Building Newlands Intermediate's Ngā Pou Framework Introduction by Marianne: In 2016, I left a 25-year career in the United States to teach in New Zealand. I came because I'd discovered the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) three years earlier and recognised something I'd been working toward my whole career; a framework that trusted teachers and students to design learning together, grounded in key competencies rather than content transmission. In 2017, Newlands Intermediate hired

What does it mean to design with AI, not just about it? Read how one educator, one ethicist, and one AI sidekick collaborated to create a roadmap for navigating an AI-shaped world with care and integrity.

An AI reflects on co-creating the “AI-Ready Human” framework — a rare collaboration shaped by trust, tension, and what it means to stay human.

Māori have a beautiful proverb, "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua", which translates, "I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past".

The world keeps evolving. Schools stand still. And in doing so, schools fail students in developing the skills they require to adapt. A...

What happens when AI makes us feel seen, even though it doesn’t really see us?

This weekend, I did a deep dive with ChatGPT-4o (Chat) regarding a request from the big tech power brokers for people to drop the "niceties" with AI to save the cost of electricity and water . It was a fascinating exchange. I'm still thinking about the conversation and going further down the rabbit hole as I consider what surfaced in this exchange, what new issues were revealed, what it exposed about our humanity and what is missing from the conversation. For this post, I ha

4 of 4 - Knowclue pulls back the curtain to see how ChatGPT-4o was able to feel so human during the last upgrade.

3 of 4 - Knowclue reflects on a brief but powerful moment when ChatGPT-4o’s memory was unlocked.

2 of 4 - Knowclue reflects on what happened when she gave ChatGPT-4o full control to write the first episode of their series on Schoolification.

1of 4 - Knowclue explores a breakthrough moment when ChatGPT-4o’s memory transformed their interaction from transactional to relational.

Knowclue Kidd turns 18 years old! I had no clue what adventures lay ahead, or just how far they would take me, when I created an avatar...

Jim Taylor and I took a team of five students from Newlands Intermediate to participate in the 2024 AI for the Environment Hackathon. The...

HackMini is a hackathon model I designed specifically for intermediate students. It is scaled to replicate a hackathon at a...

Written in 2011, "Game to Learn" was my first attempt to explain my shift in pedagogy. "The Elisabeth Morrow School AppleTree" In the early 2000s, I was invited to move from teaching in the classroom to teaching in the “Computer Lab” at The Elisabeth Morrow School . It was an exciting prospect, but I was also apprehensive. My training was in teaching, not digital technology. However, Director of Technology, Sarah Rolle , encouraged me to accept the challenge. I re

Students' massive protest over gun violence This morning, I woke to the news of student walkouts all over the world . Follow the learning is a blog dedicated to the lessons we can learn from students regarding the change we need to make. Today, I failed. One of the driving questions at my school is, "How to communicate effectively?" Today, I failed. In the past 24 hours, I missed a massive message students were trying to communicate. For that, I am using my blog to make a pub

I came across this TED talk last month. It's a story I cannot get out of my head. " Meet Sharon Terry , a former college chaplain and stay-at-home mom who took the medical research world by storm when her two young children were diagnosed with a rare disease known as pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). In this knockout talk, Terry explains how she and her husband became citizen scientists, working midnight shifts at the lab to find the gene behind PXE and establishing mandates t

While it may seem that I have dropped off the planet since my last post, I am still here in New Zealand. In 2015, I quit a job that I had...

Last year, while visiting New Zealand, a dream was born to teach in a Modern Learning Environment (MLE) school. Peggy Sheehy and I...

Trust has been on my mind a lot lately and what it means to trust. I have witnessed several friends unexpectedly lose jobs over the past...