Blog Posts - KORIMAKO EDUCATION

Workshop at Hawke's Bay's MTG - Museum, Theatre, Gallery

31/10/2018

As part of my work with Parkside Christian School, students, teachers and TAs have spent two days at HB MTG to develop skills for their current integrated unit. We are looking at how life has changed and been changed by the evolution and selection of materials, food, technologies, etc. over several hundred years. We are exploring ways of showing this digitally.
The museum is one of only three regional facilities in the country selected by Te Papa Museum to deliver the Ministry of Education-funded digital learning programme, Raranga Matihiko – Weaving Digital Futures. The focus of Raranga Matihiko is to bring technology-rich learning to students, help them tell their own stories in a culturally relevant and meaningful way and ultimately offer them further options in the future. If your school caters for Years 1-10 students in Decile 1-3 schools/kura kaupapa and is within 120km of MTG Hawke's Bay, it could be worth getting in touch

Digital Facilitation

30/6/2018

Parkside Adventist Christian School is working with me to reveal the mysteries of the digital technology world. It's exciting making these early steps with their staff and I recently had the pleasure of working with a senior class for the whole day and we left the timetable behind and 'played' with Scratch. We animated their names so with an example and the toolkit they were off while I simply acted as a provocateur. The outcomes were exciting, opened up a load of questions from the other children (Wow, how did you do that?), and allowed a different group of children to rise as future peer tutors. And I hear they are now using the new terminology across other learning areas, much to the delight and amazement of their teachers. Well done team.

Project Based Learning with an Environmental Focus

30/4/2018

Napier Intermediate School is embarking on a project based approach to learning this year, working with the local community to help achieve the government's Predator Free 2050 goal. We started thinking about this last year and on the last day of the holidays, Ruud Kleinpaste (aka The Bugman) and the Cape to City team put on a great session for staff. Teachers explored ideas around using the outdoor school environment to engage students in real issue learning. We certainly got pretty up close and personal with a few pests during the process!
It was an inspirational day thanks to the dedicated people who poured their passion into the participants. I’m excited about what will come from this day for the future thinking students and teachers at this school. and I'd love the opportunity to explore this with concept other schools. If you are able to see how the whole curriculum drips from such rich and real learning opportunities, give me a call. I've had several years experience with developing these ways of working and will guarantee it works. Genuine student directed learning in action solving real world problems.

Strengthening Digital Technologies

30/4/2018

Just attended the MoE training to deliver the DT &HM support packages so I am now officially available to schools for the new digital strands; computational thinking, and designing and developing digital outcomes. One of my schools in Napier has been approved for MoE funding for this and we will be starting very soon. Happy to talk if you want to explore the options, or get some help writing the funding proposal.

Support Staff Workshop

15/3/2018

We had seriously good fun last week in Stratford with 27 Teacher's Aides from 7 schools coming together for professional learning. We learned more about our roles, some useful strategies especially around simplifying the way we give instructions (that's where the blocks came in :) and using video to self reflect and shift our practice. We finished the afternoon with some first steps programming using Duplo, blocks and paper. Not a computer in sight. I'd love to see your schools now that these amazing people are back in their classrooms with all their enthusiasm.

Here's just some of the feedback:

Amazing. I would say every TA should be in encouraged to do this.
It was my first time at one of your workshops and I enjoyed it.
Really enjoy working with and meeting the other teacher aides, and learning new strategies from them and Heather.
Good motivation to continually do better
Learnt a lot about myself and teaching style
Hands on activities are great
Great, funny and informative
Great mixing with other schools.
Great to hear different strategies and ideas to add to my 'kete'

Thanks everyone. Go well.

A change of approach

6/3/2018

Providing effective professional development today requires different thinking. Please take a few moments to have input into the direction our Inclusive Ed work will take in the future. Thanks.
https://tinyurl.com/inclusiveopportunities

Upcoming Workshop in Napier

6/3/2018

Senco Workshop on the 14th March in Napier is postponed due to a clash with other meetings on the same day.

Senco Hawke's Bay

27/2/2018

There's a great programme for this workshop on the 14th March. We have an RTD (Deaf) joining us so that's another strength we are able to now add to our group. I'm going to have a focus on working with your Teacher Aides effectively this time. I've been running sessions with them lately and know that you can have a real influence on helping to make the best of this precious resource in your schools. I also though we could have a dip into the new digital technology material with an Inclusive hat on. A thinly disguised bit of play based fun - oops, learning!
Please spread the word, the more people we get to these sessions the greater the networking opportunities.
Cheers, Heather