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.