Weekend takeaways

This weekend I spent time at #educampAKL.  Getting to see many teachers that I have twitter conversations with regularly,  however having the Face to Face is important as well.
Tamaki College provided an excellent backdrop to these conversations with their classrooms providing a modern learning environment to learn in.

On Friday I spent some time down at the Primary School talking with one of the teachers about possibilities, these were able to be developed at #educampAKL with some of the topics that came up. One of them around Google Cardboard.

The teacher and his class are currently filling in a questionaire from another school about how their classroom looks so they can built it in minecraft. How walks does you classroom have? Bit difficult when you have a room that isn;t quite a normal shape, or a classroom door, or typical spaces. One of the question is around how many spaces are in your classroom. Answer 14.

How can we use technology to support the ideas and questions that these are bringing up.

Having some time with some google cardboard offered us some ideas in how we can use technology between the secondary and primary to show these ideas, but not just within our school, within our community. Showing the history of the point before it is changed forever.

Second (and third), the Hobsonville Point area and even our school are rather new. We could take photos, upload them and then allow others to experience the growth of our area and school through Google Cardboard. This has direct ties to an ongoing project at HPPS and HPSS, opportunities for some authentic collaborative projects here are massive.
The last opportunity, all credit here to @Gmacmanus (pictured). I've been taking part in an interesting little project to assist @NZWaikato and his class as they try collect information on classes so they can recreate them in Minecraft. His learners and mine are operating in quite different classroom environments, Google Classroom would provide a more realistic way to experience each others classrooms. 

Copied from http://teachingyoume.blogspot.co.nz/2015/07/educampakl-2105.html 

My moonshot is to get students creating interactive artefacts.

Today, I followed a conversation on twitter around nodebots. These are some simple electronics to develop programming skills. I have been looking at this within our school and what we can develop using some of the equipment we have, however, I do like the idea of this, considering the laser cutter we have.  

Using this open source robot might provide an interesting challenge for some of my students, http://sumobotkit.com/.