Te Matatini

This week I watched some of Te Matatini with my children. We had a good look at what each group was wearing and their marks, discussing the colours, shapes and patterns we saw.  We listened to the songs, listening for words we knew, songs we knew, and trying to decide what each song was about by the sounds and actions and facial expressions. 

It was lovely to watch, even if only from home, and the children were making connections with what they could see and what they do in kapa haka at school. We saw the talent of the poi being spun in rhythm, the noise of feet pounding on the stage, the way the fabric moved as they spun and move across the stage. 

If anyone else wants to watch it, go to https://www.tematatini.co.nz/te-matatini-festival/te-matatini-2019/

What is Te Matatini?

Te Matatini is a national Māori performing arts festival in which kapa haka performers from all around Aotearoa compete in the Te Matatini festival.

It has the kaupapa (purpose) "To foster, develop and protect kapa haka in the pursuit of excellence."

So what does Te Matatini mean?

 Te Mata meaning the face and tini denoting many — hence the meaning of Te Matatini is many faces.

Here are some other words I think are helpful to know when you watch Te Matatini. 

• Kapa haka - Māori performing arts, kapa means form a line, haka means dance. Kapa haka involves choral singing, dancing, action songs, and learning the haka (that is a challenge). Facial expressions are important to the delivery. There is often guitar accompaniment, sometimes pūtatara (it is a shell you blow into), poi, rākau  and body percussion (stamping feet and chests). 
• Tāonga - treasure, trophy
• Toa Whakaihuwaka - overall winner 
• Waiata - song
• Poi - round ball attached to a plait, spun around during songs
• Manukura Wahine/Manukura Tane - the female /male leader of the group
• Kakahu - the costumes, everything is judged at Te Matatini - weavers, moko and tuhi kiri (tattoo) artists, and carvers. 
• Roopu - group

I have probably missed loads, but here is a start. 

Kupu Hou means Word of the Week

This year my work have started Kupu Hou (Word of the Week). There have been three so far:

Whānau (pronounced Far-no) Whānau refers to family. For Māori, whānau might be used to describe mum, dad, grandparents, brothers and sisters. It can also be used to describe great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, grandchildren and everyone they are related to. The word whānau can also be used to describe a group of un-related people brought together for a specific task.

Mana (pronounced mah-nah) - prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power, charisma. Mana is a supernatural force within a person, place or object. The more prestigious the event, person or object, the more it is surrounded by mana.  Mana is displayed by people who lead, organise and regulate communal activities and make decisions regarding social and political matters. A person or tribe's mana can increase with success. Mana empowers chiefs and in turn spreads to his/her people, their land, water and resources. Almost every activity has a link with the maintenance and enhancement of mana.

Manaaki (pronounced mah-nar-key) - to support, take care of, give hospitality to, protect, look out for - show respect, generosity and care for others.   To manaaki our patients, their family, whānau and colleagues is at the core of what we do in the healthcare sector. Manaaki can be displayed by, but not limited to, warmly greeting someone, an act of service, an act of kindness, listening with intent, giving a koha (gift) or even sharing kai. This is anything nice someone does for you that would give you what can be described as 'the warm fuzzies'. Many Māori take great pride in the way they manaaki the people around them and greatly respect others who manaaki them the same way.

Te Pōkaitahi Reo - Week 1

I have embarked on a new journey. I enrolled in Te Pōkaitahi Reo (Rumaki, Reo Rua)(Te Kaupae 3). It is offered through work and involves attending 2 hours of class time each week plus directed and self directed study. There are four papers, each of which will be assessed orally. 

Am I scared? Yes, a little. I have been trying to get comfortably with pepeha, but this is next level. 

Starting my pepeha

• Ko Tabitha toku ingoa.

Can I deliver a more complete pepeha?

