UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND VICE CHANCELLOR'S TOP MAORI & PACIFIC ISLAND SCHOLARSHIP

Te Kahuwhero Alexander-Tui'inukuafe has been awarded the prestigious Vice Chancellor's Top Maori & Pacific Island Scholarship which will pay for her fees and course costs at the University of Auckland. during her studies. Te Kahuwhero is considering studying a Bachelor of Achitecture. She was an e-student this year, studying Level 3 Statistics and Modelling with Tony Jenkins from East Otago High School, an OtagoNet school. (By the way, I am the proud aunt)!!!

AGRICULTURE SCHOLARSHIP

Rix Wihongi (Year 13) and Jimmy Croft (Year 13), both students in the full-time Agriculture Academy who participated in weekly VCs with Andrew Thompson from Telford Polytechnic have been accepted to attend the Certificate course at Telford in 2009, and better still, they have both received a scholarship worth $5000 to cover their fees. Rix and Jimmy have been e-students for two years now. Their achievements wouldn't have been realised without the support of their Agriculture tutor, Bill Dalton and eteacher Andrew Thompson. It was a very proud moment seeing these boys graduate from NC. Rix had just arrived back from a 10 day, fully paid trip to Italy as a Youth Advocate for indigineous people. A great young ambassador. Jimmy Croft with Northland College Principal, John Tapene

HOSPITALITY ACADEMY STUDENTS

These students have been attending a weekly VC with Sue from Mercury Bay Area School (CoroNet Cluster) as part of their full-time hospitality training with their Chef Robbie Nicholas. These students catered for the graduation dinner, of which two were graduates but are thinking about returning next year.
BACK: Andrea Paul, Chef Robbie, Joseph Renata FRONT: Hine Hohepa, Mina Rurehe, Raewyn Veltmeyer, Fontaine Veltmeyer

Graduation Dinner for Year 13 at Northland College

This week I attended the graduation dinner for the Year 13 students at Northland College. It was a very enjoyable evening, but even more so for me as I was able to enjoy the evening as a whanau member, rather than the organiser. My niece was graduating, along with 25 other Year 13 students who had been involved in elearning this year.

Here are three of the students who undertook their Level 3 Statistics studies with Tony Jenkins from East Otago Boys, part of OtagoNet.
LEFT: Trivia Barrett-Howard, Greer Williams, Te Kahuwhero Alexander-Tui'inukuafe

MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

Update for Term 4

Where has the term gone? I just had my last official VC with my accounting students today. It only seemed like a few months ago that I first met with them.

This term has been really busy with lots of school visits. Where have I been:
DARGAVILLE - 30th October - Week 2 - Met David Bargh and Angela Troath at Dargaville High School. I enjoyed the discussion I had with David, 2 hours and then with Angela about the future of FarNet. They are both really enthusiastic and especially enthusuastic about the TAL Programme. (Tech Angel Leadership Programme). They have suggested that their Head Boy for next year work with the students as a mentor, so very encouraging. David was also very interested to hear about the Web 2.0 tools and how I could work with his staff to integrate some of these wonderful tools into their F2F classrooms.

NORTHLAND COLLEGE - I am probably at NC once a week, mainly because I have been working online with their Year 10 Bilungual Class - 10 Tahi as part of my university study. I have been doing some F2F lessons with them. I also have two accounting students from NC in my online class, so I have been trying to push through the work required for preparation for external exams.

OPONONI AREA SCHOOL - I visited Tiere and her new DP - Natasha Sadler just this week. Whilst they are facing some other challenges at the moment, they are both enthusiastic about the TAL programme and integrating some web 2.0 tools in their F2F classes. Natasha has a wealth of knowledge around Te Reo Maori, having come from NZQA, so I am hoping that we can utilise her expertise and experience amongst our teachers in the Far North.

SOME OF THE THINGS I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON:
Study - I am almost at the end of my journey this semester with the two online papers I have been doing through Canterbury University. I can't say that I am happy it has come to an end because it has been the best PD I have ever done around online learning. I have experienced a huge shift in my pedagogical thinking around elearning as a result, and have some ideas I want to share with some of my colleagues about a different model of delivering elearning. For a start, I no longer support the idea of an hour of VC teaching a week, but rather 4 hours of online learning for students with the use of VC, Skype, Adobe Connect to offer support in the form of a tutorial to students. We need to ensure that our online environment is robust and engaging, interactive and student centred and not just a repository portal for us to dump our work for students to look at if they have missed a class. I am thinking about approaching CAM to discuss how we could utilise some of our very experienced and talented e-educators to support our eteachers in their online environments. - GOSH - I hope that I do pass both these papers after all the work I have done.

Update of FarNet for Term 3

I haven't been very good at keeping up with my blog, but while I was in Christchurch for the ULearn08 Conference in the second week of the school holidays, I got an opportunity during a meeting of the 12 ePrincipals to reflect on some of the things that have been happening in the FarNet Cluster and to reflect on our three goals.

The 3 goals of our FarNet Cluster are:
GOAL ONE: Create a sustainable collaborative elearning environment for FarNet schools around the Virtual Learning Network
GOAL ONE: Create an sustainable online teaching and learning portal through Schoolzone’s MyClasses, MyDesktop, Mymail and MyPortfolio for all nine schools
GOAL ONE: Develop a sustainable group of trained -eteachers within FarNet

BACKGROUND TO FARNET:

Most of the 9 schools are low decile with high % of Maori students with a mixture of area schools. Developing relationships is very very important to me, hence Russell Bishops’s research on his Te Kotahitanga Project in terms of engagement of Maori students is always high in my pedagogical thinking and working with people.

Students: Some things around the students
In looking at ways of sustaining an online learning environment I am introducing a Tech Angel Leadership Programme – Year 8/9 (area schools) – who will be trained in using VC and the preferred LMS – MySuite and Myclasses and Web 2.0 tools. They will be the support for teachers and students at the 9 schools. This is being targeted as a GATE programme.

Two students attended a residential workshop for Level 3 PE with Lynda Pascoe-Walsh who teaches Level 3 PE online from Roxburgh Area School (OtagoNet) at Wanaka as part of their Level 3 PE course. They skied for 4 days, then spent 4 days working through the Gateway Programme on Mt Hutt Ski Field.

11 students from 2 FarNet schools (Kaitaia College and Northland College) attended a residential course at Telford in the first week of the holidays. This is a great experience for them. Six students have applied for a full-time placement in 2009 at Telford.

Sustaining the capacity of eteachers:
I have been speaking with Principals about targeting a teacher from a specialist area which have small numbers and creating a blended learning with strong emphasis of pedagogy in online learning. Eg Level 3 English – 5 in F2F class, 4 hours per week, 2 hrs F2F with those students working independently for 2 hours, teacher delivering the same course online to the cluster on VLN. This is a proposed model to address the need for each school to provide an eteacher.

Training for 2009 – current eteachers will be encouraged to work on their online environment for 2009 and Eddie is coming up to provide them with a set of web 2.0 tools and lots of the software that the ministry has available for us. Important thing is documenting not only what we are doing now, where we are going but our journey up until now. (whakapapa) So one of the tools we will be insisting our teachers to use is to keep a blog on their work, for self-reflection – and providing an opportunity for fellow colleagues to be able to hold up that non-judgemental mirror up through posting comments.

Research keeps telling us that we are “powering down” our students when they come into our schools, so we will be challenging our eteachers to use online resources like audacity and utube, wikis, ipods for podcasting, cellphones for communication and more student centred learning in their classes.

Where have I been:
Sydney – attended "Leading a Digital School" - August - 3 ePrincipals attended the 4 day conference. It was a valuable opportunity to reflect on what we are achieving in New Zealand. I think we are well ahead of most of the Australian schools.

Tony Bates – Lecturer from the University of British Columbia – Canada - delivered a symposium in Wellington which was organised by the Wellington Loop schools. He spoke about the blended learning – 35,000 students in BC doing at least one of their subjects online in schools. Tony spoke about this blend and it was inspiring to hear that their research clearly shows: Results were much the same; Retention on courses much the same; Satisfaction of courses from teacher, student and community was hugely increased.

So this has given me more information to now take back to the Principals and to support my proposal.

Both conferences were very thought provoking and we waved our VLN and elearning flag at both of those conferences.

What have I been working on:
Using my VC unit at home to avoid travelling. My record so far is 6 VCs in one day – as opposed to being able to visit only one school in a day. Something Conor (ePrincipal of Volcanics) shared in one of our Principal Mentor leadership meetings was that it was important that I became the face of FarNet. One of my goals has been to spend more time to become that face of FarNet by making more F2F visits in my schools and using the VC for follow up.

eMentor - Sue Winter

I feel well supported by Sue as our Principal Mentor with our regular meetings which always have a focus on our leadership and we have been able to share lots of our experiences. Sue has also visited me in my cluster and shadowed me for a couple of days. The feedback was excellent.

Study with Canterbury University

I have enrolled in two online courses with Canterbury University, which has challenged my thinking on pedagogy in elearning. Both these two lecturers, Derek Wenmoth and Nicki Dabner through their courses are exceptionally good examples of elearning courses. As part of this study, I have been facilitating the learning between two schools from opposite ends of the country, one decile 4 – 100% European students and one decile 1 – 100% Maori. 30 students – VC supports the learning, but the learning is collaborative and scaffolding on each other’s learning. I really see my role as facilitator of this class and not the teacher.
We had a powhiri online, and it was a little difficult to work out who was the manuhiri (visitors) and who was the turangawaewae (home group), so we had a short mihi delivered from Northland College.

