This term I am really excited to participating in the Hack Your Class Project hosted by the wonderful Claire Amos from Hobson Point Secondary School. Claire’s introductory post gives a really good overview of the whole idea and there’s also a lot of great resources in her holiday reading post. I’m looking forward to working my way through the reading list (once Stage Challenge is done with almost every waking moment).

 

Reading through the tentative timeline has got me so excited – all the things I’ve been thinking about and starting to explore are in here – deepening e-learning, maker culture, design thinking, universal design for learning… Seriously I’m geeking out about this so much right now!

 

I’ve also been thinking about the things I want to hack in my own classroom. My maths programme has been top of my list since the beginning of the year and I’m slowly starting to get it to a place where I’m happy with it and I’d like to blog more about the hacking process and how the students are finding it.

 

The other big one I want to hack is my physical space. We have good-sized classrooms with masses of class and wide double doors that open out on to this crazy huge shared learning area (effectively doubling our space) which is an amazing space to work in, but in the classrooms we’ve still got a lot of old school furniture – single cell desks and the dreaded tote trays. So my class and I have started looking at how we can make our space more flexible and reflective of the way we actually like to work (all while spending absolutely no money!). Definitely a lot of hacking going to happen here!

 

I’ve also found myself a performing arts hacker buddy @ginippi – yay for finding another dance teacher in NZ who’s actually on twitter.

 

Can’t wait to get started! How will you #hackyrclass?