• Tēnā koutou katoaKo ____Maungarei ________ te māunga
  Ko ____________ te awa/roto/moana
  Ko ____________ te waka *
  Ko ____________ tōku tīpuna *
  Ko ___Ngapuhi_________ tōku iwi
  Ko ____________ tōku hapū
  Ko ____________ tōku marae *
  Nō ___Tāmaki makaurau_________ ahau
  Ko _____Adrianne_______ rāua ko ___John_______ ōku mātua *
  Ko ___Tabitha_________ tōku ingoa
  Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa
   
• Greetings to you allThe mountain that I affiliate to is ______Mt Wellington, where I live___________________
  The river/lake/sea that I affiliate to is ____________________
  The waka that I affiliate to is ____________________________ *
  My (founding) ancestor is _______________ *
  My tribe is ________NGAPUHI, NGAI TAWAKE and TE RARAWA._____________________
  My sub-tribe is _________________________
  My marae is ___________________________ *
  I am from ________Auckland____________________
  My parents are ___Adrianne_______ and _____John______ *
  My name is _______Tabitha_____________________
  Therefore, greetings, thrice over

My grandma (mum's mum) gave me a bit of my whakapapa written down so I can start to get a picture of who I am....... So, here my journey starts, in the 1800s. 

My children are enrolled in Kapa Haka at school and in Maori immersion classes. I want them to know about the history of this land, and to understand the people around them, starting with Maori and European history and building from there. I know so little myself, and I have started to read books from the library and ask questions and research. 

Enrolling in Te Pōkaitahi Reo (Rumaki, Reo Rua)(Te Kaupae 3) is an opportunity to really get on the waka and put in the moi, the work, and see where this journey leads me. 

Our first class was meeting the kaiko, the teachers, and discussing the course overview and setting the scene for what we would be learning. They said that we would be hearing many stories to help us understand the kupu, the words, in te reo, the language. 

Our first directed work was to find out where is Awanuiārangi. Well, I looked up where Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi is, and I think it started in Whakatāne. But then perhaps grew as there are now:

• Whakatāne Campus
• Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) Campus
• Te Tai Tokerau (Northland) Campus

Given we are told we will be learning stories, I think I need to learn the story of Awanuiārangi, ancestor of the Ngāti Awa and Te Āti Awa people. He was a descendant of Toroa (captain of the Mataatua canoe).  What I am not sure of is why Awanuiārangi is important to the Wānanga, so more research to be done!

Moodle Moot NZX 2016

I am excited to write about the upcoming Moodle Moot NZX being hosted by HRDNZ and Northtec.

Join us for Moodle Moot NZX 5th-7th October in the 'Winterless North"

It's a special year, as HRDNZ celebrate 10 years of being a Moodle Partner (wow!) and we would love you to join us for the best Moodle Moot ever !

New Zealand Moodle Moots are regarded as one of the best in the world. They are always well organised with excellent speakers and workshops, but what sets them apart from other conferences is the friendly atmosphere and support, the feeling of belonging to a community, and high level of participation and sharing by attendees.

This year the Moodle Moot is a celebration of HRDNZ being a Moodle Partner for ten years. To recognise this milestone, everyone attending the event this year will also be entitled to 10% off any of the HRDNZ MoodleBites courses - yay!

This year the Moodle Moot is structured to begin with a community day, followed by two workshop days. 

The first community conference day is a great opportunity to meet people and get yourself focused and energised ready for the workshops. Keynote speakers are Scott Hunley talking about The Internet of Things, Justin Hunt (creator of PoodLL) speaking on the Life of a Moodle Developer, and Hazel Owen on Creating meaningful assessment in Moodle. Stuart Mealor will reflect on Moodle over the last ten years, and we'll also hear from some other great voices across New Zealand. 

There will be four workshop streams: teaching, administration, management and developers. This is ensuring there is "something for everyone". I am contributing a couple of workshops this year so hope to see and hear some of you there. You can switch between streams, and you'll find me in the teacher and management streams.

So a big thank you in advance to NorthTec for hosting venue and all that goes along with that role, and thanks to the HRDNZ team. Do take the opportunity to say a big thank you to our hosts and make some new friends over the three days. I find Moodle friends become friends for life!

Register here.

Learn Moodle MOOC starting

Today I am excited to be starting week one of the learn.moodle.net MOOC. As an experienced Moodler, I still get a lot out of attending a beginner Moodle MOOC. Here are some of my thoughts on what I think experienced Moodlers will get out of the next four weeks:

• Examples of different ways Moodle courses can be set up and different ways to setup activities.
• The opportunity to see how you can run a course with a lot of participants. Not many of us run MOOCs but as they have become more common it is good to participate in them to keep current of this trends pros and cons.
• A reminder of the kinds of questions beginners think of (outside of your own work context).
• An opportunity to help beginners with their questions and give back to the Moodle community.
• The experience of using things you might not have enabled in your own Moodle environment, like badges. This will help you think about how they might be used in your own context.

