Raranga Matihiko in the Classroom

The students loved the two days based at Waitangi - the journey on the bus; the visit to the museum; the hikoi around the treaty grounds to see the treaty house, the whare runanga, the waka taua (Ngātokimatawhaorua), the flagpole, the bush and the gardens; but most of all the learning time in the digital classroom.

 



Each student worked with a learning buddy. I had been mindful of capability as well as co-operative learning behaviour in selecting the buddies for the two days. It has been interesting to note that back in the classroom at school, the students have continued to work with the same students for buddy tasks - mostly by their own choice.






The students rotated through fairly fast sessions at each learning station: Wonderbots with block coding on iPads; SculpGL (web-based tool) on Microsoft Surface Pro 4s; using Paint 3D on Microsoft Surface Pro 4s, then attaching images to mixed reality; Tinkercad - which is a chromebook app - but this app does have advertising on it, so we won’t use it at school; Sketch Fab (another web-based app); Stop Motion; Green Screen; and Virtual Reality.
A lot of learning, packed into two days.

          

Students used some of the apps to start creating trees for a virtual forest,

applying learning about New Zealand native forests and trees, from our classroom focus. 

Back at school we were able to continue using SculpGL plus Google Drawing to continue
to build our file bank of trees for our virtual forest. By linking the Google Drawing work to
Maths learning, we had really rich discussions about 2-D and 3-D shapes, and how they
were placed together, or manipulated, to create trees. This task provided lots of opportunity
for all students to use geometrical vocabulary as part of their talk.