ICT Cluster 19/11/2008

The Wellington Central North Island Top of South Cluster group spent the day at Awatapu College in Palmerston North sharing and reflecting on the experience as being part of the ICT cluster programme. The day had a secondary school focus. It was interesting to hear from schools which are at different stages of the three year time period of the ICT cluster programme. Several of the schools nearing the end of their involvement discussed how far they felt that they had progressed. They described how much of the first year was spent planning and getting organised. Check out this link for information on the cluster and the programme for the day.

Presentors

Jes of Wellington College focused on languages and their use of ICT.

• Students’ producing French virtual fieldtrips was found to improve motivation and engagement.
• Students used Audacity to make voice recording and using the multi tracking facility students are able to cut and paste into the recordings and students are able to make comments on each others recording.
• Useful French site
• Also using photostory and Google Earth http://www.panoramas.dk./
  

Allan (Manawatu)
Three schools in this cluster, one using moddle and two who are using knowledgenet.

• A lot of time has been spent on PD sessions for staff and identifying and removing blocks / barriers to using ICT in teaching and learning. Often removing the barriers involved changing the way ICT systems were set up in schools.
• The cluster is now involved in setting up eLearning streams. Students selected for these programmes have good self management skills. One of the spin offs from this has been the increased interaction between teachers from different schools and the sharing of support and resources.
• One to one tutoring of staff was found to work best for teachers.
• Every staff member in the cluster was encouraged to have an eLearning goal.
• Two teacher only days were held each year.
• There has been a focus on getting teachers in subject areas working together across schools.

Welnet Cluster: Queen Margaret and Newlands College

• Sent several teachers to Learning at School conference which provided a significant shift in teacher skills- developing individual is very powerful.
• He asked: How do we measure improvements in student learning which are related to increased use of ICT?
• Queen Margaret migrating to Scholaris LMS (Microsoft Product)
• Next year the Lead Teacher model will continue with both colleges self funding in the new year

Alannah of the Nelson cluster which includes Motueka High School and 14 primary schools. Her blog.

• Profiled the use of Google video and bubble comment.
• referred to Cheryl's Google doc on the key competencies, check it out
• podcasting and how it fits into teaching the key competencies

Waka ICT cluster: - Kim, (New Plymouth Girls)

The school has 20 students working as Tech Angels helping teachers with the use of ICT in the school. They have been involved in several projects which included the creation of a blog for the library which reviews books. Several local primary schools have Tech Wizards who work with the Tech Angels this has improved transitions thru primary, intermediate to secondary. Several times a year the Tech Wizards and Tech Angels get together for events which often involve competitive team events. Check out some of the students work Time4Celebration.

Freybreg High School: Craig shared his learning journey-
first year- all about raising personal confidence,
second year saw the beauty of blogging- personal first to get the hang of it + animations + Delicious (freybergscience) + revisiting blogs, using tags
Begun an edublog this year as well.

Onhigh cluster: Wellington High School and Onslow College

• Bring and brag session are run once term where teachers share how they are using ICT in their classrooms
• Cmaps - concept mapping tool is being used in science. Students develop their own concept maps for science vocabulary. Next year the teacher plans to make this a collaborative activity with students working together.
• Year 11 technology students are using blogs and video blogs to document the technology process - this has improved students ability to write reflectively about their learning experience.
• Silicon coach is being used in PE to analysis movement. This has also improved students ability to comment reflectively on their learning.
• PD is run every Tuesday morning usually in faculty groups.
• Identified the challenge of keeping up with all of the new products and advances.

Looking for inspiration! Check out these teaching and learning resources.

Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton

Guy Claxton Podcast

Ross Todd, Rutgers University PowerPoint He is an info literacy expert.

Zoho Creator useful tool

NZQA Moderation Workshop: PE

NZQA PE moderator best practice workshop.

1. The presenter went over a snapshot of the moderation process.

• Check the coversheet.
• Check the assessors judgement
• Look at the task, even TKI tasks, fill in the gap tasks can only ever be descriptive, not keen on quantitative schedules (which many of the TKI example tasks are). They pointed out that the TKI example tasks have been around for a long time and many need to be rewritten but at the moment no one has funding to do this.
• Look at the assessment schedule, the most common problem is the lack of examples of learner responses. It is a requirement to include these.
  

2. A new web page has been developed for each subject area which provides links to lots of useful information in particular the Clarifications of internally assessed standards document.
PE page link
Health page link

3. The next part of the workshop involved working through the moderation of five PE standards a mixture of level one, two and three. We worked in small groups and moderated three examples of student work and then checked our moderation against that of the school that provided the work and the NZQA moderator’s judgement. It was a useful process but unfortunately none of the standards worked on is provided at TCS. Some tips gather in the process:

• It is good practice to gather exemplars which can be referred to, this helps to maintain consistence over different years.
• Explain needs to be how and why
• It is considered good practice to provide the student with a copy of the NCEA standard.
• When the standard has two bullet points then the assessor can make a holistic judgement within the bullet point but not across more than one bullet point.
• Look for positive and negative examples in student evaluations.
  
  Overall comment
  The new web pages look like they will be useful and the clarification of internally assessed standards documents will provide guidance for assessors.