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March

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March

Inspirational life-learner and life-teacher

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Gina Cathro

Sometimes in the course of our daily work, someone stands out as being more-than-the-ordinary. Someone who is willing to do more than expected for no other reason than ‘it’s the right thing to do’. There are many stories within education circles where people have done something to inspire others to learn. In the Life-Changers category of our blog, we will feature some of those people: teachers, students, parents, principals, board of trustee members, and so on, who have inspired others.

Here’s our first example.

Leanne

Leanne Summers attends Kimihia Parent College, a teen parenting unit in Ferry Road, which lost its principal, Anne Haines, to cancer earlier this year. Leanne didn’t know Anne—Anne was already on sick leave when Leanne started studying at Kimihia at the beginning of 2010. But Leanne saw the impact Anne’s loss had made on the College. Leanne had obviously made a deep impression on the school. When the idea of a memorial garden in Anne’s honour was raised, but stalled due to lack of leadership from the students, Leanne stepped up.

Leanne said, “Although the garden’s location and basic concept had been planned by Anne and another Kimihia staff member before Anne died, the teachers had introduced the idea to the students, but, apart from a few discussions, no one had taken any action.”

Plants at Kimihia Parent College

Leanne decided to get things moving.

Leading by inspiring example

Steve Langley, the acting principal, describes Leanne as the ‘main driver’—developing the layout, encouraging students to get involved, and seeking out hire-equipment and plants.

Steve said, “What made the difference is that Leanne is the sort of person who says, ‘Yeah, let’s do that’. And she does it straight away. This energised people around her.” It wasn’t just talk. Steve says, “She led by quiet example – she didn’t leap up and talk at people to motivate them, but quietly led by example.” He added, “She pushed me along. She’d say, ‘Shall we do that now?’ And of course, we did.”

Charm and organisation skills

An example of Leanne’s enthusiasm for the project—and her initiative and drive—was in the hiring of a rotary hoe. The girls had managed to phone around a few hire places, and the best quote they could get for a large rotary hoe was $80–$100. Steve describes a class trip where they drove past a hire company, and Leanne yelled, ‘Stop!’ They stopped, she ran in to the building, and came back out with a big grin. She had negotiated a $50 fee for a morning’s use of a rotary hoe. “She knows how to use a bit of charm’, he says with a grin, ‘and she’s well-organised’.

Leanne has two children, Hayley, almost 3, and Liam, 18 months. She returned to school to finish her NCEA, because the first time round, ‘qualifications weren’t a priority’, but now that she’s a mother, she says that she ‘wants a better job for her kids’ sake’.

Leanne is very modest about it all. She says the languishing garden plans had upset her, and to get things moving again was ‘the respectful thing to do’.

A fitting memorial

And so, the memorial project was done. But not only was it a fitting memorial to Anne, but to the quiet persistence and inspiration of Leanne.

Leanne Summers with Steve Langley
Leanne Summers with Steve Langley in front of the memorial garden
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When you teach, do you listen?

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Tania Coutts

Listening to children?

When children are telling us their stories, it is giving us the opportunity to get to know that child’s interests, and also, an insight into the knowledge and experiences they have. By gaining this knowledge we are able to offer experiences to further inspire, motivate and challenge their thinking and learning.

In my role as an Early Years Facilitator, I have been working with teams of teachers who are thinking about what it means to truly listen to children.

Listening helps us to teach well

When thinking about the emergent curriculum and inquiry learning, the importance of listening becomes a high priority. To engage children in learning, it is important to recognise and build on their skills and interests. To do this, it is crucial that we engage them in conversations, ask effective questions, and truly listen to their answers. Firstly, to understand what they already know and, secondly, to explore what they would like to learn more about and the possibilities for this.

Effective questioning brings insight, which fuels
curiosity, which cultivates wisdom.
– Chip Bell

We teach our children to listen, but do we? Some tips…

The art of listening is an amazing topic to explore. I have delved deep both personally and professionally, and reflected on my skills as an effective listener. As teachers, we continually encourage effective listening skills in children, and I wonder if we are reflecting enough on our own listening. I challenge you to think about your listening skills, and to reflect on the following 5 tips taken from a book called Are You Listening?: Fostering Conversations That Help Young Children Learn by Lisa Burman.

Are You Listening? by Lisa Burman

  • Pause and reflect on the ways you listen closely to children.
  • Pause and become more conscious of the questions you ask.
  • Pause and become aware of the time you give children to think before you continue the conversation.
  • Pause and become aware of how you might unintentionally lead children to your ideas instead of exploring their own schema.
  • Pause and become a more skilled teacher by reflecting on your role as a listener to young learners.

