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RoboCupJunior Te Tai Tokerau

This blog has been sitting in my drafts for several months, finally got a chance to finish it! Better late than never right!! For the past four years I have prepared and taken a team to compete in the First Lego League competition in Auckland. This has always been a great learning experience and a highlight of the students' year but the cost of buying the kit each season is high as well as organising and funding a trip to Auckland and taking a day out of my weekend with my family. So this year I decided to try and bring an event north. In setting up our space at the start of the year I made a connection with Joanna from MTA who runs workshops on using the EV3 and was keen to support my idea. Joanna was involved in RoboCup and recommended we have a go at this format as it is much more accessible with only a $40 entry fee and there is more flexibility around the robots that can be used. Joanna came up and ran a free workshop in May, introducing us to the Dance/Theatre form...
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Term Hectic!

As a newly minted senior secondary school teacher I am renaming Term Three to Term Hectic!! Having always taught intermediate, prior to this term my colleagues warned me about the crazy, busyness of Term Three but even their warnings didn't prepare me for the reality! I feel like I blinked and it's the holidays again. And I didn't even get time to blog! As I talked about in my previous blog, my Year 11 students took part in the 123Tech Challenge this term. This turned out to be a great motivator as they had to find a real problem, need or opportunity that they could solve using digital technologies. Those students who found a need that involved working with real stakeholders or 'clients' did amazing things and commented how this process opened their eyes to the possibilities of real careers in the field. " We both have taken this subject in school for many years, but this opened our eyes as to what applications this field can open up in life. We have...
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123Tech Challenge

Yet another new term! Where is this year going!! I'm really excited to be taking part in the Tahi Rua Toru Tech Challenge with my Level 1 NCEA class this term. The in-school component of the challenge is built around the very successful TechHub CREST Challenge, previously operating at Years 9 and 10 but now available at all school levels across years 1-13 as a way of supporting the introduction of the new Digital Technologies curriculum into schools. The Challenge uses a special version of the CREST programme from the Royal Society of NZ. CREST stands for CREativity in Science and Technology and helps students at all levels work through the whole process of problem solving. In a digital technologies context this includes defining a problem, need or opportunity, experimenting on possible solutions, taking guidance from industry mentors, creating a solution and reflecting on it. The really exciting part for me is that this is a way to enable my students to work with people f...
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Tour Creator Tutorial

My Year 9 Makerspace class are going to have a play around with this new program next week so I made a tutorial video so they can have a bit of guidance as they create a tour. The uses for this program are endless! How awesome would it be for students studying a country to be able to create a tour of important places in that country, adding information about points of interest as they go. Check out my short tour here .
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Launching into Term Two

After a whirlwind Term 1 where I was getting my head around a whole new subject area as well as teaching lots of new students and new levels of the curriculum, coming into the second term I feel much more confident in my planning. This term I have new Year 7 and Year 8 classes taking part in Digital Technologies as we have termly rotations through the Technology subjects. This gave me a chance to reflect on what worked and what didn't in the first rotation and refine the unit plans accordingly. One of the major changes I made to the Year 8 program was doing some 'offline' programming before we jumped into programming with the Spheros. On reflecting on the unit I taught in the first term, I found that although most of the students got a general understanding of Computation Thinking from Progress Outcome 3 in the new DT curriculum, they couldn't use the key language (e.g. algorithm, sequence, selection, iteration, debug) to describe what they were doing and why. This ...
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EdTechTeam Summit

So much learning gained at the EdTechTeam Summit over the last two days! Don't even know where to start at the moment but excited to dive in with some of these ideas to inspire and innovate with my students next term. Day 2 Reflection: Affirmation, Idea and Challenge.
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Creativity takes courage!

This year we are trialing a new Makerspace course in Year 9. Prior to starting this I'd done lots of reading and research but there's nothing like the real thing to learn from! So far this term, I've been setting challenges and teaching skills around using the resources we have. A lot of the learning has incorporated exploring learning competencies such as collaboration and critical thinking rather than focusing on content knowledge. Last week we focused on the learning competency of creativity and discussed why creative thinking encourages deep learning. So this week I decided to loosen the reins a bit and let the students loose on the resources. We talked about how the best creations come out of a personal interest or motivation, or out of a desire to solve a problem. We talked about how 'problems' could be as simple as being bored and that a creation might be something to solve that problem. We also discussed how coming up with ideas is often the hardest...
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