Partnership leaves North schools well prepared

Our recent experience of Covid19 and the urgent shift to online learning highlighted the need for teachers to be digitally fluent.   Bay of Islands College teachers can feel proud of the fact they were prepared and ready to cope with this change.  Over the past three years, the school has embraced the challenge to move from an analogue traditional classroom to a digital environment. 
Their efforts were highlighted in the Northland Age this week.  

The four Northland primary schools and one secondary school that make up the Kaikohekohe Education Network had no idea how fortuitous their six-year partnership with the Manaiakalani Education Trust was going to be until the Covid19 lockdown entered their lives.   Read the full article here...

Making reading accessible with Wakelet

Looking for an alternative app to Padlet I came across Wakelet which is a great alternative if you are just wanting to compile a variety of digital media.  It has a good reading feature will be really useful for unpacking text with students as it can highlight any verbs, adjectives, similes and provide pictures as well as a dictionary to cue the meaning of the word.  There is even the option to have the text read aloud.  Here's my first moodbood, I'll definitely be adding this one to my classroom practice.

SMART media

This term we're focusing on SMART media which involves anything related to images, movies, music, animation and so on.  One element I particularly wanted to unpack a bit more was image use. It's so easy to use any image without pausing and giving credit to the artist or even checking that it's ok to use it in the first place.  More often than not, images that we want to use are not licensed for sharing.  An easy way to see which images are available for free is to click 'tools' on a google image search and swap through the different licences.

Encouraging students to use the Explore tool in the Google Suite is a good idea because that automatically brings up only images that are in the public domain along with the associated reference.   There are of course a number of free image sites one that I often frequent is pixabay.com they have a good collection of both photos and vectors for free use.

I've complied a Creative Commons lesson resource to help students develop an understanding for what's ok and what's not ok to use online.  You're welcome to use and repurpose for your own classes and I'd love to hear how it worked for you or whether you developed it any further.

Digital Fluency Day

Yesterday we had a fabulous time experimenting with Makey Makey, here are some enthusiastic teachers engaging their creativity with maths.