…and it works outside the classroom or centre too!

These tips by no means apply only to listening to children and the role of a teacher!

I have found a key to building and sustaining relationships is listening. The more I have explored and learned, the better my skills have become. Taking the time to listen—truly listen—to our children, our whānau, our friends, our work colleagues, and total strangers can only make the world a better place!

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand
and be understood.The best way to understand people is to
listen to them.
– Ralph Nichols


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The strength of the early childhood community in NZ: an opportunity

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Jocelyn Wright

Last week, I shared my thoughts about some dilemmas the early childhood community in Christchurch are facing ‘post quake’. This week, I am heartened to share some of the ways that show how the Christchurch EC community is so much a part of the wider New Zealand EC community.

Children communicating using technology

Financial support from EC centres

I have been very fortunate as a member of CORE Education’s national Early Years team, as I have received queries from early childhood groups around the country who have wanted to offer financial support for as well as desire to develop ongoing relationships with individual EC centres here.

A network group of infant and toddler teachers in Northland have offered financial support to one Christchurch centre, which will be matched by the owners of one of the centres. This network group wants to continue their relationship through sharing ideas as the Christchurch centre rebuilds. A similar offer has come in from a group of early childhood teachers in Auckland. They are planning to hold a benefit night to raise money in support of a Christchurch EC centre.

Ministry support in innovative approaches

The community spirit displayed within the early childhood sector has been matched by the care and concern shown by the staff at our regional and national Ministry of Education (MoE) offices. The CORE Education Early Years team is involved in the delivery of professional development programmes as contracted by the MoE. These PD contracts are tightly shaped around meeting predetermined professional learning outcomes that, in turn, result in improved learning outcomes for children. Focused professional learning, or curriculum-based children’s learning outcomes, are not at present the main priority for centres where the lives of families and whānau have been so detrimentally impacted. ‘Post Quake’ PD provision in Christchurch is needing to take on it’s own shape in these locations.

Children using technology to communicate

With MoE support, our Early Years team has been able to be innovative with contractual arrangements, so that we can set up and facilitate a number of support networks for EC leaders, managers, and supervisors.

The formation of these networks is done with a collective vision for the EC services in the quake-affected areas to be able to share expertise, ideas, and resources for addressing and overcoming the ‘post quake’ challenges ahead. The network groups will initially target the leaders, managers, and supervisors of EC settings, as these are the front-line people in their EC community.

Who is there on the ground to support these people while they support so many others?

Networking opportunities around the country using technology

This is an exciting opportunity. The establishment of Christchurch EC leaders networks and the enthusiastic support of groups of EC teachers around New Zealand will enable us to use a raft of communication technologies to establish and maintain valuable relationships. Strengthening a national EC community is at our fingertips. The purposeful and meaningful use of virtual communication tools has potential to bring children across the country together, as well as their teachers.

Watch this space, and if you are keen to become involved please let me know.

Jocelyn

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Necessity is the mother of invention: Schools share their responses

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Karen Spencer

On the CORE Education blog, we have been discussing the need for creative and flexible solutions to deal with prolonged disruptions to school as a result of the Christchurch earthquake (see Derek’s post on Blended solutions)

Several schools have been discussing their approaches to dealing with the upheaval in their schools, on the MLE Reference Group forum. They have kindly agreed to share their stories.

St Andrews College students assemble outside after Christchurch earthquake
St Andrews College students assemble outside after Christchurch Earthquake

Cloud-based mail and online learning areas

St Andrews College: “Many of St Andrew’s’ students have left for other centres. Over the last week 600 of their 960 students have been accessing material in their online Secondary Learning Area using subject sites and class sites. All students will have been receiving emails. The school has introduced Quake Learning Messages—teachers can create brief learning messages based on year level, subject, and class. Some TICs are using subject sites to provide materials, and most teachers are communicating with students by email directly from our SMS using a web client. Information updates are emailed on a daily basis and posted on the intranet.

“Live@edu (i.e. cloud-based mail) has been fantastic—all of our mail went over to this at the end of 2009. There has been, correspondingly, no down time with email. Quite a few staff have linked their phones to email (and some students). It has enabled me to respond quickly to teacher’s requests for assistance.” [Grant Saul, St Andrew’s College]

Social networking and wireless extended to new families

Mount Aspiring College: “We have 130 additional students (a 19% increase over our roll on 21 February!) at school this week from all over Christchurch….[There has been] a huge demand from these students to have access to our wireless network, and we have accommodated this. For many of the students and their families, this is their only internet access while they are in Wanaka.

