iEducator Tour of North Island

This week I have been lucky enough to visit 7 North Island schools this week as part of the iEducator Tour run by Apple Distinguished Educator, Stuart Hale.  The amount of innovation and motivation of staff, students and parents at these schools when integrating the use of digital technology has been inspiring.  It was great to visit schools who have been leading the way with the introduction of mobile technologies such as iPods and iPads.

On Monday we visited Hingaia Peninsula School and Summerland Primary in Auckland.  Hingaia is a new school with innovative classroom spaces where 3 classes and 3 teachers share a central area and 4 'breakout' spaces are attached, including a fully kitted out performance space with green screen and stage.  I was also really taken with the variety of furniture available to support student learning preferences.  Summerland introduced us to their culture where collaboration was to the fore and innovation was encouraged.  There was a wide range of ICT tools being used.  A couple of the online maths tools being used look interesting too.  Click on the links and leave some comments below on the what you think of the sites:  Maths Whizz  & Xtra Math.

Tuesday brought a visit to Point England School in South Auckland.  This is a Decile 1A school where all Year 5-8 students bring along their own netbook!  It is amazing what can be achieved with huge buy-in from the community.  Parents have really seen the benefit of students becoming competent online learners-each student hosts their learning online with their own google site.

In the afternoon we visited Bucklands Beach School who are integrating Google Apps for Education effectively with each student hosting their own E-Portfolios in this way.  A big thank you to our very articulate host students.  Any teachers out their, make sure you check out Lenva Shearing's (Bucklands Beach's DP) Cool Tools for Schools Wiki if you haven't already.  This is an awesome resource, freely available to anyone so check it out.

On Wednesday we visited Tahatai Primary School in the Bay of Plenty.  We were again welcomed with some wonderful thinking around their 'Above and Beyond' topic for the year.  Check out the cool animation James (Russell Street DP-Palmerston North) and I created with the help of our clever tutor, Campbell (Y6):  Rocketeer Animation

This is a quick and easy way of creating animations using KeyNote.

Yesterday we visited Selwyn Ridge in Welcome Bay, Tauraunga.  I haven't been here for 10 years and it is awesome to see the continued focus on creative, student centred learning and a high level of rich learning that makes the most of digital technologies.  One of the things I really want to take away from here is the range of student-led initiatives being facilitated by students with enthusiastic teachers alongside.  I would love to see some of these groups established at our school-media mob, scoop team (newspaper-with 'reluctant' writers), cooking crew and more.

We passed by Berkley Middle School on the way back to our hotel and checked out their initiatives with the introduction of iPads.

It is a huge privilege to be able to visit other schools and have them put time and effort into sharing their innovations and practice with us.  A huge thank you to all the schools we visited and for Stuart who has shared his passion for learning and technology right through the week.  Great to meet some other passionate educators too.  Don't forget to keep in touch.

Back to school next week with some wonderful ideas to add to our school and make it an even better place to work and learn.  Our keen teachers will receive plenty of new ideas and will have plenty to think about as we move towards embedding more technology use within our learning programmes.  These are exciting times for us all!