Making Great Television to Reinforce Social Studies Learning

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Tom Adams

As blogged about in 2014, St Andrew’s College has been running the only professional television studio in a New Zealand school for almost 20 years. What is particularly exciting for me is the potential of other subjects to utilise this fantastic resource to allow students to conceptualise, and create video content.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to attend a PD day that featured Dr Rueben Puentedura, that developed my own understanding about the SAMR model and its application in unit planning. An important aspect of this learning is that, as part of the redefinition of a unit, technology is allowing students greater opportunities to create meaningful content. With our fully functioning studio, students at St Andrew’s College have the opportunity to produce high quality video content, that both reinforces their own understanding, and displays their learning for others. One such recent example has recently concluded in Year 10 Social Studies.

Mr Simon Williams – Head of Television and Film

Decade Study – The Swinging 60’s

A Level 5 Curriculum Objective in Social Studies requires students to study how the ideas and actions of people in the past have had a significant impact on people’s lives. This year, students undertook a decade study of the 1960’s; including aspects such as historical events, music, and fashion. This was a very popular unit with students, but, as always, the challenge was making their learning authentic.

Mr Simon Williams, the head of Film and Television, was interested in this new unit of work, and offered to assist the teachers to create some video resources to complement their classroom learning. Because the majority of students access learning in the TV studio as part of the Performing Arts course at either Year 9 or 10, there was no need to spend time on the ‘how’ to create such material. This meant students already had the skills to produce an interview style television program, and they could focus on the content.

Mr Williams wanted the process to be smooth and clearly beneficial for the Social Studies staff members, so he assisted by writing a simple script, and organising several interviews with staff that have fond memories of the decade, as well as a television cameraman who cut his teeth in Vietnam in the 1960’s; Mr Wayne Williams.

Student Involvement

The students’ roles included filming, performing, presenting and editing the final production – to create a number of professional standard videos that were ultimately edited into a 35 minute television program.

Students with varying levels of experience were able to contribute to the production of such a programme as the interview format is very familiar and accessible for them. This fact emphasises the potential of the Television studio to help students of almost any subject area to enhance their learning by creating resources of various forms.

Putting Social Studies Learning into Action

The head of Social Studies at St Andrew’s College, Miss Kerry Larby, was enthused by the activity.

One of the key aspects of Social Studies is perspectives, so it was extremely beneficial for our students to hear the authentic experiences of staff members they interact with on a daily basis, but may not realise their past experiences.

Miss Larby also noted that one of the focuses of the unit was helping students to discover the wealth of resources that exist within people, rather than relying on the easy, often web-based, option. Each student was encouraged to identify, and interview, somebody who had clear memories and experiences in the 1960’s and make use of this information to supplement their learning in class.

Collaboration for Mutual Benefit

Students at St Andrew’s College are extremely fortunate to have access to the remarkable television studio. What was particularly pleasing about this activity was the cross curricular nature of the production; utilising students’ existing television creation and editing skills to show, and develop, their learning in Social Studies.

There is certainly scope for more subjects across the College to implement similar tasks, and I look forward to reporting on them on this blog in the future!

Guest Post: Mr Dekker’s Journey With OneNote & Minecraft

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Sam McNeill

This is a repost of a blog on the official Microsoft Education blog where Mr Wilj Dekkers, a Year 6 teacher at St Andrew’s College and Microsoft Innovative Educator, recaps the journey of his classroom over the last two years with Microsoft OneNote and Minecraft.

OneNote is central to the pedagogy in my classroom and school. When you walk through the building you can witness the everyday use of the application from Year 4 to Year 8. You will see Active Boards where teachers annotate writing samples in the Content Library for students to use as a reference for their own learning. Students are huddled around their laptops debating which sources of information are most relevant to include in a shared notebook, and staff are reviewing meeting notes shared through a Professional Learning Group’s OneNote.

Preparatory School Inquiry Learning Model

St. Andrew’s College uses a custom designed Inquiry Pathway—the core of which is built around helping students develop a collaborative approach to learning. The approach is question-driven, encouraging students to find the answers themselves, coming to their own conclusions. As a teacher, this is exciting; we plan and facilitate but cannot predict the final outcome.

Having planned an inquiry around national identity in the 21^st century, I had posed a problem to my class: The Christchurch earthquakes of 2011 had left a long lasting scar on both the economy and identity of the city. Tourism was dwindling, with visitors flying in and quickly moving on to other parts of New Zealand’s South Island. I challenged my students to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a Kiwi in the 21^st century?” and also find a way to bring tourists back to our city.

Students formed collaborative groups and created their own shared notebooks. They planned, questioned and researched their Kiwi icons. They interviewed parents and discussed how families from a variety of cultural backgrounds celebrated being “Kiwis” and what being a New Zealander meant to them. All of which was documented in each group’s shared OneNote Notebook.

Students began asking if they could book laptops to work together in our shared learning spaces outside the physical space of the room. They loved having the flexibility to be able to work together around a PC or laptop and then continue collaborating using OneNote at home, completely away from the physical space of the school, in the evenings. Students were so enthralled with the inquiry unit and ability to work together in real-time through OneNote. Parents even began commenting on how they had never seen their students so excited to return from school and get started on their homework.

Part of the inquiry was looking at how we could bring tourists back to Christchurch. This was where Minecraft was introduced to the class. Students brought in devices running the pocket edition and connected to shared realms via the school’s Wi-Fi. As well as working as a team to answer the big inquiry question, members of each group had individually focused on an aspect of Kiwi culture. I asked the students if they could build a theme park with Kiwiana-themed rides that incorporated elements from their inquiries.

Before long, the class was a buzzing hub of self-directed learning. Students were writing presentation speeches from their inquiry notebooks while Minecraft experts built bigger and better Kiwiana rides to showcase their learning. In the evenings, groups continued developing and improving their learning in preparation for the big day.

By the end of the third term of 2014, OneNote became a standard classroom tool. Having seen the benefits, families had started purchasing laptops for their students to use in our class. This again caused a chain reaction. Students with access to their own devices were using OneNote more, which in turn meant that more students began arriving with laptops.

This had to be managed carefully, since having a laptop in Year 6 is not required. I was wary of technology being used as a substitution tool and made sure that in my planning any use of OneNote or any other tools we were using was in ways that enhanced or allowed learning to take place in a way that could not be done without a device.

It was around this time that Sam McNeill, Director of ICT for the college, brought in six Surface Pro 3s to trial, and I was fortunate to be asked to use one in the prep school. Having always been a believer in the creative power of the pen, I was instantly won over by having the best of both worlds at my fingertips—a fully functional Windows tablet with a stylus that allowed me to write down ideas, thoughts and comments directly into my OneNote Notebooks. It did not take long for a few students to begin arriving with their own Surface tablets!

In the final term of the 2014 school year, we focused on our use of narrative; enhancing writing features and broadening our vocabulary. Using both OneNote and Minecraft seemed like a natural fit.

As a class, we read through “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain,” written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in 1982. This book was one of the first “single-player gamebooks” and was the first of what was to become a successful series of pick-a-path gamebooks called “Fighting Fantasy.”

The students loved it. We discussed modern game worlds, from Fable to World of Warcraft. How could we emulate those fantastic “Fighting Fantasy” stories using the technology at our disposal, and how could the technology enhance the quality of our writing? We wanted our readers to have the same sense of choice and adventure we had experienced reading “Warlock,” while being able to share our writing without needing to produce any form of print media.

“Minecraft brings out the creativity in me. I love remaking my story Minecraft and improving my writing.”
—Mila

Through the insertion of hyperlinks connecting pages, students found an easy way to provide choices for the reader, and as notebooks stored on Onedrive could be easily shared, the audience for their writing expanded quickly. Students were sharing and collaborating on their adventure stories by allowing editing rights to certain classmates deemed to have the relevant skillsets to be seen as official class editors.

The inclusion of Minecraft was thanks to Ms Tam Yuill-Proctor, a Year 10 English teacher in our college. Students in Tam’s creative writing class had used Minecraft and other 3-D authoring tools to create worlds for their stories.

“Using Minecraft made my imagination go wild with thoughts!”
—Kinda

Our Year 6 students took Tam’s idea and expanded upon it by using Minecraft to both plan and develop their writing, as well as to review and revise the content, descriptive phrases and vocabulary. As their Minecraft worlds grew, so did their stories, which were housed in OneNote. In some cases, we had 10-year-old boys who were not big fans of writing producing 5000-word interactive pick-a-path stories. We published a blog entry detailing the OneNote and Minecraft pick-a-path story.

“Minecraft was helpful because it made me notice all the little details in my narrative that were never in my original bubble plan.”
—Padric

By 2015, most teachers in the prep school had embraced OneNote. The superb OneNote Class Notebook app creator was now an important element of Office 365, and students were appreciating the structure of the Collaboration Space, Content Library and their own personal sections.

Teachers were appreciating the organizational simplicity of adding resources and lessons into the Content Library for students to use in their own sections. Within my Year 6 class, multiple students arrived at the beginning of the year armed with Surface Pro 3s.

OneNote sections became collaborative planning spaces for groups designing games and interactive narratives; students naturally made use of the Collaboration Space to form group sections for our prosthetic hand designs for the 3-D printer.

This was also the first year that I started using Minecraft in Math. The students in my group weren’t huge fans of math. I knew they were capable of so much more, but their personal attitude towards the subject was that it was hard; comments at the start of the year were mostly, “I’m not good at math.” My focus was to change their attitudes to that of a growth mindset where they say, “I’m not good at math, yet!” Continue reading →

Putting the R in SAMR

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Tom Adams

One of my on-going goals is based around the successful implementation of eLearning into my teaching of Year 13 Geography. In my role as eLearning integrator at the College, it is important that I am seen to be visible in this area, and that I can show that I too am implementing some of the strategies and tools that I am advocating to other staff.

The SAMR Model

SAMR is a popular model used to help teachers infuse technology into teaching and learning. The man behind the model is Dr. Ruben Puentedura, an Argentinian academic. The SAMR model is based around a planning progression that aims to transform learning experiences so they result in higher levels of achievement for students. We have previously blogged about the SAMR scale here – a great post that thoroughly describes the model.

Alternatively you can listen to Dr Puentedura explain the SAMR model on this video.

Hearing Dr Puentedura Explain his Model

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Dr Puentedura here in Christchurch. During the presentation he spent time analysing the structure of the SAMR model, by modeling how the model could be used in the teaching of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The way we were challenged to think about the model was as a SAMR Ladder. A unit of work must involve a deliberate progression through the stages of the SAMR model, with each learning activity building on the complexity of student understanding generated by the last. This ladder analogy was the crucial aspect of the presentation for me, and really consolidated my own understanding of the model and the most appropriate way to implement it.

The second part of the presentation was time spent working in small groups implementing the model into a unfamiliar situation. In my case it was helping Year 5 students consolidate their understanding of correct notation in Mathematics. While, as a senior Geography teacher, the context was unfamiliar, this actually proved beneficial as the exercise consolidated my understanding of the importance of a deliberate progression of learning activities required to move through the ladder, thus improving student engagement and understanding.

Takeaways from Presentation

I found Dr Puentedura’s presentation the most engaging I have attended recently. On reflection, my main takeaway’s are:

The SAMR model is designed to be implemented progressively across a long unit of work, rather than used to justify the planning of an individual task.
Think of the SAMR model as a ladder, and plan to progress your students and their learning.
The challenge for teachers is to move beyond Augmentation to Modification

Putting it into Action – Queenstown Tourism Development Unit

My Ideas for a SAMR Unit on Tourism Development

Upon returning to school I felt compelled to put my new learning into action. Next week my Year 13 students begin work on a new unit of work; Tourism Development. The aim of the unit is to help students demonstrate understanding of how a Cultural Process shapes a Geographic Environment; in this case Queenstown. During this unit they will study the historic and contemporary role that Tourism Development has played in the life of Queenstown.

Whilst technology has previously played a part in my teaching of this unit, this will be the first occasion where I plan to implement the SAMR model this deliberately throughout a unit.

Four levels of Task Development

Because OneNote plays such a big roll in my class it was easy to identify tasks in the unit that are clearly Substitution. Particularly with the recently added Classroom Notebook Add-in to OneNote it is now incredibly easy to ensure that class notes are easily distributed to all students in an organised, and deliberate way.

The second level of the scale is Augmentation. These are tasks that technology acts as a direct tool substitute, but there is a level of functional improvement. A good example of this will be a task that I have previously used during this topic where students use the Placemark functionality within Google Earth to investigate the Spatial Patterns of accommodation and attractions in Queenstown. This task could just as easily be done with a paper map and felt pens, but the functional improvement comes from the ability of students to turn the different layers on and off, and add text detail to each of the Placemarks.

Task Modification is where the real challenge lies for me in this unit. Google Earth makes another appearance on this list, as the program is so useful for students to visualise an environment such as Queenstown; so there are two further tasks that utilise its potential. The third task is aimed at utilising the potential of the site Canva which we have recently discovered in our team as an easy site to use to create visuals.

The final step in my ladder is based around task Redefinition. At this level the technology must allow for the creation of a new task, one that was previously inconceivable. In this case I plan to have my students create a revision website that will be made public. We have previously blogged about student produced websites and I feel that this is an authentic purpose for the students to challenge their organisation and, most importantly, their learning.

The unit of work is planned to take approximately 5 weeks of class time – and with the amount of content material that is demanded of Y13 students it will be interesting to see the progress that I am able to make through this plan. I feel particularly optimistic at this stage however, as the substitution aspect of my providing notes for students to annotate, rather than copy, frees up huge amounts of time to complete more in-depth tasks.

At the conclusion of the unit I will revisit its success – watch this space!

Modelling Google Earth Tours & Internet Research

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Sam McNeill

I was recently invited to speak at the weekly St Andrew’s College Chapel Service. One of the features of these services is the Deputy Head Prefects walking up the centre aisle at the conclusion of the first hymn, and saying “Today we remember ….” and naming an Old Collegian who was killed in action.

For my Chapel, I researched Barry Martin, student #101 at St Andrew’s, who attended from 1918-25 in the Preparatory School and completed his first tour in the RAF before volunteering for a second and eventually completing 46 operational missions over occupied Europe, before being killed on 2nd February 1943.

To visually represent Barry’s life, I opted to build a Google Earth Tour (something I shared on at the recent TeachMeet hosted at St Andrew’s) and indicate places of significance such as his birth (Waiau, North Canterbury), where he attended school (here at St Andrew’s College), through to his various flight training and operational bases (Canada, Mildenhall and Oakington) and his final resting place (Rotterdam General Cemetery). Google Earth tours are something we have encouraged teachers to use and some good examples include:

The yellow pins in this Google Earth screenshot represent targets Barry Martin navigated his crew to, over the course of his 46 flights.

The entire story that I shared at the Chapel Service can be seen in the video at the top of the blog, however you can see the start of the narrated Google Earth tour here. What has been interesting to me is the amount of teachers and students who were really surprised by the power of Google Earth, having never really used it in any meaningful context before. Consequently, Tom Adams (our eLearning Integrator) has run some professional development sessions for staff interested in using it with their students.

The reality is, whilst the visualisations of Barry Martin’s journey added engagement through technology, the researching of the information for the presentation itself was almost entirely dependent on the power of the Internet. I had used Microsoft OneNote to easily compile a working document of information, starting with links to relevant websites and notes to myself on their usefulness:

http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph – check here first as best starting point
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast – great search features – limit by date range and boolean search terms to narrow results. Can export a section as an image too.
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/ good overviews of battles and context in eminently readable format.
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/researching-first-world-war-soldiers – tips for researching
http://www.archway.archives.govt.nz/ – lots of digital records available
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Maor.html Battalion Histories – searchable
http://www.Youtube.com – always good for turning things up.
http://www.bombercommandmemorial.co.nz/ useful for airforce members
http://www.nzwargraves.org.nz/ as it’s name suggests…
Copies of the Collegian Magazines at StAC if we get a good lead
http://www.nzdf.mil.nz/personnel-records/nzdf-archives/ – NZDF Personnel Archives – free copies of military records of all NZ servicemen and women.

The ease of being able to drag ‘n drop and cut ‘n paste information into this notebook accelerated the research considerably:

Screenshot of my OneNote notebook for researching Old Collegians

One of my goals in this research was to bring to life Barry Martin’s story and show more about him as person and not just a statistic from World War II. Through the searching of PapersPast I was able to find references to Barry’s pre-war life, including his engagement and attendance at an Old Collegian dance at the Dunsandel Hall with his fiancee, which sounded like an eventful night with the power cutting out!

Other sources that proved invaluable in finding out more about Barry’s life included Google Books, an unexpected source that showed up the research of Stephen Harris in his book Under a Bomber’s Moon and the relationship between his great Uncle Col Jones and Barry Martin. It is from this source that I obtained the photo below of Barry with unnamed friends, along with the entertaining account of Barry cooking up a storm in the barracks with tins of lambs tongues and tomato sauce sent to him from New Zealand:

Image linked to from http://www.underabombersmoon.com

Original Dutch Police Report on the crash of Barry Martin’s Stirling bomber.

Other sources were not so easy, but did manage to turn up gold for this research. I optimistically posted on the Wings Over New Zealand Aviation Forum and was thrilled to get a reply out of that which led to obtaining a copy of the original Dutch Police Report that detailed the circumstances and location of the crashed Stirling Bomber on the night that Barry Martin’s plane was shot down and he was killed. This was eventually sourced from the book “De Crash Van De Padvinder” by P. van der Leer.

This highlights that whilst the Internet can be an outstanding source of quick and accessible information, the importance of human interaction (even if that is via forums, email and text messaging) along with a curiosity not to give up, remains a vital part of any good research. The Christchurch City library had all three volumes of For Your Tomorrow by Errol Martin which was invaluable for factual details, and the St Andrew’s College library had historical records of Barry’s attendance at the College, 98 years ago.

I also discovered that Barry Martin’s medals had been auction at Bonhams in 2014:

Barry Martin’s medals – note the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) on the left. Barry never knew he had been awarded this, as it was announced only two days after his disappearance.

It was very gratifying to be able to harness the power of technology to shine some light on an Old Collegian of St Andrew’s College and the ultimate sacrifice he made.

UPDATE:

This is the recording of an earlier Chapel Service that I gave on James Samuel Cartwright. He was a former teacher at St Andrew’s College and All Black triallist and was tragically killed only days after the D-Day Normandy invasion:

Hosting a TeachMeet at St Andrew’s College

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Sam McNeill

This week, St Andrew’s College hosted the first TeachMeet event in Christchurch for 2016 and over 40 staff from 15 different schools attended. If you’re unsure of what a TeachMeet actually is, you can find more at the website http://www.teachmeet.co.nz but in short:

A TeachMeet is an organised but informal meeting (in the style of an unconference) for teachers to share good practice, practical innovations and personal insights in teaching with technology.

Participants volunteer (via the TeachMeet website) to demonstrate good practice they’ve delivered over the past year, or discuss a product that enhances classroom practice.

Source: Wikipedia

To help promote the event, I took to a new tool I’ve been using recently called Canva which allows you to very quickly and easily develop stylish posters, images and social media banners through their website:

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One of the key reasons TeachMeets are successful is that presenters are limited to only 2minutes or 7minutes for their presentations. This results in a fast-paced event and a range of different ideas and solutions being shared. It also means that preparation for the volunteer presenters is kept at a minimum – it’s not onerous to share something you’re already doing in your classroom or researching to give a go.

From the slides above, you can see there were seven presenters who shared on the following topics:

Wilj Dekkers (St Andrew’s College) Using MineCraft and OneNote for Creative Writing
Tom Neumann (Riccarton High) Using an alphanumeric self marking video game in Moodle to review content of Yr11 Economics
Sue McLachlan (Hagley College) Using OneNote Learning Tools in the classroom
Tam Yuill Proctor (St Andrew’s College) Using OneNote as a Digital Teacher’s Planbook
Karyn Gray (Haeta Community Campus) The Quest for Personalisation of Learning- My Thinking, My Research, My Questions
Schira Withers (Our Lady Of The Star Of The Sea) How we as educators can help students with low working memories improve their self-management skills using digital technologies, thus allowing them to experience success and move from a fixed to growth mindset.
Donna Jones (St Andrew’s College) Using a 3D app to inspire creative thought and ideas for creative writing.

When one of the presenters was unable to attend at the last minute, I added some thoughts on using Google Earth to create personalised tours to round out the afternoon.

A number of attendees contributed on the designated Twitter hashtag of #TMChch and you can see the entire timeline here with a small selection being:

#TMCHCH great feel and looking forward to teach meet pic.twitter.com/zKFW2OVpiZ

— Linda Chong (@Chongstar) May 17, 2016

@samuelmcneill introducing #TMCHCH pic.twitter.com/IfhuIWoX3C

— Tamara YuillProctor (@Tameey) May 17, 2016

Here's @WiljDekkers presenting at #tmchch Nice. #MSFTEDU pic.twitter.com/O6QdM2EVYC

— Ben Hilliam (@benhilliam) May 17, 2016

Tom Neumann from Riccarton High sharing some @moodle tips at #tmchch – games to help learning #gamification pic.twitter.com/NLZZGOeUkk

— Sam McNeill (@samuelmcneill) May 17, 2016

Hearing from @suemcl1 about #msftedu Learning tools. #tmchch pic.twitter.com/uSWcVjsRNR

— Ben Hilliam (@benhilliam) May 17, 2016

Continue reading →

Networked Projectors Offer Easy Access

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Sam McNeill

This post was originally published on the Interface Magazine Online website – you can read the original post here.

How often do you want to access the internet but can’t because your device is connected via Wi-Fi to the classroom projector? It’s one or the other … but not both. St Andrew’s College has worked with Epson to find a way to do things differently.

“Epson gave us some sample units, and we trialled some existing units in our preparatory school before we did a major upgrade,” said the College’s Director of ICT Sam McNeill, noting the units were in place for six months. “We wanted proof of the concept.”

By Term 4 last year, the College had rolled out 35-40 Epson EB-535W short-throw projectors.

“One of the key drivers for upgrading to networked projectors was our use of OneNote,” explained McNeill. “We’re gradually becoming a compulsory BYOD school and the majority of teachers now choose a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 or 4. Because we use OneNote, everything that goes up onto a projector screen also gets automatically saved for later in the students’ notebooks.”

Two underlying needs for a projector upgrade were also present, the first being teachers wanting not to be tethered to a projector by a VGA or HDMI cable. The second, more importantly, was St Andrew’s experiences with other technologies.

“We’ve played around with WiDi and Miracast devices, and had varied results.

“The Netgear Push2TV worked okay but still had interference issues because we had 30-40 devices in a classroom,” recalled McNeill. “The ScreenBeam dropped out from time to time, and had some security issues. Also, the pairing process between Miracast and a Windows 8.1 or 10 device was challenging for some teachers.”

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Epson’s EB-535W projectors are networked and have their own IP address which is displayed on the projector’s screen, and a signal is received from a teacher’s Surface Pro via the school’s wireless network. Rather than going from one device to another (point-to-point), this allows for a highly stable connection, not unlike live internet streaming.

St Andrew’s separates all projector traffic on to a separate VLAN (with a dedicated switch), meaning it was isolated and would never affect general school-wide Wi-Fi speeds. All installation of the projectors was done by the in-house ICT team.

Enticingly, Epson’s projectors did not require a network upgrade, they could be used on the existing wireless infrastructure.

“We wanted to be able to use them for the internet and project the teacher’s screens at the same time. What we like about the Epson is, you don’t have to fiddle around with the Windows configuration. It has its own standalone software (EasyMP), and it just works.

Just one downside has come with the roll-out of Epson’s projectors.

“The trade-off in all of this is that video frame rate is reduced,” added McNeill. “If a teacher wants to play a movie, they’ll need to connect through HDMI for an optimal experience.”

St Andrew’s is using Epson’s advanced networking solutions with its projectors in various ways.

“We have the central management software, which allows us to see how the projectors are running, when bulbs blow, and see how teachers are connecting, all from our ICT office. We even have a scheduled off function, in case teachers forget to turn theirs off.”

Currently, the projector network is only accessible by teachers, not by students.

“It is possible, under moderator control from the teacher, but we haven’t had the teacher demand for it at this stage. Perhaps when they become more fluent and familiar with using wireless projectors, they’ll see the value in students’ BYOD devices projecting to it.”

St Andrew’s College is in Merivale, Christchurch. With a roll of 1,350, it’s a fully-independent, co-educational school for pre-school to Year 13 day and boarding students.

Duncan Ferguson – Apple Distinguished Educator 2016

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Sam McNeill

Mr Duncan Ferguson

Congratulations to St Andrew’s College’s Head of Music Mr Duncan Ferguson who has been selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator for 2016.

Mr Ferguson is one of five New Zealanders to be selected to attend the Apple Distinguished Educators conference in Berlin, Germany.

Attending an ADE Institute provides powerful opportunities for collaboration and ongoing professional growth for ADE alumni members. This 4-day intensive professional learning experience, will bring 400 ADEs together to collaborate, share, and learn. By collaborating directly with peers from across the world, ADEs will return home with a shared sense of purpose as they develop content and promote powerful ideas for improving teaching and learning worldwide.

To see the iBook about Collaborative Composition that Mr Ferguson wrote as a result of the 2015 ADE Institute in Singapore please visit:

https://itunes.apple.com/nz/book/collaborative-composition/id1052956067?mt=13

Congratulations and have a great trip to Berlin!

Staff Profile – John Quealy

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Tom Adams

Mr John Quealy

Throughout 2016, I am going to be profiling a number of different St Andrew’s College staff. The first of these was a post that I wrote a few weeks ago about Ms Donna Jones, in the English department. The subject of this post, is Mr John Quealy, a teacher in our Mathematics department.