“Social networking with peers has been one of the big requests. Thus, we have relaxed our internet filtering rules for specific students, and allowed access to, for example, Facebook. Mount Aspiring College has two video-conferencing units—if home schools have a need to go face-to-face with their “refugee” students then we can arrange this easily. [Tim Harper, Mount Aspiring College, www.mtaspiring.school.nz]
Kendall School Twitter app

Updates for families via Twitter and the website

Simple and effective: Kendal School has an app on their home page of its website that displays the principal’s Twitter feeds, keeping parents and local community informed. Easily managed from a phone or home computer, one post on Twitter and it’s there for everyone to read.

Lessons online with Ultranet

The Cathedral Grammar School: “We are currently developing lessons within Ultranet. Our staff have taken an accelerated learning curve to get lessons to students. Already having interoperability (interop)working meant all accounts were already created. We have used a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) model of computing for a large number of years, so we were able to re-establish our network as soon as we were able to enter the cordon. We are looking at full virtualisation in the near future. We are also on the brink of releasing live@edu accounts to all staff and students as the interop, for that is also working….. It is just a matter of a little PD.” [Adrian Gray, The Cathedral Grammar School]

Crowd-sourced courses

Shakeupschool wikiAnd across the country, many hands make light work:

  • Jill Hammonds of CORE Education is working with educators across New Zealand to upload a range of learning activities to a wiki for primary students – Shakeup School Wiki (See also the CORE blog, 15 March Towards a temporary virtual solution for schooling in canterbury)
  • The GCSN (Greater Christchurch Schools Network) are trying to get some material up onto a Moodle 2 site as soon as possible to help schools and students who have been affected by the recent earthquake. The idea is to upload material and courses onto this site, and then share them with other schools via the Moodle in Schools HUB. Read more on Derek’s Blog: Resources for Canterbury schools
  • Marielle Lange has set up a space for schools to request assistance or provide it: Schools EQNZ
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When disaster strikes

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Derek Wenmoth

A number of years ago I had the misfortune to be caught in a heavy rain shower on my way to work. Not only did the water penetrate the raincoat I was wearing, leaving me totally saturated, but it also ‘drowned’ my laptop, leading to problems occurring when I tried to start it up, resulting in the hard drive being completely unusable and nothing able to be retrieved from it. Fortunately I worked in an organisation that allowed me to send daily backups of my laptop across the network to be stored on the server. Within a few hours I was again working on a borrowed laptop, with all my files installed, minus just a few things I’d been working on the night before.

That was really my first ‘close shave’ that caused me to appreciate the absolute importance of ‘backups’! Failure to do that would have been a disaster for me!

I’m imagining that many schools and teachers in Christchurch are thinking about this after the recent earthquake. Many have either had their laptops or servers destroyed, or have lost access to them as they lie inside condemned buildings. For them the issue of ‘disaster recovery‘ takes on new meaning – more than simply a case of whether things have been ‘backed up’ – but also a case of where those back-ups are located.

The principal from one school I spoke to is distraught because while his school had invested wisely in a complete back-up server and ensured that regular and comprehensive back-ups were made on a regular basis, the back-up server was located alongside the active server in the school, and together they lie in a condemned building in the city. Their data is undoubtedly safe, but inaccessible.

A teacher from a second school was telling me how ‘lucky’ they were that as the earthquake was happening their technician had the presence of mind to grab the back-up tapes from the office as he fled the building, and now the staff and students are able to continue operating on borrowed computers in borrowed premises accessing their files installed on a borrowed server. Certainly a case of good luck rather than good planning – they are the fortunate ones. Their tapes could so easily have been left inaccessible inside a condemned building also, leaving them in the same situation as the first school.

One of the essential elements of a good disaster recover plan is to ensure that you have off-site back-up and storage. This doesn’t simply mean that you take the back-up tapes home at the end of each day. Effective off-site back-up involves regular ‘pushing’ of data to the off-site server – this should occur at least once daily, typically overnight, but with digital data being mission critical for schools, more frequent back-up or “continuous data protection” should be seriously considered.

This is one of the significant benefits of being connected to Ultrafast Broadband, and as schools look forward to how they can leverage their investment in UFB, the lessons learned from Christchurch should raise the concerns for a good disaster recovery plan to somewhere near the top of the list.

This article is cross-posted from Derek’s blog

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