My online class

I teach a Level 1/2 accounting class. I have had students from Invercargill, Dunedin, Stratford and Northland College. My teaching role has changed from an instructional teaching role to more of a tutorial role in Term 3 and I have placed more emphasis on the online learning environment and textbooks and workbooks they have.

My Principals:
I have been trying to meet with each Principal during Term 3 to discuss their schoolwide goals and how I can assist them through support of FarNet, rather than adding another task for them. The results from an online survey has given us some good baseline data to work from.

Other:
I have been working with 2 new VC capable schools – one kura and one Christian school. It was great to be able to call on the expertise of Anton Coltham (ePrincipal of Welcom) to speak with one of the schools who were talking about developing moodle.

Enterprise Northland and E4E

I have been working with Dave Templetom from Enterprise Northland on developing an online course for YES in 2009 as a trial – with Rachel Roberts (ePrincipal of Tarnet) and working with Enterprise Northland in the use of VC for PD and meetings. Dave has a VC set in their Whangarei offices. Meeting last week of term had 15 F2F and 20 remotely.

Have been trying to attend the future choices/option evenings and facilitating online interviews between eteachers/estudents and their parents.

Ka Hikitia Strategy

In terms of the Ka Hikitia Strategy, I am still refining the proposal to present to the Ministry and I have been working with Eddie about the enrolment forms on the VLN for 2009 to reflect things like student ethnicity so we can gather data around student ethnicity. We are looking at how the VLN could have more of a presence of demonstrating the success of our Maori students studying through the VLN – like photos or case studies.

TERM 3 - WEEK 3

4th August - VC with Film Commission - Because I was at Northland College, catching up with some science students, I stayed to attend this digiconversation organised by Rachel Roberts (Taranet) with the NZ Film Commission. Other people there was Deb, the Media Studies adviser based in Auckland. Unfortunately this time is when NC staff have their full staff meeting, but I was able to grab the Faculty Leader English and Media Studies teacher part way through. They were unsure of using the equipment, but I gave them some guidance and then left them to finish the VC off. I had arranged for the adviser to stay online after the meeting to speak with them about moderation and film studies accreditation.

5th August - Tutorial Class for Accounting - Kirsty and Alice attended. Cameron didn't know about it and Marlene is Level 1 mainly. She is going to attend from now on though.

5th August - This was the first VC meeting I had attended all term which I didn't have to dial in through the audio bridge. Was great to be able to see my fellow ecolleagues. I was looking forward to this meeting for a range of reasons, but most of all because I knew that Jan Collier (Coronet) was going to be chairing it and that Sue Winters (Principal Mentor) was going to shadow her.

Reflection: I thought that Jan looked confident and fully in charge and I really like the way she ran the meeting in terms of ensuring that everyone had an opportunity to make one comment on each item and that the person presenting the item was able to wrap up at the end. There was still room for hilarity, as shown by Eddie in his dress ups and time at the end of the meeting for those interested to discuss the Start of the Year Modules. This went on for a further hour.

6th August - Faciliated a VC meeting between Dave Templeton, E4E Coordinator, Maryanne (Core Education) and the enterprise teacher, Clinton (Kaitaia College). Dave had wanted some PD in the use of VC as he wants to deliver Enterprise Studies and YES PD for staff via VC, so he came to my home office and used my equipment. Dave is really interested in either getting a set installed at their Enterprise Northland office in Whangarei or to use the VC at Te Puni Kokiri office in Whangarei.

8th August - Eddie dialled in today via VC to speak with me about a pilot project that the Correspondence School were interested in offering to schools in the FarNet cluster. He had Inka Helwig and Kerry Whelan from TCS with him and they discussed their proposal. They are looking at support alternative education units with their teaching and learning programmes through video conferencing. I also asked them about another need I see in our community and that is with our students who have recently left school, and may have missed out on a few credits required to attend university or just to upskill. They don't want to return to school full-time and do not meet the requirements of being an adult student at a school. These students often work in part-time employment, or often don't want to leave their home town straight away, so they are still keen to be engaged in some form of formal learning. I suggested that the local runanga in their area might be interested in supporting these students by providing them with a place to study at and the correspondence school said they were looking at providing computers for those types of students to work on if they were enrolled with TCS. TCS have dropped the $80 fee per paper for enrolment for students between 16 and 19.

I have sent out invitations to the providers of alternative education in the Far North, including those schools not involved in FarNet. There will be a meeting between those stakeholders, the Runanga o Ngapuhi and TCS next Thursday via VC at 3.00pm.

I am really hoping that this will eventuate into a viable project.

8th August - VC meeting with Gary Walsh, Principal of Roxburgh Area School. I am going to be working with his class as part of my study with Canterbury. We discussed my proposal which I had sent through to him and he is happy about the future learning experiences we are all going to have. The class will start on 25th August, after we get back from the DEANZ Conference.