Future Learning Blog

Where is external assessment going, and who are we thinking of when we are deciding the future of assessment beyond 2020.   This picture is the actual view I was confronted with, walking into our local community college gym, aged 16.  A place where we had played volleyball, netball and cricket was now being used to measure how much we knew about the things we had spent our school lives practically doing inside this hall, to see if I could pass GCSE PE.  It is now clearly ironic the amount of time that we spent actively exerting ourselves and demonstrating competency in the ‘doing’ of the skill was now going to be measured by writing down everything we knew about it in 2hrs to double check we knew what we were supposed to know.  The previous 24hrs before this vista had seen me cramming the information written on tiny ‘flash cards’ into my short term memory, even up to the walk down the corridor to find my seat I was memorising the diagrams I had drawn about ...

Image from  Geof Wilson This  is a recent opinion piece that I wrote in the Gisborne Herald, although some of the points are 'sensationalised' I am aiming to mobilise community support to consider how important education is and how everyone should be involved in reimagining this in Gisborne.  The children we have here are amazing, we only have to help them prove it.

Here is an interview from Radio New Zealand National where I had the opportunity to talk about how The Mind Lab by Unitec can be the catalyst in transformational change in our district.  The Eastland Community Trust and Activate Tairawhiti have been instrumental in allowing amazing opportunities for all of our learners, students and teachers through access to emerging technologies and hands-on learning experiences. From RNZ national... "Tablets, smart phones, applications, animation and building games like Minecraft are ubiquitous in households..... but how do teachers get to grips with emerging technologies and ensure they are used to enhance learning in the classroom? The Mind Lab by Unitec is running post-graduate courses for teachers to learn to make the most of the digital age through learning opportunities in Auckland, Gisborne, Wellington and Christchurch. Tim Gander is the Centre Director for the Gisborne Lab."

Last year I spent plenty of time thinking and reflecting about my own practice as a classroom teacher - I developed a need to question everything I was doing - you could attribute this to the action research process, but also the necessity to understand why I was even in a classroom with other humans trying to teach them - whatever that entails, I was challenging myself with questions around what learning, knowledge or even teaching was - and why were we spending so much time doing whatever we were doing for around 8000 hours ? I had started thinking about this again as I watched an EdTalk that had just been released that was filmed during the whirlwind which was ULearn 2014.  The talk was about the learner agency work I had been focussed on, this again rekindled my ideas around the term and questioned my understanding of agency, and how I was supporting the concept in my teaching.  I feel I need to revisit this again after watching myself talk so enthusiastically abou...

It was devastating to miss out on winning the Gigatown competition by 0.2%, especially as this was due to a social media element which Gisborne was completely disadvantaged in due to our smaller population compared to Dunedin (the overall winner).  It was even more frustrating to hear that our 'plan for success' was a clear winner with all judges agreeing that it was the strongest proposal.  I believe the investment that Chorus and many other companies would have put into our region had the potential for the most radical transformation out of all of the final contenders. The discussions that arose from all the hard work that so many people in the Gisborne community invested in have recently come back into the limelight as a steering group has been formed to action many of the ideas proposed in our original plan, this is extremely exciting as the momentum that was built around the competition bought together large groups of people from different sectors that would not hav...

Māori pedagogical frameworks & relationship with technology tools This post is an excerpt from a project I have been working on lately, if you'd like to have a browse through the full resource have a look at this site .  The overall findings confirm that the approach to inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy starts with relationships, and getting to know the learners - this is applicable in all teaching and learning situations and not uniquely with Māori ākonga - eLearning can be used in a way to collaborate with community and connect learners to their past, present and future places in society. While there is no specific pedagogical model to support eLearning and no pedagogical model specifically for Māori it is possible to interweave many of the unique components of both to support successful outcomes (figure 1.1). A large amount of research has been completed to identify the unique components of kaupapa Māori for successful learning and eLearning. This post i...

