E Whiti! E Whiti!

Opening sequence (background music): title of the strategy, Connected Ako: Digital and Data for Learning, appears with graphical images of a puna (spring). Transition to moving icons of punas that represent the 6 areas of mahi in the strategy.  

Transition to footage of the story. Speaker presenting with imagery represented on screen.

Karl Summerfield: “E Whiti! E Whiti! means crossover. The programme is about rangatahi and community partners getting into each other’s spaces. Students having an opportunity to solve a genuine, authentic, slightly knotty problem that are community partners are struggling with themselves. The thought is that rangatahi will bring some new thinking and a fresh perspective to those problems.

Student: “So about I think two weeks ago we started this course; it was a four day from Monday to Thursday. The first kind of two days were all about design thinking and analysing and stuff. We saw how other people worked; we saw offices. It was super cool. And we saw how everything that is done in a building or in just in anything in a street is specifically throughout and designed for a certain way.

Student: “We have these people coming to us like, businesses, or like corporations which have problems which are related to like people or something like that, which they want help with, but they don’t exactly know how to fix it. So, they come to us and for the next few days we must plan out what we’re going to do, how we’re going to approach that problem to solve it.

Student: “So you start in like a place of darkness, where you don’t know anything and then you move into a place of, you’re just starting to get the beginnings of an idea and then you’re widening that scope and looking at all the possibilities and then coming back down and narrowing it back down to something. This happens over and over and over as you refine.

Student: “First you just empathise, and you listen. You don’t think, “What am I going to do”.  You listen to the problems, you put it together.  So, it’s quite a selective process and I really enjoyed learning about that as well.

Speaker: “These kids have like brilliant ideas, innovation, tech savvy, sustainable thinking, learner design, AI. Just all that stuff is going to be the way of the world soon. So, we really need to incorporate it into the classes.

Student: “I think we did need quite a lot of help with experts. The lovely people that come around and talk to us. We tend to focus on like the details and the technical. So, our sort of process was jump right to the end and go, let’s make something rather than let’s work out who we’re targeting and why we’re making it first. If we didn’t have like our experts in our helpers around, I don’t think I ever would have made it to this point. When you get stuck or don’t really know how to move on, they give you a bunch of ideas and just help you through it, which is handy because otherwise we wouldn’t be at this point.

Speaker: “Well to me this gives us that ideal setting where teachers like me can get access to real world problems. So, you get that real world, you get that authenticity.

Speaker: “E Whiti E Whiti is like a segway or the foundation for students to be able to be, move into a sector where money’s being generated and just instead of taking all our kids who have all this expertise and digital fluency and innovation, keep them in New Zealand.

Speaker: “This year we’ve expanded to include more schools, more teachers, more students. We’ve still only really scratched the surface in terms of the schools locally. I think the sky’s the limit really.

Student: “Well, it’s definitely very different to normal school.”

Student: “Oh, it’s so much better.”

Student: “I quite like it here. We can just focus on one thing instead of going to different classes every hour.”

Student: “It’s really fun to get to like brainstorm these ideas, which most of the time you don’t actually like get to interact with in school.”

Student: “This is different because we’re outside in a different environment, experiencing real world things.”

Student: “We’re fed, we’re left to our own devices as well. We’re given control of our own learning.”

Student: “We have more freedom here to ask questions and it doesn’t matter if we get something right or wrong.”

Student: “No, it’s a lot more chill. I like it and I get to work with people that I like. So, it’s awesome.

Student: “It’s been really, fun. I’ve made loads of new friendships and it’s just been amazing. It’s been awesome.”

Student: “They feed me; I really enjoy that.”

Student: “The kind of learning is different. It’s not really teacher telling you to study this or study that and then but instead coming up with a solution to a problem that we’ve identified in the community.

Student: “And this stuff, the design thinking is kind of like, because you’re constantly doing it, it just gets somewhat hammered into your head, cause it’s like you need to approach the problem in different ways.”

Student: I’ve loved it. I honestly loved it.

Closing sequence (background music) with graphical image of the Puna. 

Onscreen title appears: Connected Ako: living, learning, and working in the digital world.  

Final screen shows logos of the education agencies. Top line showing agencies leading this work which will develop workplans based on the strategy: Ministry of Education (MoE), New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) and Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). Bottom line showing the broader education agencies who have contributed to the strategy and will use it to inform and guide their own plans and decisions: Education New Zealand (ENZ), Education Payroll Limited, Education Review Office (ERO), Network for Learning (N4L), Teaching Council, Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura) and Research Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ).