GEGNZ Student Summit

Today our learners had an awesome opportunity to present at the GEGNZ Student Summit!
For months now, our learners had been preparing their presentations to share with other learners from around the country (Yes, country! There was a school that had come all the way from Rotorua to participate!) This was Stonefields first time at the Summit (this year's was the second summit, ever).

Group 1 consisted of some proud creators of a video game in the making called Undecided, who shared their process of the game creation thus far, covering how they use the game development platform, Blender as well as programmes such as Blender to create the models they use in their game. Not only was it super informative, the boys had also made it hands-on by allowing their workshop participants to play their game. The workshop was such a hit that they passed the 25 participant limit and we unfortunately had to turn people away.


Group 2 shared a bit about Breakthrough at Stonefields and how they used that opportunity to organise a whole school disco with some amazing parent help. Definitely not an easy feat, but executed smoothly all the while having fun!


Although the learners weren't fast enough to get into their first choice of workshop (Google Cardboard/Robotics and Character development) the role of presenting was invaluable for them. After the summit we took a moment to reflect about what we thought went really well and what we thought would have worked a lot better in terms of their presentations. The main learning that came from it was to be able to have the opportunity to practice in front of a live audience so that you can hear the awkward silences, the bits where you might be facilitating game play while 15 odd people wait to play etc etc. So proud of the team and an amazing job to the organisers - One keynote speaker Suan Yeo from Google Australia was particularly inspirational, challenging the audience to find a problem and solution to something they were passionate about.

The only downside would be was that we didn't book tickets fast enough and they sold out! So we weren't able to get non presenters to go along. Next year for sure! And hopefully more presenters, too!

Who doesn't want free professional learning?

Two things that I took from an Educator's Social Media Guide

1. You have more to say than you likely give yourself credit for, and your work is worth sharing.

2. If what you know or have can help educators, you have a moral imperative to get good at sharing it - Dave Burgess

This morning James Hopkins, Ako Hiko outreach facilitator, joined us via Google hangouts to give his presentation on the value of Twitter as a Professional Learning Network. I would highly recommend reading the link at the very top of the post if you are interested in developing your Professional Learning Network. As James Hopkins said, if you have an active Twitter account, you have an endless supply of Professional Learning.

Chats on Twitter are much easier to engage with than I had originally thought, all you do is tweet a normal tweet but use a hashtag that all participants of the chat are using. Today, we engaged in a group chat, responding to questions posed by Anne Sinclair. With five questions and fifteen minutes to engage with each question, posting our answers and responding to other's answers, we were all deeply immersed in the chat! What I did find a little tricky when engaging with a chat was keeping up with the questions being posted by the facilitator and the answers that other people were posting. At times there can be a significant number of people participating. I voiced my struggle in the chat and sure enough, someone posted a solution within seconds. Tweetdeck acts a social media dashboard for Twitter, making it easy to follow things such as lists and chats. See below for a thread of our first ever #MDTAchat. Our answers were in response to Anne Sinclair's questions

How do you see the glass?

The MDTA cohort was fortunate enough to join the August PLD for Teachers new to the Manaiakalani Cluster. During this time, we unpacked what sharing meant to us as adults, and then considered the importance of sharing for our learners. Considering the pedagogy of Manaiakalani, sharing is not a brand new concept to us, however, it did give me an opportunity to reflect on the opportunities I am allowing my learners to share their learning with an authentic audience.

For a very long time, I have felt that having a hub-wide blog rather than individual blogs for the learners has meant that we are on the back foot. What I have only just realised is that I have been looking at the glass as half empty, when I could have been seeing it as half full - seizing the opportunity, allowing the learners to share their learning with an amazing, connected cluster, through the medium of our hub blog. Luckily, it's never too late to change!