Story Builder

This was my first attempt with Story Builder. It was easy to use with a Google account. You really need to decide who your characters are and then start typing the dialogue among them. After this, you can add music and then finish. It was a bit tricky to change spelling mistakes because to edit it seems everything written under the edit is removed and needs to be retyped. Students could write their story in any language that uses letters of the alphabet or maybe even in other language scripts if their device is enabled. This needs more investigation but quite a neat tool.

See the story

Publishing a Video from Drive on my Blog

This was a bit tricky. Firstly, I had taken this video when I attended an Apple educators session in Auckland last week. It is Dr Ruben Puentedura reviewing the SAMR model as applied by a group of educators to a unit on Matariki. I used my tablet to do the recording and found that although the sound is fine, the picture, especially of the screen, is not very good at all. Maybe to just record people, it would have been ok, but to record screens I would need a higher quality recording tool.

So, I have the video. Next, I followed a tutorial that has been shared by a Core Ed facilitator. Everything worked according to his instructions except that when I reviewed my blog with the video it stretched across my page outside the width of the blog section. The tutorial did not tell me how to fix this, so I googled my question and found another short tutorial which showed me how to go into the advanced section of the template and enter code to make the video narrower. I copied this code and updated and voila, my video is the correct size!

Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust

Here are most of the members of the Kootuitui ki Papakura Trust at one of their recent meetings. They are community representatives working together for positive change in the lives of families and young people in Papakura. As the name suggests, the programme interweaves education, health and homes, to build social infrastructure and deliver life outcomes for children in the low decile schools of the area. The trust sits at the nexus of a number of collaborative endeavours:
- the collaboration among six schools with the implementation of digital pedagogies;
- the collaboration with health providers;
- the collaboration with local government, local community organisations, businesses and support agencies;
- the collaboration with corporate sponsors and philanthropic trusts.
Through the formation of the Trust, the framework has been established to provide leadership for the community from within the community. Finding local solutions from within is a partnership model in which all participants are invested in the outcomes and therefore have a huge stake in ensuring these are positive and significant. It gives agency to this community to determine and take their own actions without having to continually be on the receiving end of assistance from outside. Which even if it is well-intentioned, it does not take account of the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".

Working with students at Park Estate School

Today I worked with three students who wanted to write a post for their class blog. They decided to write about recent art work they had done. Only one student had finished her art so we took a picture of that to add to the post. Here is their post:

We learnt to do concertina art. It was fun because we got to colour the strips using colouring pencils. It was difficult because we had to put the picture of us in order and the strips in the right places. It was fun to see our finished art.

By Lile, Zidane, and Tamisha