We have previously blogged about some of the great Teaching and Learning that occurs in this department. This week I had the pleasure of chatting to Mr Quealy, and the Head of Department, Mr Mitch Howard, about the work they are doing to redesign the content and delivery of the Year 11 General Mathematics Course. This course focuses on the practical application of mathematics in everyday life and achieving Numeracy. For students working towards level 5 of the New Zealand curriculum with the opportunity to progress to NCEA Level One Achievement Standards.

Mr Mitch Howard HOD Mathematics

Due to the nature of this particular Year 11 course, and the specific learning needs of the group of students enrolled in the course, a few deliberate changes have been made in 2016. As this group of students are in a 1:1 computing environment, the decision was made to increase the role of the device in the course. The pleasing aspect of this course development was that this increased use of technology was not simply as a direct substitute from the original textbook and exercise book model used in the past, but included the deliberate integration of technology into specific, and most importantly authentic, learning tasks.

Working collaboratively, Mr Quealy and Mr Howard identified that these particular students would benefit from more practical and hands-on learning. An example was the Number topic that they are currently working on.

Practical applications of Number in Mathematics

Example of a student’s food diary, ready for analysis

To give this topic a more practical application the decision was made to embed this important learning into a wider topic around food, and food labeling. Students have been using Microsoft Excel to keep a food diary, which they have embedded into their OneNote class notebook. The benefit of this was that it allows Mr Quealy to access the students’ work and provide the extra feedback, and assistance that certain students require.

The second benefit from using Excel in this situation was that the students were able to develop the basic skills required to complete basic formula, such as percentages and decimals, and data display within Excel through tables and graphs.

“It is great to be able to engage students with real life activities that they can hook onto and see the relevance of life long skills” – Mr John Quealy

The content library in the class OneNote being used to model what is expected.

Mr Howard shares the same sentiments, particularly about the benefits of these students engaging with their devices.

“Numeracy is about being able to use numbers in an everyday setting. If this is the last Mathematics course that these students do, we want it to be useful and practical. We want to be able to teach these students how to use spreadsheets for calculations and organising their thinking. Also if a person is comfortable using a spreadsheet, they will be comfortable using most software that they might be asked to use in a workplace.” – Mr Mitch Howard

The benefits of Collaboration between classes

Another clear benefit of this new, computer based course, is that it allows the teachers of both Y11 General Mathematics courses, Mr Howard and Mr Quealy, to collaborate in the planning, delivery and reflection stages of the topic. By having access to each other’s class notebooks, they can keep in close contact, and share ideas, all while obviously maintaining the differences that their individual teaching styles, and student’s needs require.

“It’s also great to be able to collaborate with John, bouncing ideas off each other and seeing which ideas have worked or not. John’s architectural knowledge will be great for when we do our measurement unit on autocad.” – Mr Mitch Howard

A department constantly developing their practice

Within the Mathematics department there are an increasing range of eLearning tools being utilised. There are a small number of staff who run flipped classroom, while others are experimenting with Microsoft Surface tablets. What I particularly liked in this example was the fact that the technology is being used to allow teachers to work more closely together, and use their shared expertise and experience to improve the learning, and engagement, of their students.

It is great to see the increasing engagement with Technology within the department, and I look forward to documenting their innovations in later Blogs.

Collaborating With The Future Schools Expo

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Tom Adams

This week I was excited to receive correspondence from David Colville, from DataCom Australia. He was present at the 2016 Future Schools Expo in Sydney. His request was that a group of St Andrew’s College students could be made available to share ideas with small groups of students from Mount Sinai College, Sydney. These students had been taking part in one of four future challenges as part of the Maker’s Playground of this conference.

Collaborative Skype Session with Mount Sinai Hill College

The 4 Challenges:

There was a tornado in Sydney last year. Some houses were destroyed. What sort of house could survive a tornado?
We know that you learn better at school when you are happy, but some times you come to school sad because you might have had a fight with your brother or got told off by your Mum. How can we cheer students up when they get to school so they are ready to learn?
We love Lego, but cleaning up the pieces and finding the right one can be difficult. Is there a way to sort Lego pieces out quickly and make packing up our lego kits more effective?
We don’t have enough refs for our netball games. How can technology help our shortage of refs?

