One of the perks of being connected through various online groups is that people from all over the world share various opportunities. A few months ago, one of the opportunities that I came across was to be a guest presenter on a (live streaming) YouTube show: The Suite Talk with Kimberly Mattina. Due to various delays on both ends, it took a few months to sort out a time that worked (I am the farthest guest by a wide margin) but yesterday the stars aligned and I was able to make it.
Here's the video if you'd like to hear me talk about Digital Breakouts and how you can make them (plus a few hints to some breakouts I've made!).
I really enjoyed the experience and am definitely keen to do these types of things in the future (so keep an eye out for that!).
So far there have been 67 views on the video. It's not a HUGE amount, but it's still a pretty decent impact. I hope that some of the viewers got something out of it.
If you're interested in learning more about how G Suite can be used in the classroom, check out the other episodes in the series.
This week I did something that I've wanted to do for a while now: bring learner presenters to an adult conference or summit. After my previous attempts to do something even grander failed, I wasn't going to take no for an answer in bringing children to the EdTechTeam Auckland Summit.
We had a busy term so our preparation was left to the last week of term. Maybe that was not ideal, but it was enough. The plan was to bring 16 of our learners and all four learning coaches from our Habitat. We had four presentations and they were all scheduled for the first day of the summit. We worked extremely hard over those five days at the end of the term. The learners actually were given a lot of leeway to come up with what they would say. I made the slides for the sessions and practiced with them, but for the most part they were on their own.
On the day, I was nervous and the children were nervous. We arrived fairly late due to one of our learners not showing up on time. I guess that was to be expected. We managed to get everyone lanyards and some nice free Google Cardboards courtesy of EdTech Team (who were extremely supportive of what we were trying to do for our learners).
For the most part the children weren't too interested in what the adults were saying (though some were) but they came prepared and even if they weren't listening, they all had a device to do something on while we adults were being inspired.
Overall, the children did an AMAZING job in the presentations. They were clearly nervous and some of them spoke extremely softly. Others forgot their lines or got mixed up, but the issues were minimal. Where they absolutely shone, though, was when they were helping out the adults at the sessions. Several of the children chose to stay back in the room with me and help out at the sessions that weren't theirs. They were so excited and happy that they knew more than adults and that they could show them how to do things they couldn't do. On the drive home, one of the girls told me that that was the first time that she had told an adult what to do.
The day was a complete success and the feedback from all four sessions was overwhelmingly positive. I'm excited to go back after the school holidays and see the effect it has on them.
An interesting side note to the whole day, was that they were clearly more up to date on some new features in YouTube than many in the audience - a fact that was continually brought up on the second day of the conference.
I'm so proud of all the learners who came with me to share. They were very brave and they took advantage of an opportunity that they were given. I definitely will look at increasing the frequency of events like this in the future.
Three times before I have applied for the Google Innovator Academy and three times I have received the rejection email with varying degrees of dismay. But each time I refused to give up, knowing that if I kept at it, I would be selected. That being said, I was still quite nervous for this current round, since it was in my part of the world.
I was not to be dismayed this time. While on vacation in New York City, I had a flurry of activity on my phone, which all indicated that I had been accepted. I was extremely busy at the time so it took a while for everything to sink it. After my holiday, I came back to a very busy school term, so was also quite rushed for time. That being said, I still managed to get everything done in time for the academy, which was probably one of the best experiences I've ever had.
If I had to choose what my favourite part of the two and a half days, I'd have a real problem. Pretty much all of it was incredible. The best I can do is point out two aspects of the academy that will likely be instrumental in going forward: The connections with other innovative educators around the globe and the design thinking process.
With me at the academy were 36 other educators, and many coaches and other EdTech experts. My close team, the Lucky Unkos made immediate and strong bonds with each other, and functioned not only as a well-oiled machine in all the activities we did, but also ended up winning quite a few things (or coming close seconds). By going through the process together, we formed something of a family group together and will now have each other to lean on through difficult times. One of my good online (and in person) colleagues was actually placed in this group, so it was nice to have that, but it was also nice to work closely with others in this capacity.
The whole point of the academy was to help each of us work on an identified problem in education and to develop a solution to it through the design process. Though I had had some experience with this, clearly I didn't know enough, because over the 2 and a half days I was immersed into the world of design thinking in a way that I could never have imagined. We started from the beginning by looking at all of the reasons why the problem exists and then examining the person (or people) to whom our solution is directed at. We spent lots of time slowly developing our ideas and giving each other feedback. Eventually we all developed a prototype of what our solution will be.
