Te Mihi

Been working on my Mihi I have recorded it on utterli as well.

It felt good to find out where I come from and to be able to acknowledge

the Maori language and its part in our identity.

Taku                      Mihi	Meaning
Ko David ahau	I am David
Ko Ngati Tahu te iwi	My tribe is Ngati Tahu from the South Island
Ko Rakeahua te awa	Rakeahua is my River
Ko Rakeahua te Maunga	Rakeahua is my Mountain
Ko Alyn taku papa	My father is Alyn
Ko Dorothy taku mama	My Mother is Dorothy
	They are both Dead now but their spirit is still with me

A good resource for this is here http://www.tki.org.nz/r/language/lls/wehi/units/unit14/index_e.php

Examples from Pt England school are here http://softwareforlearning.wikispaces.com/eStory2

What do you think about cyberbullying?

I read a bebo comment where someone was called a loser and asked to "go cut themselves". I know that online insults often don't hold back. Well we notice more people involved in having their say. So "students" have a look at this video on youtube. Have your say Comment on any of the following or just make general comment about this clip.

• Is cyberbullying real for you?
• What would be different if this video was filmed in New Zealand?
• How effective do you think this video was?
• What methods of filming did they use to get their message across?
• How is the talent show connected to cyber bullying?
• If you were to make a video about cyber bullying what would it be?
  

Current events?

I am not a great fan of current events in the classroom.

Why? Because what we generally see as a current events programme is: a teacher decides what of value has happened in the past week maybe 2. (generally looking in newspapers and on TV).
The questions that are generated at an assessment level are trivial pursuit in nature. So why do we teach this?

• The deep learning ?
• Is it Thinking or Remembering?

So people fit in with the conversations in the street the chit chat etc. or perhaps so that we have a wider understanding of the world around us?
That I feel this is selling ourselves short.
Short on where we need to be for the future we need to be articulate about.
I feel we need to lift our overall level of understanding of politics, social issues, environmental issues tetc
Instead

• Teach students reciprocal teaching
• Work in wikis or online collaborations reflecting on current issue events
• compare 2
• Order five current events in order of importance state why?
• Debate a case.
• Use graphic organisers
• Read each others blogs on current events
• RSS Feed from news sites and even add specific google news search to follow a topic
• Fight the desire to summatively assess recall
• Nonlinguistic representation
  

I looked at some of Stuff from a wiki Marzano and web2.0
worth a browse.