Having started the first week activities, I am already seeing hundreds of participants rolling up their sleeves and digging in. The course uses completion tracking to help you manage your tasks and progress as a learner in the course. There are clear tasks to complete and an indication of what kind of assessment will be carried out in the course. There are also badges used as one form of motivation. 

Anyway, enough of reading my notes; if you want to join go to learn.moodle.net to sign up and get started today.

Learn Moodle MOOC

Did anyone notice how quick 9 August 2015 snuck up on us?

If you haven't already set yourself up on the Learn Moodle MOOC now is the time to do so as the introductions have been flowing in from all around the world. What a great opportunity to network, share your experiences and learn from others.

iMoot15 and mootau15

At #iMoot15 Miriam and I facilitated as session aimed at getting a conversation going and gathering information in the Moodle community about how we manage enrolment, access, and semester rollover. Miriam and I hoped that this would feed into the working group at #mootau15 on archiving and roll-over.

Our institute is reviewing how we manage enrolment, access and course rollover in Moodle. We have struggled to find solutions that work across the board and maintain an exception list that we see increasing. Initial conversations with other institutes suggested that the perfect solutions are yet to be established. We hoped this iMoot discussion would build on the work started at https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Year-end_procedures and in the forum https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50298 and that we could find out more from the Moodle community about what the issues we collectively have so as we can understand them better and work towards resolving them.

Our iMoot presentation is here and the details on the Moodlemoot working groups are here. Note there are two working groups, so check out the assessment analytics working group too.

If you are able to share your institutes current enrolment/access/rollover practice please complete our form here or get in touch with us.

We have so far found that most institutes do not automate creation of groups, and many duplicate courses each time they are run. Each institute has their own approach to where the teacher’s role starts and ends.  With everyone using different student management systems, and having different strategies around re-use of courses and access periods for students to their learning resources (and artefacts the students create!) it is very helpful to share ideas on how to meet the requirements of your institute and your learners.

You can also comment on this blog post if you prefer. Looking forward to further discussion.

Moodlemoot Australia 2015

I hope you have all registered for mootau15 and I will see you at Monash University in (Clayton) Melbourne, 6 to 8 July 2015. This is going to be one very exciting Moot, boasting an impressive range of keynotes and with a new schedule format that makes the most of the time together. The introduction of working groups to the Moot format brings together users, researchers and developers to work together to make Moodle better.

Monday 6 July is professional development day. There will be keynotes and sector based sessions, working groups, and drinks reception.

Tuesday 7 and Wednesday 8 July are community days, focusing on the interests of users in different roles. More keynotes, role based sessions, new features and roadmap, and more social activities.

Thursday 9 July is developers’ day. Even though the main conference is over, this will be a day of action for working group members and developers. There will be new developer training and a hackfest with working group interaction.

See you there!

iMoot15

 

If you use Moodle, don't forget to register for the global online Moodle Conference iMoot15 and "come on a learning journey with us" Thursday 28 May to 1 June 2015 (you should totally check the local times for this) #iMoot15 Everyone Matters.

 If you haven't attended before, you can listen to the Free Moodle podcast where Vinny Stocker is interviewed by Stuart Mealor from HRDNZ.

MOSOMELT cMOOC

This week I joined MOSOMELT. I meant to join last week (or was it the week before?) but this week a prompt from a colleague reminded me to actually leap in and signup.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about a cMOOC designed by some lovelies at AUT as a professional development strategy that takes on a distributed communities of practice approach. Over 24 weeks MOSOMELT will take us on a journey of Mobile Learning Technologies (with some friendly global experts) designed to develop both our personal eportfolios and pedagogical practice. There is an option for validation by external CMALT accreditation too.

Why? I think this can provide a valid and effective way to offer and receive professional development. Enrolling in a cMOOC with some work colleagues means we have strengthened the likelihood of successful completion as we can motivate each other to stay engaged (a common problem with online only courses). There is also a great community of practice involved, with many members I know and respect for their contributions, so I can imagine this can be a robust course with some excellent opportunities to develop my portfolio, and my practice.

See you there!

Innovative ideas for improving education in developing countries

I’ve been a long time supporter of One Laptop Per Child and Sugarlabs, but there are some other quite interesting innovations that I thought some of our readers may be interested in hearing about. I’ve just picked a couple to write about.

