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)