                                                        Leaving Poverty Bay It has been a couple of weeks since I returned from the second 2014 e-fellow experience of the year.  Christchurch was our destination, a place I’ve not visited for 15 years since I toured around the country in a 1981 Mitsubishi Mirage with surfboards on the roof, a tent in the back and not a care in the world.  Plenty has changed since then and I was astonished by the level of disruption, hardship and destruction still felt by the earthquakes back in 2010 and 2011.  However I was really amazed by the level of good old kiwi ingenuity and positive outlook that allowed the residents of Christchurch to continue on and rebuild their city.  Learning communities like the GCSN have really supported the rebuild in the educational sector by connecting sch...

The first e-fellowship experience for me was embodied in a vision of the Sky Tower from half way up Mt. Eden. The 3 day meeting was full of inspiration, innovation and fresh ideas from a wide range of people places, buildings, practices and theory. Day one was kicked off by a meet and greet at the CORE Education HQ, everyone gave a personal introduction and a small talk with the artefacts we brought along - it felt humbling to be in a room with such a vast knowledge base and endless list of experiences. The e-fellow group consisted of 5 secondary educators and 2 from the Primary sector, this was a different ratio from previous years and sparked plenty of interesting conversations and allowed me to realise that despite many of us being at different stages of integration and familiarity of blended e-

Mahanga Beach, Mahia Part of the work I will be doing this year with my e-fellowship will be about developing student agency in the classroom, especially within the confines of traditional schooling system and the NCEA.  I decided to start at the beginning and look at learning and what it encompasses, although we are teachers and it is our core business it is good to re-visit the theory.  I came across the following quote while I was on school camp last week; "The most accurate word in western culture to describe what happens in a learning organization …is “metanoia” and it means a shift of mind…For the Greeks, it meant a fundamental shift or change, or more literally transcendence (“meta”- above or beyond, as in “metaphysics”) of mind (“noia,” from the root “nous,” of mind)….To grasp the meaning of “metanoia” is to grasp the deeper meaning of “learning”, for learning also involves a fundamental shift or movement of mind…. Most people’s eyes glaze over if you talk to th...

I've just finished a slice of holiday reading involving "New technology trends in education: Seven years of forecasts and convergence " by Sergio Martin, Gabriel Diaz, Elio Sancristobal, Rosario Gil, Manuel Castro, Juan Peire and felt like reflecting on this. The group conducted a study on the the technologies most likely to impact education in the near future, by looking at technology metatrends from 2004 to 2014 - the report was based on the technologies highlighted in the NMC Horizon Reports . The main trends highlighted were; Social web  Mobile and ubiquitous devices  Augmented reality  Semantic web  Immersive environments  Learning objects  While most of the trends highlighted receive quite a bit of exposure I was interested in finding out a bit more about the Semantic web - from more reading I see it as a trend well worth watching I also I feel that we should not only focus on the technology but also the organisation of...

Last week I sat in the school hall on a cold and stormy thursday night, in the middle of the hall, possibly the furthest point from any source of heat you could have found, for 2 and a half hours furiously marking yr 9 tests ready for the junior deadline next week - I saw 3 parents out of 79 potential.  I couldn't help thinking there must be a better way to do this......

At the end of last term I pestered my principal into letting me go to Learning@school 2013 in Gisborne.  I'm glad I sent the numerous emails requesting to go as the whole day was full of inspiration and positive energy - my mind has been a whirlwind of activity since then with all the ideas that were triggered by the talks and workshops - i've finally gone through the notes I made on evernote and thought I'd share some of them with staff who were interested but unable to attend.  The most inspirational part of the day was the keynote that was presented by Derek Wenmouth, Director of E-Learning at Core Education. Derek introduced the talk by glimpsing 20 years into the future by looking at how some of the big thinkers were claiming how our future would be shaped.  The first character that Derek mentioned was Ray Kurzweil who is director of engineering at google.  He claims that biotechnology (reprogramming biology as an information process) would ...