Keepod
This idea is based on reusing old computers and giving each child a USB drive with their own computing environment whilst sharing a computer.
It’s an Android based Operating System which allows the student to get the best apps from the marketplace for their education or other uses.
Read the BBC article about Keepod in Nairobi.

Raspberry Pi
The idea behind Raspberry Pi is that you reuse a computer monitor or TV and a keyboard and a mouse to plug into a credit card sized computer (the Raspberry Pi) so that students can explore computing and learn how to program in (quite accessible, easy to learn) languages like Scratch and Python.
The Raspberry Pi is also quite a capable computing device, whether students want to use it for web browsing, writing, or watching videos. You can connect peripherals to make things even more exciting.
The Raspberry Pi website is well set out to make it easy for students to learn how to program their Raspberry Pi and for parents and teachers to support learners.

Aakash tablet and the government of India
Datawind invented the Aakash tablet (also known as UbiSlate) in response to an Indian initiative to develop a low cost computing device, similar to OLPC, intended for college students. The tablet was sold to the Ministry of Human Resource Development in India.

School in the cloud
Sugata Mitra, renowned for his “hole in the wall” experiment, wanted to build a school in the cloud that utilised what he learned in his granny cloud (students are encouraged by a “grandmother” which enables them to learn what they need and motivates them to find what interests them) and SOLE (self organised learning environments) projects (students work in groups, and use the internet to access educational support). His first cloud school opened this year in India.

Do you know of an initiative that our readers might like to hear about? Please feel free to add in the comments.

Moodlemoot NZ 1-3 October 2014

It's time to register (and propose a talk!) for Moodlemoot NZ 2014. This year we will be enjoying sunny Nelson as the hosting venue is Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. Block out Wednesday 1st to Friday 3rd October 2014.

The first day is workshops, with four offerings:

• Moodle Foundation for newer users
• Moodle Administration
• Mobile Moodle
• Moodle in Government

There will be the usual three tracks: technical, general and teaching.

Martin Dougiamas (founder of Moodle) will share "Moodle from the horses mouth" and Dave Sturrock (NMIT) will also keynote.

The usual fun and frivolity can be expected at the conference dinner.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Sharefest

Sharefest is an annual conference held in Hamilton, New Zealand, in September. In it's seventh year, it aims "to encourage and develop an ongoing community of practice where those engaged in e-activities... can share their innovations and experiences" (http://wordpress.isle.ac.nz/shar-e-fest-2014).

Theme: E-learning in practice: How are learning technologies and social media being used effectively to enhance student learning and achievement?

Keynote speaker: Professor Jan Herrington 

Keydates:

• First call for papers:  8 July 2014
• Conference: 29-30 September 2014

Registration: click on the "register" link and you get sent an email to activate your membership 

Submission: the submission system will go live in early July, so plenty of time for you to prepare!

The old website provides a bit of history and the flavour of the event. 

Manaiakalani

Manaiakalani is an elearning and literacy strategy that is being coordinated out of Pt England School but includes a lot of schools in the Tamaki region of Auckland. 

The plan was/is to get one netbook per child (almost like one laptop per child but not quite?) for students from year five through to year thirteen, and to distribute wireless broadband into homes in the community, increasing family engagement in education. The first netbooks distributed run Ubuntu and they use Google apps for managing their work. Software in the build includes GIMP, Scratch and TuxPaint. The newer devices are Chromebooks.

To see how it all fits together you might want to check out the Tamaki Achievement Pathway website.

Hackers

The Manaiakalani Hackers meet at Pt England fortnightly to support the project, along with all the other stakeholders: teachers, students, families, philantrophists, researchers, contributors, and the Manaiakalani Education Trust (hopefully I included most of the stakeholders in my list!). 

Us hackers wrote some design principles way back in the beginning, which we revisit occasionally to see if we are still on the same page. We have indepth honest discussions at our meetings - rowdy, passionate discussions - where lots of points of view were brought to light and thrashed about. We frequently have guests at our meeting and all the given feedback is very useful.

I think the role of the hackers and the Trust are to facilitate the changes necessary, so technology is developed, and solutions tailored to be appropriate to the pedagogy desired.

