Tamaki Today - 2008

For the duration of 2008 I had as classroom resources a single classroom computer operating, and a teacher laptop, with which we were forbidden to allow the teachers to use. It was here that I ran my class blog at tamakitoday.blogspot.com

I signed up for blogger/google because that's what the co-ordinator for my ICT cluster suggested. This was extremely fortuitous as the site developed I ended up putting more and more video on it, and I would have ran out of space had I gone with Edublogs! (Which would then have required me to donate to the Edublog hosts to ensure I could continue posting). I was literally making some things up as I went along. None of what I would have done would have been possible of the mentoring of my cluster co-ordinator, Dorothy Burt from Point England School. Its a cliche to say it, but I would have never got a start online if it wasn't for her. As part of the Manaiakalani Cluster in the Tamaki Area of Auckland I had a fertile group of other teachers to work with, bounce ideas off and develop ideas.

The site was named "Tamaki Today" because when it started there was a TV Network Show that the kids saw each week called that, broadcast to our students (supplied by Rob Munick from Schools Inc as he was employed by the School it still is broadcast as part of Triangle TV) and I thought that I might at some point use material to go on there. It was a terrible name and with hindsight I wish more thought had gone into it, something generic would probably have been good, that didn't necessarily tie me to the school once I left ideally, but at that point I wasn't really thinking long term, so it had to do.

The start of it was horrendous. Talk about lessons learned.

Initially I had no material to post. We'd had a talent quest at the end of 2006 and I had some footage from 2006 which I put up. Tried to upload a video that was larger than 50 megs and it wouldn't be accepted by Blogger. I tried uploading it. For three days. I then realized that it was too small, and reduced it in size (it went down to 45 megs I recall, now I would never upload anything more than 30). So I uploaded a few files and waited for people to arrive and leave comments and tell me how wonderful the class site was.

And no-body came.

We (myself and students) were so excited to be starting online and doing this work and we was sure that it would be an 'instant' hit and that we could create an audience all of a sudden and that people would love it and it get the break that we needed. I can't remember the exact figures but I think it took a month to get 500 visitors and that included us literally throwing ourselves everywhere as on online face/entity. In the end we managed to snare 4,000 visitors to the site for the first year. Its actually doing better now, in terms of visitors than when it was actively running!

The other thing that I really had difficulty with was the fact that I contacted several well known online personalities/bloggers and tried to ask for their help to get me started, and to publicize what my students were doing. Some of the people that I made contact with, really made the difference between me continuing and giving up. Amanda at EPS was one of them, as was getting a mention on a Suzie Vesper Slideshow. Some of the other people that I met didn't really help in ways that I wanted. While this is a fact of life its been an influencing factor in the way that I view my online activity, I think its essential to assist to help and to show people the ropes no matter how trivial or how basic that it sounds. I try to make sure that every comment that has been left on my sites that I or my students reply to and try to feature as many other sites as I can. I don't think that there are any 'secrets' to how one should operate online and try and make every effort to spread understanding and use as much as possible I have and will always attempt to tutor and help people in any way that I can. The culture of the students that were at Tamaki Intermediate was a huge advantage. The students were from a decile 1 community and immensely proud of their culture and heritage for the most part. In turn they were almost unanimously keen and eager to share their language, culture, ideas and backgrounds with an audience who in turn found it interesting. The video above was the first in a series of Maori Poi lessons that the students created for viewers on our site.

By October 2008 I had decided that a shift of towns was in order and that I would be returning to my roots. I had long ago decided when I was first in Auckland that I could 'rile' in the right context and so I was turning up the fact that I was from Hamilton to a significant level (Auckland and Hamilton are traditional rivals in Rugby) and it seemed a good move to make at the time, and a year later it absolutely was on a personal level. I gained employment for the 2009 year at an Intermediate School in Hamilton. I was able to point to the work that I had completed for 2008 from my class site and the success of the material that had been uploaded to Teachertube and Youtube, which to that point was pressing on to 50,000 visits/views for the calendar year.

The World in Review 2002-8

So I found myself at my second teaching school by 2002. I was charged with reviving my new schools sporting fortunes which had sunk relatively low. Again the results don't need to be individually recorded but relatively speaking every year from 2002 to 2008 was better in terms of results that the previous six years, including three of the best years ever, and we won a national title, and also competed twice in the AIMS Nationals.

