Travelling Mascot Chicao, Brazil.

The Learn-Now welcomes Chicão from Brazil. From a class in Colégio São José, Santos, São Paulo, Portuguese speaking students sent Chicão to New Zealand for a holiday.

Hosting Chicão, is Team Solway, the Gifted & Talented Students at Solway Primary, Masterton, Wairarapa, New Zealand. Their mission? To beam Chicão's kiwi experiences back to Brazil as learning bites for his class.

Team Solway's learning the art of character role-play digital photography, third-person speak, blogging, rostering, sales pitching and strategic planning. One student's Chicão's Mascot Manager and when the team's not working with Chicão, they're discovering more about finance in Brazil, international communication and working with the media - as close to home as school newsletters and perhaps even the local newspaper.

The beauty of this experience so far? Grins from ear to ear, a real 'touch' of something international and country that feels 'real' to the students. With such a positive experience as this, we're planning to foster this nature of programming on a much grandier scale. Schools around the world can join and be actual hosts of international characters, mutual learning experiences and a year-long project that could virtually take students to at least 10-12 countries in a year. All we need are hosts, tour guides (students/schools) and exchangable mascots.

Interested? Contact us to enrol!
For more on Chicão, see his Learn-Now site
...and the Solway School bubbleshare movie.

Personalised Learning & Lifelong Learning

This week in Christchurch, New Zealand, the education conference Ulearn, focuses on integrating new technologies to empower learning and transform leadership.

Ulearn is, for many schools in NZ, thee conference to attend, for an uplifting spin re: ICT integration in education. Derek Wenmoth, and his blog presents the highlights and while grabbing a coffee before reading the entry will only see it go cold, the key points stay hot.

Of particular interest to us and our focus with Learn-Now, is keynote reference to 'Tomorrow's Schools, Yesterday's Solutions' (the battle Learn-Now has with schools), with Hattie & Oram. This followed the Williamson & Nussebaum focus on the impact of Web2.0 technologies to enable online participation and sharing and the need to shift from a classroom metaphor to a community metaphor for the way we organise learning in the future... One could 'hear' that this could (and should) refer to teacher communities, but reassuring for Learn-Now, is that this is exactly what we deal with, for students within their schools. We are still getting it right.

Derek's actual reports
a) Hattie & Oram is here...
b) Richardson & Nussebaum-Beach is here...

A year on

We're a year on now and diversity continues. Learn-Now could well be the latest roller coaster. It steadily journeys up steep learning-curve terrain and enjoys the adrenalin rush of fast paced energy.

The Changing Model

The dominating focus as an Online Learning Environment has shifted to also being a model for others. We're delighted! There are those who use it as a working space to see what it's like to create an online life for their students and those who use the continuing R&D to better inform where their own mission could be driven. We don't even have all the bells and whistles! Strangely enough, when we'd gone down the 'should do' track with that thinking, we've scared many clients off. Keeping our site simple has enabled those early in their journey (toward developing their own online environments) in a can-do zone. For now, that's where we're going to sit.

Highlights

Our most rewarding moment this year was a Kids Conference. There are conferences aplenty for adults, corporates and educators, but little exists for those less senior.We joined the committee behind a 3 day event for 350 students and offered a post-conference Virtual Workshop pilot. I know of Virtual Conferences, but ahave yet to find reference (even if only googling) for young students. We're in the midst of working through it - much of the action destined between now and the end of this calendar year. Watch this space

Consulting, Scoping & Developing

Exciting too, is the consultative work we're dealing with too. After being recipients to several research case studies, the spin off has seen us now helping others strategise their own plans for developing Online Learning Environments. The greatest beauty of all, is that others are hugely interested in the voice of the student, student-driven concepts and even the realistic fees respecting the nature of the work involved.

While it's otherwise been business as usual, the bounciest highlights are on the horizon. We're about to even more go global like never before... Just can't say much yet! But meanwhile, it's good to be back blogging - long may it last.