Hapara Certification

Happy New Year!!

Last year I embarked on the first two levels of Hapara certification: the Educator and Scholar programmes.  I completed the later a few days before Christmas. 

If your school uses Hapara, I highly recommend this training.  It isn't just focused on the Hapara Suite of tools but it also goes into digital pedagogy and encourages you to formulate your own digital philosophy.  The training is very cost effective and you work alongside educators from around the globe.  I probably devoted about 20 hours to each course.  At the end you get a certificate and a Hapara badge to use for your portfolio. 

If you would like to see my final projects that I completed, follow the links below.  I'm signed up for the Hapara Trainer certification next.  I'll let you knowhow this goes.

I hope to keep posting useful digital tools and research this year, so please click on the subscribe button if you wish to get notification of when I post again. 
Have a great 2019!

Digital Philosophy
The Teacher as Learner in the digital world: Hapara Workspace

Using Hapara for Inquiry Learning and Learner Empowerment

I just watched a Webinar by Lenva Shearing of Hapara on Inquiry Learning and Learner Empowerment.  It was a great watch and can be found on this bit.ly link:  
bit.ly/inquiry_learning

The key points were the use of Workspace to facilitate authentic student inquiry. Hapara workspace allows a teacher to set up an inquiry process within workspace and for students to choose and then be grouped according to interest around a big idea. Students can also upload their own resources and learning activities.

She also discussed using Workspace to conduct Teaching as Inquiry projects too.

This is a quick blog post as it's nearly Christmas time and I'm going to attempt to switch off for a few days.

Disruptive Education

If you haven't watched this YouTube video yet, please take 14mins out of your day and give it a go.  It's challenging.  It's brave.  Taking time to challenge ourselves is something that teachers struggle to prioritise, with such a busy and full on workload. But I believe it's as equally important as exercise for wellbeing.  It's the only way that teachers retain passion and balance.

Nicola Ngarewa was the Principal at Patea Area School and has recently joined the team at Spotswood College.  She is a disruptive educator.  She challenges anything that gets in the way of students becoming successful learners, and she puts the responsibility for that solely at the feet of the school community.   She has ditched bells, rigid timetables and changed up start and finish times for students.  She's all about real life contexts for learning, STEAM, and an integrated curriculum.  In terms of inquiry, Ngarewa sets up a school where students inquire and act on problems they see around them.  She integrates litearcy and numeracy skills within these subjects and not as stand alone subjects.  She believes in growing successful global citizens. Powerful and brave stuff!

So what would it mean to be a teacher with leadership like this?  More collaboration and close relationships with students would be a must.  Teachers would need to work closely together and change up what they have done in the past.  They would be more responsive to the needs of students.  Plans would need to be fluid, but inquiry and learning to learn skills would need to be explicitly taught with high expectations put in place.  Once in a Lifetime | Nicola Ngarewa

If you want to learn what a classroom might look like in the early years, watch this YouTube clip:  Are you ready to disrupt learning?
You can see how technology, mindset, critical thinking, inquiry, innovation and creativity is important in the classrom.  But more importantly, it's about the teacher's approach and philosophy: the teacher is the learner too.  Both the student and the teacher learn and inquire together.  The teacher's role is to facilitate activities and projects, question students, creating engaging activities for critical thinking, creativity and innovation, prompt for links between knowledge and skills, make students accountable to showcase their learning and make it visible, to act on the inquiries, to provide links with the outside community and places. 

It's an exciting time to be a part of education.  I'm going to delve further into disruptive education and what it means practically in the classrom.  Watch this space.

Becoming Google Certified

For a while I have been interested in becoming a Google Certified Educator.  It was not so much for the badge, but more for the learning that would encompass the certification.  For our school, Google is the fundamental tool that allows us to deliver personalised learning.  For me as a teacher, I now use Google Apps for pretty much everything.  I don't know when was the last time that I used Word, Excel or Powerpoint.  It's all done online, can be shared easily and found on any device.  Magic! 

If you're interested in learning more about Google Suite for Education, I highly recommend doing the certification. It's easy and the course covers more than simply how to use the Google Suite.  It covers pedagogy and gives great examples of how teachers are using this to engage and personalise learning for their students.  You don't need to go through a third party to deliver the course.  You can do it all via the Google Certification site.  However, if you do wish to get some extra support, I recommend ShakeUpLearning.  This site has some really useful resources and ideas.

To gain access to the exam and get the much desired certificate and badge, simply pay about NZD$10 and register.  A warning here: the exam is actually pretty full on.  It takes about an hour and a half to two hours and it involves you using Google, not just answering questions.  It actually made me respect the certificate more.  I found myself reasonably exhausted by the end of it all.  However, it is well worth it. 

Next I'll attempt Level 2 which is aimed at leaders of digital tech.

ISTE Standards & Hapara training

In the past month, I have completed the Hapara Champion course.  Wow!  If you're using Hapara in your school this is a must do.  It will provide you with all the skills you need, and the all important links and discussions on pedagogy, to run an effective learner agency in your class and school.  I didn't know this before, but it is based on John Hattie's research.  The catch phrase is "visible learning" and it truly provides the functionality to make this happen easily in a digital classroom.

If you're not using Hapara, and you work in a 1-1 device school, I would really recommend you take a look at it.  They only accept a certain number on the course, and I applied three times before I got in.  Keep your eye out for the next intake.

Now I'm working on the Hapara Scholar course which dives into ISTE standards.  The ISTE standards provide a framework which educators or leaders can work towards.  Also, well worth a look.