Progress

Wow! Looking back over the last few years since Manaiakalani started, here are some highlights courtesy of http://www.manaiakalani.org/our-story 

• Tamaki College became New Zealand's first state secondary school go fully digital in 2012 with all 600+ students with netbooks and has doubled its NCEA level 2 results for Māori and Pasifika in its first digital year making it among the top 60 improving schools in country
• We have research validated rates of improvement for reading, writing and number across its primary schools that exceed national averages
• We have developed and tested a software product called the Teacher Dashboard which is now in is the hands of 1m + users in the USA and elsewhere
• Commercial partners have invented a wireless network that has gets UFB quality wireless into family homes for $4 netbook per month
• More than 1500 families on an average adult income of $19k are paying off netbooks at $40 deposit and $15 per month over 3 years with an 80%+ payment success
• Nearly $4m over 4 years has been raised to support this innovation and nearly 30% comes from parents
• Tamaki year 9 students are sitting internal assessment online (NZQA have announced all exams will be online in 10 years)
• We are creating a digital teaching academy in 2014 partnering with the University of Auckland.

The success comes down to:

1. Collaboration across 11 schools where 'all boats rise on a rising tide'
2. Parent as investors with support from commerce and philanthropy
3. Results focus on reading, writing and number with comprehensive research
4. Shared pedagogy across cluster – Learn, Create and Share
5. Affordable infrastructure

OLPC in NZ

After years of volunteering for One Laptop Per Child and Sugarlabs (I started mid 2008), it is very exciting to share with you that there are now New Zealand schools using the "One Laptop Per Child" XO laptops in both English and Maori. There are more than two million XO laptops distributed around the world, with over five thousand in the Pacific, and over seven thousand in Australia. 

A not-for-profit charitable trust, OLPC New Zealand has now been established in New Zealand to "to empower educators to lead and inspire children to learn through innovative use of affordable technology". 

The first school to get them is Te Wharekura o Manaia. You can read all about it in the Hauraki Herald.  Based in the Coromandel, this is a bilingual school making the most of the opportunity to have laptops in Te Reo. When I visited this school I met some of the fabulous teachers and students who are using the XO laptops and saw just how much they had discovered in their first weeks.  

With over one hundred laptops now in the hands of kiwi kids, it is a good time for you to step forward if you want to be involved. There are lots of ways you can help, so contact the OLPC New Zealand trust to find out how. 

Implementing an LMS

A couple of days ago I was asked for a few ideas on how to get started with writing an LMS implementation plan. I thought some readers here might be interested in what I wrote to the enquirer. The following is not a complete how to, but might help with those first conversations before the real planning starts. 

Identify your stakeholders

Obviously students, teachers, academic and administrative staff at your institution, and ICT staff, but stakeholders could also include (but are not limited to) - industry partners, parents, mentors, employers, standards bodies (your national qualifications authority or your industry governing bodies), prospective students, partner learning institutes, ...

Considering your stakeholders, identify who should be in your project team and write up what you think their roles could be.

Scope

In your project plan list what is in-scope and what is excluded. 

• Will the LMS take enrolment automatically from your student management system? Enrolment is one of the most important things to figure out and you shouldn't underestimate how much work this might be.
• Will your LMS pass grades out to an external records management system at your institution?
• What customisation will your LMS site have have for your institution? Did you include marketing department in your stakeholder list?

Include in your plan what constraints there are and what assumptions you have made - e.g. financial constraints, time constraints, assumptions around IT support for staff and students…. is there wireless on campus for students to bring their own devices and can they connect, and Is investigating this something you list as in or out of scope?

Cost

Include in your plan some costings… servers and infrastructure, project management, external consultation, licenses if applicable, IT staff to setup the environment, trainers to teach the teachers/students how to use the LMS, designers if you are going to create course material for the teachers (though I wouldn’t! I would get specialists to help the teachers do this as a better long term investment).

Communication

You will need a communication plan. Decide how you will communicate the arrival of the learning management system to stakeholders, and how it will impact on them. Communicate the changes they can expect, the training that will be available, and the support they can access. 

Think about it as more than just setting up a website

Make sure you plan includes setting up a pilot before building your production environment, getting stakeholder feedback to ensure when put into production your LMS works in a way that meets your teaching and learning needs.

Have a testing environment for trying things out before they are put into production.

Supporting your LMS implementation

You will need documentation of the test, pilot and production environments.