The only problem was after 12 years of this I was getting increasingly bored and more than a little frustrated with my position. Officially I was the School Area Sports Coordinator, the School Sports Co-Coordinator and a Team Leader. Without wishing to sound arrogant we were producing results that weren't comparable to before. But it's also not an exaggeration to say that other than a small localized audience, the success was small scale. Also despite what I felt were consistently strong results there was pressure on myself (from myself primarily) to continue to produce the same sort of results year after year. We didn't get any extra time to do it, all the sport was developed in addition to teaching responsibilities in the classroom. All the training, preparation etc was effectively done in my own time. Professionally, I was in a rut.

Come 2007 the school announced that there was the possibility of involving itself in an ICT contract. I saw the prospects for it, thought it would be a good challenge and attempted to do so with a class blog site for 2008. That's not without actually reducing my other workload (which by now was running to 25 or so sports teams a year) I attempted to run a class site simultaneously with everything else.

This is my very first foray into the video filming world. Its also the very first video I ever uploaded to my class site for 2008. Its footage of our Tongan Boys Group from our 2006 School Talent Quest. There's a lot to like about it - length is about right, its not too long. As an adult I enjoyed the energy, the action and the joy of the video. I tied this in with Literacy by getting the students involved to write a recount of the event for the school newsletter, which we also posted on the blog. I have a short attention span so when I see this sort of work online I want to see something that makes it come to life, something that takes me to be there and something to make me get excited by the writing. The writing itself can do the job but it needs to be a very special piece of writing to do that.

(Update by 2016 when I went to review this post, five years later, I discovered that the original video, which had been uploaded to Teachertube had been deleted and that was the only copy of the video rather than a scratchy DVD/Moviemaker original)

A History of the World 1997-2002

Graduated from the University in 1996 with a Degree in Geography/Education. Attempted to gain a teaching job in the town where I went to University for 1997 (population at the time 100,000), applied for a single job, along with 35 other applicants. Didn't get that, and went to Auckland (population 1,000,000 or so) where I applied for a job and was the only applicant. Taught at a decile 2/3 school for five a quarter years.

To summarize my time there - my ICT input was virtually nil. Within a term of starting I was asked to take over the sports at the school. My principal was a supremely canny motivator who challenged me to lead the school/students to sports coaching success. The school was part of a School Sports Organisation (35 Schools all up, 10 Intermediate Schools with over 500 students - we had three classes never more than 75 Intermediate students in total). While I was there we won thirteen 'Zone' titles in seven different sports and two Auckland titles where we beat everyone. In one particular stretch we had three years when we qualified for every second tier tournament in every sport. Since my departure in 2002 the school (as of 2009) had not won a single Zone title and had two years when they did not qualify for a single second tier event in any sport.

I found myself in 2001 trying to create a video highlights package of the year, and eventually gave up (although I remember from plans etc I was attempting to create a very early version of what I was going to do later with Moviemaker online on my class blogs) despite playing around with filming and presenting, back then it wasn't really possible to take all that footage and put it together, and then show it in a coherent format. Somewhere there's a bunch of tapes that don't make sense to anybody, if they ever find them!

Come 2002 our school role was falling, and staff needed to be shed. To cut a long story short (libelous edit required here) I opted to make a shift to one of our sporting nemesis and did so for the final school term of 2002. I opted for the other school because I'd found the students to be friendly and out going, plus relatively speaking they hadn't been successful in the past sporting wise and I thought that I could rectify that.

Nunquam Narro Nunquam - Never Say Never

The idea behind this site is to catch everything that doesn't fall into any other category related to my online work as an educator. I'm very particular about my class sites not containing anything related to my classroom (that would be personal photographs, opinions etc) which I have seen elsewhere. I already have a collaborative site that I contribute to, At the Teachers Desk, with Jarrod Lamshed, Joe McClung, Will Chamberlain, and others. However sometimes material falls outside of these categories and I want a location for that. Also my online profile while its been in existence for two years, its only been as a consequence of Ulearn 2009 that I have been prepared/willing to have an online capacity. I'm in the process of doing work online that's becoming dated and I want an opportunity to record the rationale behind that, the results of it, and have some control of this. Finally from 2010 onwards I want to be innovative and creative with some of my online work (recording results/testing with groups etc) I want a space for that.