September 5

Being an Upstander

Over the past month, in our Cybersmart lessons we have been learning to be upstanders when we see things going wrong online and in person.

Some of the things we need to do to be upstanders can be hard, but we know that we can do this – especially if we use the skills we have learnt.

Over our lessons we have learnt about things like Scratch and Google Slides to make animations, Google Draw for posters and Google Slides to make pick-a-paths. We’ve also played interland to help us with making right decisions.

Whaea Stacey then gave us a task where we could choose the way we showed our learning from an online taskboard. Some of the things we could do were: videos, games, animations, podcasts or stories. We chose a variety of things. Here is some of our work.

From our class we had: 3 PE type games.
In one, we had to jump in a hoop with a person from the opposite team, the person who was fastest to say a compliment to the other person added a hoop to their line. The first team to run out of hoops was the winner.
In another, we put our football skills to the test by answering upstanding questions and passing the ball along our team if we got the questions right. After scoring a goal in football, we had to try and get a basketball shot up.
The third activity was an obstacle course and you couldn’t move onto the next part until you answered a question correctly.

We had lots of pick-a-paths and animations, as well as a kahoot!

4 people in our class became newscasters and interviewed other people.

We also had a few board games made, and some stories. One of the groups who wrote a story even took it to the younger students!

We also had a game which incorporated being an Upstander with learning Te Reo Māori!

August 8

Chrome Music Lab

Today in our Cybersmart lesson with Whaea Stacey, we followed on from our last session of copyright and creativity by learning about creating our own music through Chrome Music Lab. We were able to access different types of instruments and could change the rhythm as well. We needed to think about patterns in our music and what we could possibly use this with – background music for our animations we are also making seems like a good idea.

Have you tried Chrome Music Lab before? What would you use your music for?

We also learnt how to embed media, like some of our songs (please don’t change them) and our animations into our blog posts!

August 1

Creativity, Copyright and Free Use

Today in our ICF sessions, Whaea Stacey taught us about copyright and free use for images and music that we can use.

While most of us knew how to use remove.bg to remove backgrounds of images, it was a good reminder to us and a new concept learnt for everyone who didn’t. We then had to place ourselves in a picture. Can you find us?

 

 

 

 

 

We learnt to use the explore tool to find images, rather than going through google as well as how to attribute pictures to say who took the photo.

Some of us had some time to create badges for people.

July 25

Term 3 – Week 2 – AI

This week with our Cybersmart lesson, we learnt about AI. We discussed whether or not AI is good, and what we actually use it for!

We found out the recipe for the best chocolate cake ever (Whaea Stacey has said she will make it to see!)

We used canva and pxlr to create a range of AI generated pictures. Here are some of them!

Lots of us thought that we might use this in the future to help with our writing.

This was an awesome activity!

May 16

24 hour footprints

We have been learning about our online footprint. We have learned that everything we share online can be searched, copied, shared, and is permanent. We learned this by watching a video and talking about what we’d seen; we also talked about times when we’ve shared something online and it’s been copied and shared without our permission. This is important information to learn because we have started our class blog, so we are actively sharing information online, during class time.

We collected screenshots of the places we visited online in the last 24 hours and inserted them onto our footprint. We also took a selfie to go with our footprint. We learned how to change the shape of our selfie by using Mask tool in Google Slides.

Here is a slidedeck of our footprints. We hope you enjoy looking through them.

March 14

Kia ora welcome to Kuaka Hub B for 2023

Our teacher’s name is Mr Baker; he helps us with the learning that we do like literacy, maths, Cybersmart, PE, and arts.

Something new this year is that we have year 5s in our class too. The year 5s still swim with Team Tarānui, which is the middle school, because they’re the youngest.

Our school has three hubs. Kōtare is the junior hub. Team Tarānui is year 2, 3 and 4. And Kuaka Hub (the godwit) is us – the senior school.

Our class has lots of nationalities in it. We have Filipino, Māori, Pākehā, Australian, and Dutch.

We hope you enjoy reading our blog this year.

October 28

Logging in to our individual learner blogs

Today we finally got to use our own individual learner blogs. The first thing we had to learn to do was log in. From our class blog we found the link to our own blog and then logged in with Google. It’s great using all Google products because it makes the login process easy.

A blog post has a title and a body. We drafted the body of our post first to make sure that we were writing a quality blog post. Once our draft had been checked by a teacher, we copied and pasted the text into the Edublog.

The last thing we had to do was learn how to add a picture. Pressing the Add Media button took us to a screen where we could upload our profile pictures. Some of us created an avatar instead of using an actual photo of ourselves. We could format this picture if we wanted to – to change the size or the orientation of the photo in our post. 

We used the Preview button to check we were happy with everything and then it was finally time to press Publish. You can connect with our individual blogs by clicking on the widget on the right-hand side of this blog. Our first entries will be our personal profiles. Please have a look and leave a comment.

October 19

Personal Blog Profile

Today we put into practice all of the things we learned last term about leaving a positive digital footprint. We remembered what we’d learned about what can be shared publicly and what’s better kept private, then we created our personal blog profiles. 

These are some of the reasons to blog:
-to share our learning with the world;
-to connect with an authentic audience for our learning outcomes; 
-to engage in interactions and decision-making with our peers, whānau and a wider audience.

Now that our personal blog profiles are ready, we will start writing in our individual learner blogs. You can connect with our individual blogs by clicking on the widget at the bottom of this blog. Our first entries will be our personal profiles. Please have a look and leave a comment.

September 29

Kuaka Hub post – 7

Wow, it has been a busy term and we’re almost done! The students in K-Hub have created some amazing work this term.  Some of the work we’ve completed has been based on novel studies and narrative writing. Students have written narratives with goals around writing an orientation that sets up the story, using direct and indirect speech, and using a range of descriptive language features. We have also worked on lots of impressive pieces of art this term. Our most recent piece was based on using an app called Kleki which we encourage other students to check out! We uploaded an image of the student’s faces and they added digital paint over half of the image to create the effect. Check out the work below!

                   

                                 

 

I’ve also added some excellent novel study work too!

Thanks, Mr Baker and Kuaka Hub.

PS – Stay tuned for individual student blogs next term!

September 13

Kuaka hub post 6

The kuaka hub has continued its focus on wellbeing over the last few weeks. We are using the whare tapa wha concept of hauora in class and we have also focused on the Five Ways to Wellbeing concept from the Mental Health NZ Foundation.  As mental health week is coming up at the end of September we wanted some visual content around our room to represent what we have learned about attending to our wellbeing.  The images below are based on the Five Ways to Wellbeing idea: Be Active, Connect, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give. Our students used the Canva presentation app to create these posters. They aimed to emphasise the main focus from the five options and use a range of images, icons and text so their audience can learn from the presentation.

Awesome job K-hub!