#educamprotovegas

An amazing turnout and packed room at #Educamprotovegus proved that there are many passionate educators striving to develop their own learning and guide their own PD. It was wonderful to see so many newbies to Educampnz and I believe they all felt welcome and not overwhelmed by the geeks. I especially liked how much focus was on got pedagogy that was not particularly elearning as their is often the misconception that these teacher gatherings are for ITC geeks only.


The Smackdown ruled the day with a huge range of incredible resources being shared. It was a truly inspiring experience and I'm still processing all the amazing things I learnt.


The Twitter feed tells the story of our day and conversations happening. 

Thank you Annemarie @mrs_hyde for bringing us all together.

Handwriting Fonts for New Zealand Curriculum

I originally wrote this post on "Handwriting Fonts for New Zealand Curriculum" in 2009, now after some discussion on the NZ Teachers (Primary) FaceBook page on New Zealand fonts for computers I'm updating it with a screencast on how to install the Jarman font onto your PC. Mac users can follow these instructions. This is the download link for the Jarman font. Enjoy and let me know how you used it.

Making Mistakes Marvelous

Tomas Edison, one of the greatest and most prolific inventors in human history took 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb, that's 10,000 failures, or 10,000 stepping stones to success. I am not Edison but after my first week back at school I felt like I had made 1000 mistakes, but for the first time I felt proud of them, in fact I boasted about them to my students all week.

From my own past experiences and what I have seen from past students, failure can shut down any further exploration or willingness to give it a go. Perhaps failure often instills a fear of failure. So this year I am determine to celebrate failure and turn it around from a dirty word into a positive word. So now I happily admit my every failure to my students and model how each mistake teaches me something new and provides an opportunity to improve. My catch phase this year is "count my mistakes to see how much I have learnt".  

My dream is that my students start their year of learning with a growth mindset that celebrates mistakes as learning opportunities.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy