Te Waka Ako

It's been many many months in the making, but finally Te Waka Ako (The Learning Canoe) at Waikowhai Primary School is open. After a slightly extended build, the students of Rooms 7-9 have a brand new, open plan learning environment to call home for the rest of the year.

A special thanks to Michael Wood, MP for Mt Roskill, for opening the building on behalf of the school and community. The students are raring to get into their new open-plan learning space. The 'Te Waka Ako' sign was designed and created by Mrs Shiralee Sands, a teacher within the school.

WHY, HOW and WHAT we share

By James Hopkins

Manaiakalani Outreach Facilitator

Everyday hundreds of students across the Ako Hiko cluster share their learning via their blogs. As they become more familiar with the processes and skills needed to share their learning in the 21st Century, it is fascinating to see who engages. Often comments are from Whānau and friends, but from time to time they come from further afield. This is a true teachable moment as we begin to talk about concepts like ‘authentic audience’ and ‘purposeful online relationships’ as part of the CyberSmart programme.

Many of the learners embrace the chance to post their learning to blogs and understand that it has a much greater potential of reaching the intended audience than ever before. Picture this, a student writes a speech about world hunger and the constant struggles of people living in the third world communities. When completed it is collected by the teacher, read aloud to classmates and feedback/feedforward is given. This in itself is a great learning experience, but it often leaves the writer with the question ‘how can my research and learning really have an impact?’ This is where a blog comes in. The chance to place the learning online, share the processes and research involved and attempt to reach people who feel the same way or have the power to implement change, is greatly improved. A personal passion that started in the mind of a learner now has the possibility of reaching someone that can make a real difference...

One example of a blog treaty constructed by a student at Christ The King School

As part of their learning and device use, we spend a lot of time looking at the concept of Smart Relationships. Using resources from Manaiakalani schools and carefully constructed research, students are shown how to engage with their readers and commenters through well worded responses. Alongside this we teach the importance of carefully constructed comments when looking at peers’ learning. This is a valuable online and offline skill that helps them focus on reading the learning and making a purposeful comment to connect.

Image courtesy of Manaiakalani and the CyberSmart Team

While facilitating in schools I often get asked the same question… ‘How can we make sure their safe online when sharing their learning?’ This is of course a teacher and parent concern that is very common. Just searching the web for a few minutes can fill your screen with horror stories. However, we focus on making SMART decisions that proactively reduce or eliminate risks online, rather than reacting to something that has already happened. I urge you to head over to the Ako Hiko Cluster Twitter feed and explore some of the student blogs. The emphasis is on sharing learning. Student’s personal information is guarded and the blog remains free of elements like their email address or last name. Teaching these life skills now is invaluable as the learners of today become the workforce of tomorrow.

Finding The Right Process

In the uber-connected world within which we live, there has never been a more important time to educate our students around interactions online. Whether it’s commenting on blogs, posting their learning or even replying, it falls to the educators of today to teach the skills of tomorrow (I know, what a cliche!).

For the Twitterers amongst you, student blogs have been populating the Twittersphere via the Ako Hiko Cluster account. Over 500 student and class blogs now automatically tweet out a snapshot of the learning and encourage other members of the global community to engage and share in the learning. So what does this all mean for our students? Quite simply, it means their potential audience could explode in two simple retweets. My own professional account has close to 2,000 followers and I have several online friends with over 10,000. Now imagine what happens if I retweet a student blog and then a high end user does the same. We now have a potential audience of over 12,000 people, in a matter of minutes.

This all means that the online audience for blog posts becomes highly unpredictable and includes people from all walks of life and all corners of society. With the highly developed CyberSmart programme, students personal information is closely guarded and not at risk, however from time to time they may encounter ‘spammers’. The reprehensible process of flooding the comments section of posts, blogs and social media has been around for several years and is an unfortunate part of the digital world. However, this doesn’t mean we cannot be proactive one dealing with the comments.

A recent blog comment from a 'spammer'

Although tricky to see, the above example appeared on a student blog very recently. It is predominantly in Turkish and utterly inappropriate for a student blog, however the good news is that we have the tools and the teaching to act upon it quickly. Each time a comment is posted to the blog, the student and class teacher receive an email. This alerts both the child and an adult to anything being made and shares the responsibility when things like this happen. In this case, the student immediately reported the comment to his class teacher and it was removed.

It has provided an opportunity to remind students and teachers of the process used to report malicious or inappropriate behaviour online and lends a valuable ‘real world’ context for this to happen.

Students within the Ako Hiko schools are very familiar with the processes in place and this term’s focus remains on interacting with others online. It’s a fantastic reminder to all that they’re never alone and a trusted adult or person is a few clicks away.

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