Catch the Wave

Sandy and her Year 5 and 6 students at Ohope Beach School have made this Habits of Mind Poster on a display board in their classroom. This is next to the mat for handy reference and reminders. Its a great way for students to learn about the Habits of Mind and how they weave together to form a set of successful learning and living behaviours.
Do you like this idea? Use it yourself!

Read this article on the Stuff (Dominion Post) website about the Gorillapod camera tripod. It sounds wonderful! I want one!

Zoho Creator is one of the ‘Zoho Work Online’ applications and it really is fantastic! It’s an online data base and form creator and is so useful for easy data collection. If you need to collect any sort of information from your principals and teachers, why not walk the talk by using the Internet and online resources to do this? Zoho Creator has many uses and the extra bonus is that teachers are developing ICT confidence and skills at the same time.

Recently, in preparation for a cluster trip to Palmerston North, I added a trip registration form to the eBest ICT cluster website for the teachers who were going to add their details. I alerted the ICT Lead Teachers to this form by email. The first photo shows the form and the second is a part of the spreadsheet of collected data. I then exported it into Excel. It worked perfectly and saved me a lot of time. And no, I didn’t lose anything! Click on the graphics for a bigger view.

Zoho Creator is easy to use and free. (It has been so far!) You simply drag and drop the fields you require from the selection (see below) and add your questions or choices. The result looks really professional and has many uses for principals, teachers and students. Try it out.

I’ve been travelling around a bit lately.  First came the Nelson ICTPD Conference, then last week I spent 2 days in Palmerston North with 22 school leaders from the eBest ICT Cluster.  Today I was in Tauranga at the Bay of Plenty ICT Clusters home group meeting.   In fact the last six years has been like this for me - lots of meetings, conferences and workshops.  Lots of professional development and learning.  Lots of new ideas and skills.  Change has been constant, necessary and stimulating.  Why do some teachers resist it?   There are times I’ve gone from student (with the Internet as my teacher), to teacher in a matter of days.   Perhaps other ICT Facilitators can relate to this.

ICT Clusters have had an impact on New Zealand education.  They can take a lot (if not all) of the credit for the education renaissance that has has happened during the last six years.  And in true Kiwi style, while we all have a vision and goals, there is no ‘how to ‘, ‘what to’, or ‘when to’ blueprint provided.  And yet we make a real difference - talking to a teacher who hasn’t been in an ICT cluster will prove that.

I’ve been with the eBest ICT Cluster in Whakatane, New Zealand for four months now. Our main cluster goal for 2008 is to develop a thinking programme for each school that reflects the needs of the 21^st century learner. Each term we have a whole day ‘Leaders Think Tank’ and an ‘ICT Lead Teachers Workshop’. This year we are looking at a variety of thinking strategies and ways to implement them in daily classroom practice.

The eBest ICT Cluster website is our sharing and collaborating environment and contributes to our development as a learning community. Here, teachers share their planning and resources and the files reflect the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Thinkers keys and Habits of Mind in their teaching practice.
The website URL is www.ebest.co.nz

You don’t need to be a member to use the site and the resources are available for everyone to download free. If you find the resources useful, please add a short post to the eBest Blog. I’d love to hear what you think of the website.

The online world is absolutely enormous now and I think I tap in to only a very small part of it. Some days I hear about something that’s been around for a while and I wonder how I didn’t know about it when other people did. That’s part of what makes the Internet so much fun. (What will I learn today? How did they do that? How could I use this? How can I find out about …?) The availability and depth of online resources and opportunities are amazing. And we are increasingly expecting other people to have the personal ability and tech capability to access these resources as well. We refer to website, online forms and are using the Internet for communication, collaboration and problem solving.

For some time now I’ve being telling people that using the Internet is making me more intelligent … sometimes they laugh, but I’m serious. So it was interesting to read an article titled ‘The World is getting Smarter’ which mentions ‘The Flynn Effect’. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn.
Wikipedia gives a possible explanation - ‘The general environment is today much more complex and stimulating. One of the most striking 20th-century change in the human intellectual environment has come from the increase in exposure to many types of visual media. From pictures on the wall to movies to television to video games to computers, each successive generation has been exposed to far richer optical displays than the one before and may have become more adept at visual analysis.’
Flynn’s thesis shows that whole societies can get better at thinking if they’re given the right environment. ‘The mind is supple and the Flynn effect shows that what we value gets stronger.’ This has huge implications for education … and never more so than now.

Lately I’ve been pretty much living on/in my laptop. This is not really a bad thing … athough I did take a long walk yesterday to give my eyes something in the distance to focus on.

I got a new Toshiba Tela laptop in February and love the faster speed of 2 gb of Ram. The only annoying thing is the volume icon/indicator which pops up on the screen every time I brush the volume wheel (which is on the front.) If anyone knows how to stop this happening, please let me know.   And no, I don ‘t think a sticking plaster is really a long term solution!

I’ve been playing with Marvin. While I think it’s clever and cute, I’m not yet a convert to the avatar craze, so I can’t see me using it much. I’m puzzled about why the software was so ‘high profile’ of at the Learning@School Conference. Is there a need to constantly have new things? Do education conferences depend on ‘new’ for their existence? I suppose we wouldn’t keep going to hear the same stuff over again! There is also the thought that Marvin used L@S for their New Zealand launch and paid the organisers for the opportunity. I spent time on the Marvin website trying to add some more understanding. Apart from learning more about Aboriginal health issues, I’m really none the wiser.