You will need teacher and student guides to using your LMS (tailored to your institution). Face to face training, training videos, and other training resources and activities are all options that you should explore within the context of your institution. 

You will need IT support - phone, face to face, and email support for teachers and students, and potentially for other stakeholders.  

The future

Have a backup and recovery strategy.

Plan for future feature upgrades and decide if this will this be on request ad hoc, or at planned times such as six monthly or yearly.

Plan for maintenance, bugs, and security patching. You might have one day a month or quarter that is publicised as scheduled maintenance day, so as to reduce the impact of downtime for your students and staff. 

Evaluation

Decide how will you evaluate the project at the end - e.g. did it meet budget and time and quality expectations? Decide how you will measure quality - e.g. surveying students and staff and other stakeholders during pilot and after going into production, perhaps looking at academic achievement if improving this is a goal?

Be prepared to do something about it if the evaluation reveals areas your learning management system (or how it is used) can be improved. 

Moodlemoot NZ 2013

If you haven't already heard, it's Moodlemoot time again in NZ. You'll be in the right place if you find yourself in Hamilton at the University of Waikato this Monday to Wednesday 22 - 24 April 2013.

The first day is workshops, with four offerings:

• Moodle Foundation for newer users
• Moodle Administration
• Multimedia in Moodle
• Cool Course Competition

Moodlemoots in New Zealand usual boast three streams: technical, general and teaching.

Keynotes this year include Martin Dougiamas (founder of Moodle) and Don Christie (ex-President of the NZ Open Source Society, councillor of InternetNZ, co-Chair of NZRise).

The usual fun and frivolity can be expected at the conference dinner, this year at Viligrads.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

OLDS-MOOC

The"Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum" MOOC starts today (10 January 2013) and runs until 13 March 2013. It is funded by JISC and offered by Open Learning Design Studio. It is expected that each week will need 3-10 hours.

Week 1: Initiate

Learning outcomes

• Explore a variety of definitions of learning design
• Initiate own learning/curriculum design project
• Define learning design, as a field of research and a practice
• Identify some of the grand challenges of using a learning design approach to the design of learning in the 21st Century
• Identify specific topics of interest for further exploration

Day one

So it started with a five minute video and then a 45 minute discussion. Then you have to introduce yourself, before setting your personal learning objectives for the week. A quick post to your learning journal and the first days activities are done.

Reflection

The five minute video was only 3 minutes and was pretty light weight, just told you what you had to do in week one. All pretty good so far.

Next I registered with Cloudworks as instructed in one of the getting started links. The registration process was seamless, and then you are presented with a busy page which I guessed I should click on the OLDS MOOC launch event. I found a "follow" button and a "mark as attended" button. There was a video link of a feed welcoming people to the course. The feed was low quality and the volume was extremely low. It was very hard to stay engaged when you couldn't hear clearly.

Whilst watching the video I setup my first cloud to act as a learning journal (oh, such multitasking, how do I stay on task?) and have added it to the Cloudscape for the OLDS MOOC.

One of the things being discussed in the video is "Disrupting ourselves: the problem of learning in higher education / Randall Bass". Engaged again as the presenter talks about the importance of the role of a university in leading students to become concerned citizens.

One of the resources provided washttp://curriculumreform.org/curriculum-reform-manifesto/ for those interested in looking at what was being discussed.

What is the purpose of education? I is a question of design. The presenter sees: craft as making good stuff; and design as making stuff better. Design is about change and about innovation.

Learning design is then looked at more indepth. There was some discussion of Instructional Design as a linear approach. Refer ADDIE model for example.
Educational Design Research is a methodology for the study of function. In Educational Design Research  you have a theory of how people learn and you explore that theory in real life conditions.
Learning by Design has some affinity to inquiry learning.
Teachers as Designers suggests developing a design attitude allows teachers to integrate theory better into their practice and be more reflective practitioners.

The presenter recommends reading the "Teaching as a Design Science" book by Dan Laurillard (2012).

The presenter takes us through the OLDS MOOC weekly topic progression to show us a bit of a roadmap for the MOOC. This part of the video was quite useful to get a feel for where we are heading.

I paused the video repeatedly during the morning. It was 52 minutes long, but I actually took about three hours to watch it as I was multitasking, trying to do the other tasks for the MOOC and deal with a few interruptions in the office. The hardest part was the volume issue, which had me almost give up. The XKCD comic at about 38 minutes of video helped (as XKCD always does).

