The 2017 Manaiakalani Hui was a great forum to participate in, and share ideas and strategies around teaching and learning for staff and students within our schools.

It goes without saying, that so many of us, who are either directly, or indirectly connected to the learners in our community, want the very best for our students.  The discussions around the 'hows', the 'whys', the backward reflecting and the forward projecting is where a lot of the rich and meaningful conversations come from.  Within our own teaching environments, it is easy to feel overwhelmed somedays when the challenges seem so great.  However, connecting with colleagues within our community of learning on a day such as this, is a timely way of expressing, appreciating and celebrating all of the positive initiatives that are contributing to outcomes for our students.

It was wonderful to see the student ambassadors share part of their learning journey from the Manaiakalani schools.  So much enthusiasm and insight shared by all of the students; an absolute delight to watch.  Extremely grateful to take in the knowledge shared by my fellow 2017 SPARK MIT colleagues, Sandy, Dorothy, Angela and Troy, as well as inquiry displays from my fellow CoL teachers.

I appreciated the opportunity to share my vision and latest inquiry updates around VTaL, and what the VTaL framework means to me, in terms of breaking down barriers and access to learning for students in our community, with the potential for the framework to be utilised on a much wider scale.

Some of the 'Impact stories' that I had, included discussions with the following attendees at the Hui:

• Pat Snedden around the logistics of shifting culture, belief and capability across an entire cohort of people.  Student feedback is what has driven the majority of changes in my own practice, as well as the development of the VTaL framework.  Whilst the student feedback has at times been particularly frank about which subjects utilise digital tools such as sites, calendars etc the most, I have not generally used this feedback to create shift, other than with staff in my own department.  This lead to a particularly interesting conversation around responding to student voice.
• Maria Krausse from Core Education, about the collective impact and logistics around students commenting within Google+ communities.   In the past I had set up Google+ communities for each class, whereby students within classes would share and comment on work.  However, at the end of that year, the students would move into another class, and so, it made more sense for me to set up Year Level Communities, to promote the longevity and usefulness of the resources that students were uploading and sharing.  As discussed in a previous blog post, I've found that students posting and commenting within a community, enables other students to view the resources from many sources (their peers) on a particular category all at once.  This is especially useful when developing exemplars relating to NCEA levels, as our students do not necessarily connect with the NZQA exemplars online.  What I'd like to investigate is students blogging to their own blogs, and sharing the blog post to the Year Level Google+ Community, to see if that enables ownership of the original post, as well as community sharing according to particular topics.
• Gina Harduar and Christine Mitchell about the overall purpose and function of the VTaL Visible Teaching and Learning Framework, it's potential and benefits to learners so far.  I was able to show Christine a short video of students from Glenbrae School using VTaL at the end of last year.  The benefit of this is being able to show that although VTaL was set up in a secondary school context, essentially, it is a series of digital tools and components that enables work flow to take place in a range of educational settings; including primary schools.

A big thanks to those who touched base with me throughout the day to talk about VTaL and other challenges within education.  Hugely inspiring discussions and exciting times ahead for us all.




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