This process was absolutely amazing and I've already brought in many of the ideas into my practice. In our iExplore block, I've taken four of my groups and run through a watered down (but still pretty robust) version of this with the projects they had been working on. Already the results have been pretty positive with all four groups working on some pretty interesting solutions (so watch this space in the coming weeks when I'll have time to share what they did in more depth).
My actual project is based on helping educators integrate coding into the curriculum. Here in New Zealand, computational thinking is meant to be part of the curriculum next year. Before the academy I did a survey and found that many educators were not teaching it (about 50%) and those that were had had very little training or support. So I wanted to change that. After the whole process at the academy, I decided on making a storyboard of a video for my prototype. I'm currently in the process of turning that storyboard into a script which will then be filmed. It has been a busy few weeks since I came back (mostly taken up with ERO and some big personal things), so I'm hopefully going to find some time in the coming week to work on it. At any rate, I was matched with my mentor today, so that's another great step in this whole process. I look forward to sharing with everyone how this project is going in the future!
This year I was fortunate enough to be accepted to present at both the Auckland AND the Wellington Google Summits put on by the Ed Tech Team.
Since the beginning of the year, as can be evidenced by my lack of posting regularly on here, I have been very busy and overwhelmed with the implementation of new ideas at Ormiston School where I was put into a habitat for the first time. So a lot of the drive that had previously been in me had slowly disappeared.
But these two Google Summits gave me my drive back. It's funny how you don't realize what's missing until you get it back, but I had mostly disconnected myself from my core online PLN and was suffering because of it. Coming back to these summits and spending four days with my tribe was extremely helpful in sparking my drive to make innovative change.
My four sessions went fairly well. Two were on how to use Mystery Hangouts (or Skype) in the classroom to connect with other classrooms globally and to promote critical thinking skills and problem solving, while the other two were on how to use Google Forms to make Choose Your Own Adventure stories. After some sessions last year that were more of me talking than of the participants actually, you know, participating, I made some changes and made sure that the majority of each session was a chance for my colleagues to try something new. For the Mystery Hangout session we ran a mock Mystery Hangout. For the Choose Your Own Adventure session we actually made our own Choose Your Own Adventures. Further to this, it gave me more ideas of what I could share in the future (and I'm going to keep some of that on the down low for now).
One tangent that these sessions sent me on was to create some sort of resource for teachers to connect with each other so that they can do a Mystery Hangout. I had used a padlet in my presentation to collect details of classrooms that might be interested, but on my long drive home from Wellington and after a suggestion from one of the attendees there, I am currently working on a small website for NZ teachers to find each other for these Mystery Chats (not trying to favour one over the other). So hopefully I'll find some time to complete that task soon and then share it with my PLN to get a global group of people who want to connect with NZ schools.
I also had the opportunity to attend several sessions at the summit which have led to some new thinking and tools for me to use in the classroom. Over the four days, I attended three (yes, 3) sessions related to Breakout EDU. Two which let me experience the game play (I've done it a few times before, admittedly) and once where we got the chance to brainstorm and look at the process of designing games. I'm actually quite interested in using this in the classroom (and we actually trialled it this week - but that's another blog post) so it was good to get my brain thinking about what we could do and how we could do it.
Another session I attended included using the G Suite Apps on iPads. This has long been an issue for me in the classroom/habitat. Often we say we have 40 some odd devices (for 90 learners, mind you) and 10 of those are iPads, which don't have the same functionality as chromebooks. However, we were given some tasks to try on the iPads and I managed to figure out how to do a variety of things on it that I had previously thought would be difficult to do.
There were also a few sessions on Computer Science and coding. One was a reiteration of the CS First session I attended last year, and this helped reaffirm the need for coding in the classroom. They have a variety of modules that learners can go through to practice coding. This got me thinking about the ways in which we can add coding to the curriculum and embed it through other subjects. I've made some tentative plans to work towards some practical, hands on coding in all areas. A second session I attended shared lots of resources for higher level coding. One resource that stood out in particular was the Khan Academy and Pixar joint venture: Pixar in a Box. Mainly geared towards older learners, there are certainly some aspects that can be used at the primary level. And don't think I haven't contemplated learning how to digitally animate and change careers! Probably not though...
I also finally attended a session put on by Angela Lee on Virtual Reality. Having worked with her for ages and ages, I've never actually gone to see her present. It was very helpful in that I now know how to use both Google Expeditions as well as another application that allows learners to make their own 3D virtual world: CoSpaces. These are two things that we're examining to add to our curriculum throughout as many areas as possible.
Overall, I was pretty pleased with the four days at the summits - and I quite liked the drive as well (it's always nice to see the green of New Zealand). It's given me a new focus going forward and sparked that fire in me that has recently been in hiding.
