Digital Mihi.

Here is a presentation I put together for the VPLDFFI hui in Auckland on the 29/30 May 2014.


I presented the first 5 slides to the participants. Below are my speaker notes.

Why mihi?
Mihi is a way of establishing a connection with an audience. We are looking to tell a story, to establish links or find commonalities, to establish our identity and in some cases to establish our credibility.


Why digital?

Mihi are traditionally delivered orally but using a digital format enables accesssibility for all. (Multi lingual, sign language, voice over recording, text and images) 

Adding images allow you personalisation, to tell your story your way, images give us more information than text alone can, you can add sounds and music to your images.

Images = building a story = building a connection, we are more likely to engage when someone shares information as a story, the act of storytelling relaxes us, makes us feel safe, is familiar to us, allowing us to more easily process and retain new information.

Embed + link + share, being a digital format means you can link to your mihi online or embed it into a presentation shared online. You can also share your story more widely engaging a wider audience and connecting beyond face to face.

Telling a story 

More on the importance of storytelling as part of presenting, includes a link to a stunning piece on the psychology of storytelling.

What's in a mihi?

Traditional and modern options. Modern allows you to share as much or as little as you like, to share what is important to you and what is appropriate to your audience.

How do I want to share? 

Time for you to think about what you want to include, how you want to share, what format you want to use. 

The next slides are like a mini inquiry - you pick your path through getting more information, examples or tools to produce you own mihi.

Feel free to have a go with your students, your colleagues, yourself, use my links and have fun!

Collaborative Projects and the Goodness of Google.

Earlier this week I participated in the Google Summit and so am fully googled inspired. : )

One of the google features I have not made full use of in the past is the google form. Many of the workshops used google forms at the beginning to gather starting data about the participants and to get feedback at the end. 3 questions seemed to be a good number to gather info but not make the task onerous.

For those of you new to google forms and wondering what on earth I am on about, here is a link to creating a google form.

For those of you keen to give google forms a go in your classroom but not sure where or how they would fit in, here is a link to a whole list of examples of google forms used in the classroom (scroll to the bottom of the page)

One workshop I would like to share with you used google forms as a way of getting us into working teams.

Julie Lindsay - Collaboration: Concept, Power and Magic

Julie sets up collaborative projects internationally for schools/students and so this session demonstrated the use of digital technologies to support geographically ‘dispersed’ collaboration.  It used Google Form to assign collaborative groups, Padlet to ‘virtual handshake’ group members, Google Docs to collaborate on tasks and finally Google Presentations to present learning.

Julie stated the session by talking about the importance of giving our students opportunities to develop the skills to work collaboratively across cultures, time zones and distances. She says “It is imperative students receive a global education and have the opportunity to connect and work with others in the world.”

In this workshop we started by completing a google form (choosing a favourite colour) to group us into working teams. Even though we were all in the same room we did not move to sit with the people in our group, instead we stayed in our seats and worked collaboratively online, using google chat and comments in the google docs to communicate. This was very challenging at times and I was so tempted to jump up and rush across the room to tap a team mate on the shoulder and say “read my comment!” : )

We started by introducing ourselves and getting to know our team, then we began to work on a collaborative presentation. We only had a short time to complete the presentation so had to divide tasks up and work as a team.

This exercise was a great introduction to working collaboratively across distances.

I would love to hear of you trying this in your school. I imagine starting as we did in a classroom and then moving to collaborating with students from another class in the same school before moving to inter-school, inter-island, inter-country collaborations.

You can find more information about the Flat Connections Project by following these links.

More information about Julie Lindsay

Flat Connections website

Using green screening to motivate reluctant writers.

In my early years of teaching I encountered many reluctant writers. Often the reluctance was due to a lack of having anything to write about. By providing an exciting motivation to write alongside scaffolded vocabulary these once reluctant writers became keen writers. One such motivator is green screening where the student is able to see themselves in the story.

Using green screening to motivate writing from Catriona Pene

Not a mac school? Here's a video clip explaining using Windows Movie Maker to do a similar thing.

or apps for iPad Green Screen Movie FX By EPOCFIELD LTD or chrome webstore Green-Screen