kaipara (Paki Kaipara) at youtube.com/watch?v=wuTsuh_8K3s and the Story of the First Woman at youtube.com/watch?v=cp7qWlpMXxo (both done with a mixed-level class of 5-7 year olds).



For the purposes of this assignment, I will focus on the blog.
The goal of this technology is to build a sense of audience, as you are writing for an audience and (hopefully) starting to enter into a dialogue with your readers.
Blogging is not a new technology now, with the first blog (called a personal webpage then) appearing in 1994 at Links.net and the term being coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger (see webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/a-brief-history-of-blogging/ for more information). But it was one of the key technologies that I identified as being potentially able to address particularly the second of the two challenges I had identified.
The Blogger platform was developed in 1999 and was well established by the time we started using the tool as part of our SSW (Sustained Silent Writing or Tuhi Māhorahora) programme in 2009.
I tried to have a rotation so that everyone in class was blogging at least once a week, preferably 2-3 times weekly. Even with emails to parents and other schools with immersion classes didn’t work – I tried to get us reading each other’s work as part of the SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) component of the day, leaving comments and feedback for our classmates.
Being a blogging platform, the technology is open-ended and the product depends on the individual student. I wanted it to be more than just publishing, so tried to build a sense of drafting and revising, with students re-visiting pieces, or incorporating media such as flipnotes, that was relevant to that child.
I believe that because we were unable to build an audience, that this technology did not meet it’s key goal, that of building a sense of audience for the students using the platform. The blog has started to be used in the last couple of years (the stats for slideshare embedded downloads has shown that, even if there is no dialogue yet, there are people visiting and using the site).
PART 3 - COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
The technologies are similar, in that they both involve sharing stories and divergent, in that the user of the blog is producing content, while the Storyteller user is consuming content.
I would love to find out from you what experience you have: especially in regards to niche languages and writing in the classroom.


Monday, September 29, 2014

Another example of how shared poems can be used to extend on topic work



 

Shared Poem - a way of extending on topic work

Although we were focusing on Guy Fawkes as our performance piece for the school concert, I wanted to consolidate and extend knowledge of a range of celebrations around the world, so I chose the context of shared poem to achieve this.

When we explored the idea of Holi, for example, we danced to popular Bollywood music around the theme and we held our own mini Holi festival on the Friday.



Returning to this post to delete the Flickr album - It was sad when Flickr introduced its limit of 1,000 pics. I have chosen a photo from our Holi celebration.






Saturday, March 15, 2014

Video production with rūmaki students year 4-6





These are the first thoughts about this unit... would you like to see some of the video we made??

Monday, February 24, 2014

Life-jackets

Returning to this post to delete the Flickr album - It was sad when Flickr introduced its limit of 1,000 pics. I've included one image of the dry session and three images of the poolside sessions.






Note: Drowning Prevention can provide you with lifejackets for use in your school, free of charge! https://www.dpanz.org.nz/community/life-jacket-programmes/ 

Monday, January 20, 2014

Art Exhibitions

 This whole post had depended on embedded Flickr images... so I thought about another angle...

Art exhibitions can be a stressful time of the year (much like the production of calendar art in most school in term 3-4)... so what about some fun ideas?

I've done a lot of different themes over the years, from year ones playing with a range of print-making techniques over the term and then choosing their favourite pieces and making them into a bigger piece. 


To getting an Intermediate class to submit group 'installations', including their digital 
eel explorations, their fired clay sculptures, and their hīnaki.


Most important, I think, is to have a solid idea, so that you can have fun with your class. We were learning about Tamsin Hanly's Critical Histories and we were going through the British Isles unit. The year one class started off with Celtic charcoal sketches, moved on to indian ink of Anglo-saxons, then water-colour with salt of Viking times. They painted a wet chalk background, composed their artworks, and gave them a title =)






Thursday, January 16, 2014

Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Electricity for juniors

Vector EnergyVector EnergyVector EnergyVector EnergyVector EnergyVector Energy
Vector EnergyVector EnergyVector EnergyMaking CircuitsMaking CircuitsMaking Circuits
Making CircuitsMaking CircuitsMaking CircuitsMaking CircuitsMaking CircuitsMaking Circuits
Lolly CircuitsLolly CircuitsLolly CircuitsLolly CircuitsLolly CircuitsLolly Circuits

Electricity, a set on Flickr.



I have had a brain-wave! School is important, therefore, planning is important. I know, late at night brain-waves don't really equate to a true blue brain-wave... but I must settle for what my lil 1 brain cell is capable of ;)