Rights and Responsibilities

Kaiwhare has been very busy in Week 2, learning more about the Treaty of Waitangi. Did you know that some Māori signed the Treaty with a mark showing a pattern from their tā moko (tattoos on the face) or from their area?  You can see them on the eight sheets of the Treaty that travelled around New Zealand from February to September 1840.

Photo: Archives New Zealand

We have started developing our class treaty, to explain our rights and responsibilities as we learn.  We've also started some artwork, using symbols to represent ourselves and our families in different ways.

In cybersmart, we are learning about using our chromebooks safely and our responsibilities for looking after them - our Kawa of Care.

Some of our parents have been invited to a meeting to learn about their responsibilities with their child's new chromebooks too. (Remember to send back the form that was sent home with your preferred meeting time!)



We practised:

• moving carefully around the class
• holding our chromebook with our "thumbs up" 
• typing gently on the keyboard and closing the screen softly, so it doesn't click
• putting the chromebook in a safe position on a desk, and turning it carefully with two hands
• logging off the chromebook when we finish working, and storing it safely

Then we made a digital poster sharing at least one of the Kawa of Care responsibilities. 

Check out Freddy's poster below.

Week 9 - Our own student led toolkits

On Friday, all of our senior school students were involved in student led toolkits.  Earlier in the term, 24 students from Te Waka Ako attended the cluster toolkits, you can read about these in this post.

Our aim was to bring the learning back from the cluster day and share it with all of the other Year 5s and 6s at our school.  This meant that from 9:15-12:45 students ran and participated in lots of different workshops that help us to use and create in interesting ways.  You can see all of the presentations and the things that the students were involved in on our Toolkits page on our Syndicate Site. We had a great time, found out heaps, made connections with others in our classes and even had the chance to present the learning to our Principal Mrs Peterson too!

Our next step is to share further and wider and we are looking forward to sharing this learning with our families. It is also important for us to think of ways to use these new tools to create digitally with our learning.

If you would like to find out more, or you have any questions about our presentations or our day, please leave a comment.  You could also make connections with the presenters and their blogs too. We would love to hear from you!

Week 5: Student led toolkits

Twenty four students from across the three spaces in Te Waka Ako attended the annual Ako Hiko student led toolkits. This year we were luck to be hosted  by Christ the King school.

The student led toolkits is a great day where we get the chance to connect with kids from other schools like us that also use chromebooks for Learning, Creating and Sharing. A toolkits is a session where  children present and learn from each other.  We had two groups of presenters this year. Oscar and Abby showed how we use spheros at school for problem solving and robotics challenges. Anuk and Toby demonstrated how google slides can be used to create animations that are fun and also show our learning.  If you are interested, both of the presentations are displayed below.


It was another really successful day. The students who attended are also going to share the rest of their learning with the syndicate. We have also included a video of photo highlights from the day in the video.

How to SMRF?

One of our new challenges as we work digitally is making sure we are smart about where we store and share our files.  We have enjoyed working with James to create a flowchart that shows us the process of how we can get our learning activities from our syndicate site, make a copy of them and then organise them in our own google drives.

To do this, we call it SMRF(ing) a document.  This is to remind us what to do.

S=STOP
M=Make a copy
R=Rename the file
F=File it in our drive.

To make this process easier you will see below some flowchart examples from Room 8.
 Do you SMRF your documents too?  We would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about how you do this.  To find out more, please check out our cybersmart page.

Digital citizenship - connecting the dots

Our key concept for Inquiry this year is "Responsibility".  So far, we have been inquiring about the rights and responsibilities that we have as a student at Waikowhai Primary, a student within the senior syndicate of Rooms 7,8 and 9 and as a person who is part of the many and varied things we all do when we are not together at school.

One new area for many of us to explore (and some of us to refresh) is digital citizenship.  This means the rights and the responsibilities that we have when being an active part of our online community.  Today Mr Riceman challenged us to make some connections between key words that relate to digital citizenship.  We worked collaboratively to come up with definitions of what these words could mean.

Our next step was to identify any connections between key words and then join those two hexagons together.  If we found three words that we could connect and explain then we tessellated the shapes together and shared these ideas too.

Room 8 was full of fantastic conversation and ran ourselves short of time, we look forward to finishing off these connections tomorrow and sharing them with you!  We would love it if you gave us some feedback in the comments.  You might even be able to help us further expand our definition of the key words that you can see in our whiteboard picture.

CyberSmart Week 1

Our CyberSmart teacher James come for his first visit back to Room8.

• We are learning to follow the Kawa of Care and use our device confidently and in clever ways.
• Smart learners know their Google ID and password.
• Know how to use their device confidently.

Google map - connections

Today James introduced us to Google Maps as part of our cybersmart learning. We collaborated to create a shared doc that showed all the different places that we were born. As a class we are originally from some amazing places and it is pretty special that we have all come together as Room 8. Below you will see the map of the different places we are from. While creating this map it was really important for us to apply our cybersmart learning so that we did not share too much information. Next time we meet we will further explore our connections in cybersmart. We would love it if you could take the time to comment on our learning. You may even have a connection with some of the wonderful learners from Room 8.

Ako Hiko - student led toolkits

The second annual Ako Hiko student led toolkits were held today at Hay Park School.  12 eager students from our Year 5/6 syndicate joined representatives from the other 7 Ako Hiko schools for a day of fun, learning and collaboration.

Students had the chance to sign up to three different sessions last week to experience some of the amazing skills, hits, tips and tricks other students were willing to share. From Tinker-Cad to Makey-makeys to coding to storybird to google drawings there was something for everyone! Our students thoroughly enjoyed their new learning as well as connecting with other students in the cluster.
Ricky and Lily from Room 8 presented "Code studio in the class Room" in the first round of toolkits, then Safa from Room 8 and Izzy from Room 9 shared "Creating shared books and yearbooks using google drawings". The third and final session was a chance for all 12 participants to enjoy some more learning.  We had an amazing day and had the chance to learn lots of new things and about ourselves as well.  Thank you to Hay Park School, Mrs Archer and everybody else involved in the organisation of this day!

What is a quality blog comment?

Room 8 were extremely excited to see James again for our regular cybersmart session.  Today we were working on creating a quality blog comment within the Learn-Create-Share cycle.  This skill is extremely valuable as we continue to grow our online presence and digital footprints.

Our first task was to 'create' by contributing to the padlet embedded below.  James challenged us to describe all the things that we might see in a quality blog comment.

Created with Padlet

We then focused on "Learn". By reading examples of quality blog comments and viewing two relevant videos we were even more knowledge about commenting.  If you would like to find out more these resources are available on our cybersmart page in the first "smart relationships" section. With new knowledge on board we revisited and reflected upon our padlet contribution to make any changes. We say proudly that we had lots of great ideas in our first attempt and only had to make minor adjustments.

Then it was time to "Share", our favourite part.  We were challenged to use the quality blog post rubric to describe and share our learning. While we are getting better at sharing, the next learning step for many of us is to give more detail on our individual blogs so our audience can gain plenty of information, enough for them to leave us a quality comment. 

If you would like to find out more about Room 8's individual thoughts please check out our individual blogs.  We love positive, thoughtful and helpful comments and feedback and we are working hard to respond to you too!