Future Learning Blog

In this second instalment of the adventure Han Solo, Chewie, Luke and the droids have escaped Tatowiine and are embarking on a mission to Aldaraan to rescue Princess Leia….to keep in with the monomyth plot we are now entering the road of trials, where things will test us and many challenges await.  To read the first part of the adventure have a look at this post . This is how my brain works when I’m mapping out what has happened this year….Illustration: Andrew DeGraff  This enquiry has been a cyclical process, and at this stage as a class we have been successful in co-constructing agency, investigating metacognition, and exploring how we learn as a class - but as on

These are some of the thoughts floating around in my head on the flight home, a roaring cold southerly pushing the tiny plane and my big ideas back up to Gisborne…...The past e-fellows experience in Wellington has been a challenge, however - at this point in time I don’t feel as mentally or physically drained as on previous e-fellow trips,  we had plenty of time to synthesise our inquiry’s at the amazing beach front house we called home for 3 days.   In this trip I grappled with what true agency meant, and rolled between the notions of freedom of thought, choice and direction and the underlying aspects of effectiveness, efficiency and academic rigour - and how agency has a part to play in all of these - and is true agency ever obtainable, or is it as elusive as the green flash at that moment where the sun sinks into the ocean beside Kapiti island? This all melded together into a timely reinforcement of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how that can relate to ...

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...

In my CORE Education e-fellowship this year I have been investigating learner agency, this blog post summarises the first steps I took during term one on my ongoing journey to enlightenment (I’m still not there yet).  I have employed an action research method for the investigation, and to help unfold the narrative of my experiences I’m going to use Joseph Campbell's traditional 'monomyth' outline as it fits well with the developments and cycles in this research process; this blog post is the introduction, the first part of the story where everyone is just milling about and life is carrying on as normal, but then something disrupts the status quo and there is no turning back.   To contextualise the media reference further, it is a bit like when Luke Skywalker is on Tatooine staying with uncle Owen and aunt Beru wishing he was somewhere else, he find’s a message in R2-D2 with Old Ben (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and before he knows it he is jumping on the Millennium falcon with Han Solo...

Poke-a-muscle and whack-a-bone are two really fun web apps that refresh understanding of human anatomy.  I'm using them today in my lesson and getting the boys to screen grab their best score and post it to our Google+ community to encourage some healthy competition between the students.  I finished the lesson off with a collaborative problem solving activity that I found on the TES website which asks the students to match up statements about functions of the skeleton !

This is another excellent tool that has been created by New Visions Cloud Lab , and  +Andrew Stillman  in particular.  I read about this in the GEG NZ group and was perfect timing as I was just about to launch into using Google sites as a way for my Tu Tane students to record their journey towards becoming a good man. I wanted each student to have their own site to use, and for me to be able to check on the sites and any edits or additions from a central location - siteMaestro allows you to do this and it isn't that tricky to set up, all you need is a site that you'd like the students to use, and a list of their email addresses!  It's so easy I made a video of it below.  The link to the site to install the Add-on is here . Overall I think it is a brilliant management tool when allowing students the power of using collaborative sites in their own learning journey.

Last year I was inspired by +Sonya Van Schaijik  to organise a TeachmeetNZ event with other physical education teachers in NZ, and managed to connect with  +Libby Schumacher-Knight   +Aaron Mead  and  +Julia breen  through a Google+ hangout.  The idea was to share some ideas around how we were going to integrate e-learning into our PE teaching the following year, it was a great learning experience and we managed to stream the event live at the Physical Education NZ conference in Auckland, which made it even more worthwhile!  During the 'hangout' we presented our ideas, one of my ideas was to use Google+ communities to allow students to connect and support each other on a platform they were familiar with, as well as using it as a tool to teach digital citizenship and digital literacies - I wrote briefly about the outline of the community on a previous blog post . Part of Google+ is the' hangout' function, this is a video conferencing/mes...