After a quick bit of organisation from preparatory school eLearning expert Wilj Dekkers, it was decided that our recently formed Year 8 Gifted and Talented group would be perfect for this opportunity. This group are working with Mrs Julie Rogers as part of the College’s GATE program.

The view from Sydney: Mt Sinai College students at Future Schools conference on a Skype call to St Andrew’s College

With only a few minutes preparation time afforded, it was great to see this small group of students independently agree to use the Collaboration Space on a OneNote Notebook, set up a dedicated area of this space so that they could collaborate on their ideas during the Skype Call, and then test the functionality of this space. This setup was all done independently of any teacher input and took only a few minutes.

The structure of the Skype conversation was simple. A small group of Mount Sinai students explained their solution to one of the problems described above, and the St Andrew’s students responded with their critiques, ideas and encouragements.

During the activity the students from both school were extremely engaged. They listened carefully to the input from all students and the questioning and reasoning on show was impressive. This activity was a really great example of students, in two different locations, displaying their collaborative and teamwork skills in an unfamiliar setting.

I liked the future problem solving Skype, because I enjoyed helping them with their problems to come up with better solutions. I also enjoyed discussing these problems with our group. We all put our solutions together to make the best one. Our group of year eights all had an input to help improve their solutions, because even if we didn’t want to say out loud, we had our OneNote to write our suggestions on, so our other group members could say it for us. – Maya, St Andrew’s College Year 8 Student

Here, at St Andrew’s College, we enjoying using Skype to connect with other Educators or Students across the globe. We have enjoyed a number of Mystery Skypes, have engaged with a children’s author, and brought experts into the classroom. We all look forward to the next opportunity to use Skype to help complement the other great learning that occurs in our classrooms!

Sprout – An Almost “Magical” Technology

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Sam McNeill

This week I’m in Melbourne, Australia and yesterday I spent the day at HP’s Experience Centre seeing a range of products (more to come on this), however there was one technology that genuinely blew my mind with the wide range of possibilities for application within Education.

This technology was Sprout by HP.

To get an idea of what this looks like, check out this promo video:

In short, Sprout by HP is an all-in-one computer with a touch screen but also has a built in downwards facing projector above the screen that doubles as a 3D scanner and an interactive mat that functions as a second input device and soft keyboard. This combination of technology allows you to do some crazy things, such as:

Take a photo of any “real world” object by placing it on the mat and then immediately start interacting with it in the software and adding it to other artefacts you’re collecting
- Example: you find a photo of a skirt you really like on the internet, but you want to see what it would look like if you made it in a fabric pattern you already have. Place the fabric on the mat, scan it, and then by drawing an outline over the skirt in the photo you can “punch out” the original skirt and insert the fabric pattern you just scanned.
Place a real object on the mat such as toy or wrist watch, scan it into the Sprout, and then start interacting with it in various ways by adding colour, textures and other filters.
- Example: you could scan a real world object, make some basic modifications, and then output these to a 3D printer so you can effectively “clone” real objects
Create collages with a combination of both existing digital images you already have, but add in scanned physical items around you and then mark up with text
- Example: in NCEA English students need to create static images (e.g. AS.90855 at Level 1) – using a Sprout they could truly combine all physical and digital artefacts and allow their creativity to take over.

An exemplar of a traditional Static Image for NCEA Level 1 English. A Sprout could revolutionise how these are created by combining both physical and digital artefacts

What was clear from the demonstration presented by Paul Burman from HP was that the Sprout is perhaps not the best tool for creating incredibly detailed and accurate finished products, but it is unparalleled in combining a range of features that would normally require exceptionally high skill levels in programmes such as Photoshop or AutoCAD.

For this reason, there is significant appeal for a device such as this in all year levels of schools, as I can see that students in our Preparatory School could easily apply their creativity to using this tool in effective ways. Likewise, Secondary School students in a range of curriculum areas could engage with this to very quickly create engaging conceptual designs using a range of media.

Below are some quickly taken videos from the presentation yesterday that illustrate a range of functions of the Sprout and, hopefully, how easy and relatively simply it is to quickly use. In the room watching was around 10 ICT Directors and Managers and all were riveted – most filming the presentation on their phones too – highlighting that this technology appears to bridge the traditional design / 3D print space and allow creativity to just flow:

Visualising a skirt re-designed with a physical fabric swatch

Scanning a physical object into a 3D model with Sprout by HP

Editing a photo from the web quickly with Sprout by HP

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Innovative & Engaging e-Learning from St Andrew's College

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