Refresh - Energise, hubsketch and grit

The learning pit.

This is a common phrase within schools, like it or not. Having the opportunity to start to recognise and deal with this is what I feel the cyclone energise conference is about. Give teachers opportunities to find there way out of the learning pit. A conference in the holidays helps me to find my way, connect back with people that are outside my school and region.

The energise conference is a fun filled, high energy Education Conference like no other. It focuses on empowering teachers and leaders to provide every student with the education that they deserve. Join us to connect with expert educators from early years, primary and secondary to explore the latest ideas on best practice teaching and learning and leadership.

Boy did it deliver. Starting off listening to Ali Carr Chellman - 'Gaming to Re-engage Learning' and finishing off with the keynote from Sylvia Duckworth - (Sketchnote queen) 'Why Creativity Matters'.

I had workshops with Cheryl Doig about collaboration and why it is needed to support students and teachers, with some good thinking around how we might better work towards better collaboration within our school.

Next was Matt Nicol from Rolleston and his Korero around how they are developing their school and what takeaways from its development over the past two years.

I then went to a session on the new Digital Technologies Curriculum and where to start. Having had some major input into the new curriculum strands, it was important for me to hear where other people are at. I think the kiwi phrase of "Yeh, na" nails it.

The second day I found myself at a bit of a loose end, the reality of holidays ending and emails starting to come in around changes to timetables and reporting start to hit. But I did make sure that I stayed engaged with aspects of the conference.

At 8am we had to find our teams, these were organised by the conference people, I was in a team of four, people I had never met over the conference and we had to use the information we were given and an ipad and sphero to complete challenges. I now know how my adventure racing students must feel when I have given them challenges to do with other students that they don't know. A quick getting to know you, what can you bring to the team and we were off, it seems that I got given the job of programming and making the sphero drive around, to tell you, this is something challenging, I swear it has a mind and control of its own.
To drive a sphero into a clam shell of water
To make a team flag
To make a chariot and race down a course
To drop the sphero in the paint and paint a creation on the floor
To stick an animal sticker on a cup and to program the sphero to act like the animal. We had a turtle.
All had to be videoed and photographed and placed up in twitter for evidence of learning.

All of this was design to show people how the new digital technologies curriculum - computational thinking could be used with students.

I must say I felt quite embarrassed when it was announced that we won the competition at the end of the day.

The end of the conference keynote was a highlight for me, from writing positive sayings on paper and then creating it as a paper plane and throwing it into the crowd, through to learning to draw was a highlight.

The paper plane that found me

My drawings

These are things that I can do with the students at school and I must say I have been doing since I returned from Christchurch.

Here are the students drawing creations from the beginning of Mondays Learning Hub - Ako. The video is based on the TED talk, so you think you can't draw.

This inspired me to refresh an activity that I was introduced to back in 2015 when Steve Mouldey and Danielle Myburgh were in our community, Taheretikitiki at school. Sketch a day in May. Here is the blog post that started the drawing https://stevemouldey.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/sketch-a-day-in-may/

I developed this with my Learning Hub - Ako back in 2015 and it has been something that I wanted to bring back over the last couple of years, but Hub had changed and we were required to do other aspects of our Hub Curriculum. However this year, I have made a conscious choice to do Porowhita in a slightly different way. That is for the students to draw. they get a post it note and a felt. When they hand there drawing in they have to say what their drawing is about. This is then added to the table and a photo taken. I plan to add them to the Instagram feed that I created in 2015 called hubsketch.

I look forward to Learning hub tomorrow where I am exploring GRIT with the students. One of our Deputy Principals often talks about GRIT, http://lea72.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/being-adventurous-requires-grit.html so it has been a good explore and make sense of what GRIT is and how it affects their lives. This is working towards developing Personal and Academic Goals for the students.