Educamp Palmerston North - RTC

Today I attended EduCamp Palmy in Palmerston North, hosted by Winchester School.

During the course of the day I attended four breakouts and also had the opportunity to listen to the keynote. During the fourth break out I was asked to present about 3D Printing and Laser Cutting (highlighting some of Auroa Primary Schools promotional videos).

The highlights of the presentations can be located here:
For the Keynote.

For breakout One, which was on the subject of intergrated learning which was run by Ana from Whakarongo School (who we visited as part of the MOA Kluster in 2016).  She talked about running an integrated program in an ILE and how she was coping with the change of students with their goal settings.  The details of the breakout are here.

For breakout Two, this was led by Bede Gilmore from Winchester School.   This was about the CORE Education addition on MLAM on the TKI Webiste and how it had been applied to the students of Winchester School.   The details of his presentation are here.

For breakout three I saw STEM in Whakarongo School and in particular how they were using the Sphero Robots to program and how they were integrated it into the program.  I collected the details of the program and have included them here.

Break Four was one that I hosted using exemplars of work from Auroa Primary School.   I had a total of ten teachers in the classroom.  I was not a formal presentation that I am able to link into this blog but instead was a discussion about what we were doing and some examples of our work.  I was asked to do this at rather short notice, hence the use of our School website and talking about some of examples of work.

Digital Parents Group

I am still not sold on the name for the group, however as nothing better was available in the short term, its what we went with.  Previously we'd had a 'Digital Focus Group' which had met once a term in 2015-6.  Last year the group (which was concerned with BYOD policy and uptake) met infrequently and stopped mid yaer.  While this group was not started again an opportunity was made available for parents to drop in and see technology in action and discuss with staff.

Today the group had two session available to parents 9am-10am and 2pm-3pm.  There had been limited publicising of the event - it was via text message to parents twice.  The morning session saw the attendance of four parents, one BOT member, one new parent to School and two parents, husband and wife who had previously worked at the school.   We showed the parents the Beebots, Dash and Edison robots and discussed with them Computational Thinking.  I would rate this as successful although I would have liked additional attendance (also of note other mitigating factors were the weather was driving rain).  The afternoon session consisted of one pair of parents from the same classroom.   Again I re-worked the session from this morning.

While the numebrs were a little dissapointing I feel the start was positive.  The group has potential and enthusiam if the selected topics continue to be of interest.  We could also repeat the topic from today, as long as we advertised this clearly we would anticipate different parents would attend.  We didn't run an evening session as we were considering - its debatable as to how many parents would attend.

On reflection I feel the group has potential and would be an excellent source of feedback and ideas from parents, the key issue would be the attendance of differing parents and input.