In my Internet wanderings, I discovered that Russell Street School in Palmerston North has changed their website to a blog. It contains all the features and pages of the original site, but allows for easy posts by the principal and teachers, photos, media and comments from parents. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll be trying to convince all the schools I work with to do this too. Best of all, the eBest ICT Cluster is taking a group of 19 leaders and teachers down to Palmerston North at the end of May to visit 3 schools - including Russell Street.

Well here I am in sunny Whakatane, in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. I’ve actually been here for five weeks, but there have been lots of things to do and places to explore … so you’ll have to forgive me for not posting. I’ve bought a little place down by the river next to the botanic gardens.

While I wonder if this is a good time to buy real estate (I keep reading gloomy predictions about the market in the newspapers) I really love living in my own place again after six years renting in Wanganui.

Whakatane has sensational scenery. All I have to do is point my digital camera and click and I get the most amazing photos! I’ve used some of the photos I’ve taken to make the eBest ICT Cluster website banner

The local newspaper (Beacon) is printed 3 days a week and amazingly costs only 40c on Tuesday and Wednesday and 50c on Friday!! It has a great website and you can even download a .pdf of the classified advertisements.

Whakatane has an impressive ‘3 bin’ recycling system, taking away your rubbish, plastics, bottles, paper and green waste from the curb.

Another neat thing is that I’ve got a new Toshiba laptop (with 2 Gig of Ram!) and an aircard - so now I have Internet wherever I go - which is pretty much essential. I love it. And I finally got my home wireless Internet going … so now life is almost perfect. I just need to win lotto and find a perfect man. (Yeah, I know!)

The teachers in the eBest ICT Cluster are positive, confident, talented and enthusiastic - it will be fun learning together. If you’re coming up this way, let me know and I’ll show you around.

An analogy can be made between being involved in a three year ICT Contract and with sponsoring a child through World Vision. When sponsoring a child, not only does the child benefit, but also his whole village. Similarly, an ICT cluster sets about developing and supporting teacher and student use of ICTs for learning and also their school’s awareness of the necessary environment for success. While an ICT cluster is certainly about developing individual teachers ICT skills and knowledge of 21Century best practice pedagogy, it is more importantly about developing each of its schools as a learning community.
The Wanganui ICT Cluster has ended it’s three year journey. The many days spent buying goats, planting crops and digging wells are over. Teachers have many new skills, strategies and understandings. Creative waters have start to flow. Hopefully their journey has planted the seeds for many future rich harvests and continued learning prosperity.

I have some big changes coming up soon and I need to make definite plans. From next year I have a new job and I’m shifting from Wanganui to Whakatane. Whakatane is in the Bay of Plenty and it gets lots of sunshine. People up there never have to wear socks … especially not in November. I also know that BoP people are outgoing, happy and energetic - I think its the extra vitamin D. I’ve already started taking vitamins to prepare my body for the change.
These plans of mine need to lead to definite actions, because relocation events do not organise themselves <sigh>. I’ve been talking about strategic plans lately with some of the people I work with, so my head is in that space. It could be that I need a strategic plan and an action plan myself.
Maybe our lives would be more organised if the government formed a ‘Ministry of Citizen Strategic Planning’ (MOCSP.) (This ministry might be more valuable than some of the others down there in the Beehive.) Then they could pass a law called the ‘Personal Strategic Plan Bill’ and we’d all have to write a strategic plan on the first of January every year. Personal Strategic Plans (PSP) could be a little difficult to monitor. A PSP Review Office would have to be formed and officers sent out to check <knocks on Mob gate, shouts over snarling pitbulls, “show me your current PSP”> Yeah, crazy. And while all this would create employment, the MOCSP is already looking more bulky than the MoE.
Wikipedia contains concise and useful information about strategic planning:

Methodologies
There are many approaches to strategic planning but typically a three-step process may be used:

• Situation - evaluate the current situation and how it came about.
• Target - define goals and/or objectives (sometimes called ideal state)
• Path - map a possible route to the goals/objectives

One alternative approach is called Draw-See-Think

• Draw - what is the ideal image or the desired end state?
• See - what is today’s situation? What is the gap from ideal and why?
• Think - what specific actions must be taken to close the gap between today’s situation and the ideal state?
• Plan - what resources are required to execute the activities?

An alternative to the Draw-See-Think approach is called See-Think-Draw

• See - what is today’s situation?
• Think - define goals/objectives
• Draw - map a route to achieving the goals/objectives

In other terms strategic planning can be as follows:

• Vision - Define the vision and set a mission statement with hierarchy of goals
• SWOT - According to the desired goals conduct analysis
• Formulate - Formulate actions and processes to be taken to attain these goals
• Implement - Implementation of the agreed upon processes
• Control - Monitor and get feedback from implemented processes to fully control the operation

The alternative is to stumble along haphazardly, with only a vague idea of the direction; trying to fit mystery pieces together for an unknown purpose, hoping that you end up with something recognisable, necessary and visionary.
That sounds like a path to frustration and failure. I’m off to work on my relocation action plan right now!

Tags: NewZealand, Whakatane, strategic planning, action plan, government, relocation