The last few minutes were dedicated to questions, but with timezones and the crazy busy internet, I didn't actually know when this was live streamed! I guess that is the case for a lot of participants to be honest. So even watching it on what is officially the first day, I missed the live stream by several days, sigh.

So, lots to learn over the MOOC, and lots to do.

Cheat sheets

The Edtech cheat sheet published here prompted me to write a post sharing a number of useful cheat sheets I refer to at times.


Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers
The Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers was put together by Joyce Seitzinger and is now available in multiple languages (including but not limited to Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Portugese, Spanish, Slovene) and adaptations as she published it with an open license for modification.
Joyce herself created it after seeing the Social Media Cheat Sheet. Read about it here on her blog. Download her original here.
Joyce recently adapted her Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers to become a D2Learn Tool Guide for Teachers.
A recent share by Joyce is her infographic Social Content Curation for Learning Communities which is also worth checking out.




Technology Intergration Matrix from University of South Florida
This is a Technology Integration Matrix. Whilst designed for use with teachers in primary and secondary schools, it is still useful for higher education. It takes five characteristics of the learning environment and then uses five levels of technology integration into the curriculum, from “entry” level where they are beginning to use technology tools to deliver curriculum content to students, to “transformation” level. This tool can be used to begin discussions on how curriculum design and teaching practice can be improved. This is an interactive tool so don’t just print out the front page! There are also videos that illustrate integration of technology taking into account the variety of technology available to students in different contexts. They do have some printable resources too.

Skype cheat sheet
Yes, emoticons are still alive and kicking.  This cheatsheet from Factoryjoe is a useful quick guide to finding that emoticon that really helps give your conversation meaning. During the Olympics it was useful to know how to create the flags for each country (flag:NZ) and sending that virtual birthday cake (cake) is always a nice gesture to loved ones overseas.
In case anyone is interested, Moodle has emoticon codes too, there is even to create a little Martin! 

ePortfolios

If you’ve been wondering what ePortfolios are all about and whether it’s the right time for you to start your own portfolio, then this blog post is for you.

Many of us still visualise portfolios as large folders that an artist carries their drawings in.

An ePortfolio is an electronic collection of evidence that showcase an individual’s skills, qualities, achievements and capabilities. The pieces of evidence are often referred to as “artefacts” and can include documents, audio and video files, as well as images. The evidence collected might include assessments, activities and achievements, plans and goals, feedback, and reflections. Dare I say it, an ePortfolio could be used as a repository.

Where ePortfolios come into their own, is when they are used as a working space, with snapshots that help the individual, mentors, and relevant contributors of feedback. Using ePortfolios is now considered a valid approach to providing structured support to teaching and learning.

There are various ePortfolio tools available, paid and free. There is a current fashion for encouraging the establishment of ePortfolios for students to evidence learning, and in some cases this has lead institutes to either provide a portfolio website to students or to make recommendations on external websites to use.

ePortfolios can be collaborative, rather than an individual’s artefacts. Many ePortfolio tools provide methods for interaction and communication between contributors or assessors.

Some ePortfolio tools provide the user with the ability to create “views” for different audiences, allowing the user to have a public view, a mentor view, an assessment view, a potential employer view, etc. This creates safe environments for the user to utilise their ePortfolio as a reflective honest learning space, whilst not compromising the use of their ePortfolio for demonstration of current competency.

Teachers’ professional ePortfolios

Teachers should be encouraged to have a professional ePortfolio as a development and reflection tool. It gives teachers a framework to model good practice to the students.

What happens in NZ?

The Ministry of Education in New Zealand is providing the MyPortfolio School website free to schools until at least 2013. Some tertiary institutes used the shared MyPortfolio Tertiary website for continuing student portfolios into higher education. Both of these websites use the open source Mahara portfolio software.

What tools?

Some of the tools being used for ePortfolios are:

• Mahara
• WordPress
• Posterous
• Ning
• Wikispaces
• Blogger

If you have found this blog post sparking an interest in learning more about ePortfolios, you might want to read some of these articles and resources:

• The future belongs to those who take charge of their own learning (Jane Hart, UK)
• Digital portfolios: guidelines for beginners (Ministry of Education, NZ)