It just failed.

It just didn't work and failed, and now I get to pull the pin. I thought the idea was fine, having all members of the staff (Y7 syndicate) contributing to a collective blog but after three terms nothing has come of it. There's been a variety of reasons, and after Ulearn10 I've had a better idea.

One of the problems with the posts that I have had with nearly three years of posting everyday is that I have over 1,000 pieces of work. Some of these have been successful, some of which have received significant publicity and some should have received more. It make sense to put the best ones together on one site (linked through cultural groupings) for exemplars that do anything else. I have tried to link exemplars through the pages on the Room Eight and while this works (its amongst our most viewed page) I still think something else could be done.

The Y7 idea was for everyone to have input, for my students to motivate the other classrooms but at the end of the day no one else was really prepared to buy into it. This isn't a knock on the teachers that I work with, their level of IT experience has improved greatly.

School Speech Finals/Posts Recipe

Recipe. Take One School speech finals. In this case it involved ten students competing for three places from five different classrooms.

Entrust a student who is reliable and trustworthy to film the event, the student has been trained in the past to record events sensibly and has a good 'sense' of what is going to work, which should leave you with minimum editing to do. (Switches off the camera during break in the speeches, switches on as the student walks up stairs therefore catching the introduction in full.)

Eva Room Two Speech at Y7 Finals from myles webb on Vimeo.

Edit using Movie Maker. If step two has been completed by student to the expected level the editing will be minimum, as the speeches should only need to be cut before and afterwards. All should be about two to three minutes in length which is ideal for publishing, although they will need to be resized to 30mg for posting online.

Classroom Speech Room 13 - Eric 2010 from myles webb on Vimeo.

Post online, not all a once to swamp the class page but gradually over a two week time frame, starting with the best one first, which logically should have the most interest, also allowing for the school holidays coming up which is a time that you will need to continue to keep posting during.

Upload to a third party source (vimeo preferably not youtube) to allow your videos to be posted to multiple class sites without the need to keep uploading the whole thing.

School Speech - Shaylee from myles webb on Vimeo.

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Wai Maths - Official Entry 2010 and Notes

A few weeks ago now one of our students from our classroom decided to enter the local Mathematical Competition (Wai Maths, an abbreviation for Waikato Maths, the region of New Zealand that our school is in). He was looking for a way to combine our global audience from our class page with problem solving so hit upon getting video responses from other classrooms for a problem that he would come up with. I discussed with him the Northern Hemisphere School break and the likely hood of getting responses and on that basis he made an estimation that the video would travel and gain responses back a distance of 500 kilometres.

Thanks to this site, the PLN of a number of you who re-tweeted the link the student was able to gain responses that had a total distance there and back of over 80,000 kilometres!

Thank you so much to regular contributors/visitors to this site like Will Chamberlain, Anthony Capps from Dr Strange University of Alabama Course, Mrs Yollis from California and all of the others who made this possible. We haven't had the official results yet but Bradley the student from my classroom has be thrilled by the response and is very proud of his video.

Here is our entry - it had to come in at under four and half minutes so we had to make some tough decisions about what to leave in or out, if you were interested in receiving the entire video including everyone's full problem solving leave me an email and well arrange to send you one.

Wai Maths Online Problem Solving from myles webb on Vimeo.

So thank you once again to : Otewa School, King Country (NZ), Broadlands School, Reporoa, Bairds Mainfreight Primary Auckland, Mr KT Class Bell Aire Primary School in Geelong (Australia), Mrs Yollis Califorina USA, Mr C Missouri, USA, and Anthony Capps from the University of Alabama in the USA.

Myles Webb/NZWaikato, Room 8, Melville Intermediate School, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand.

Wai Maths Online Problem Solving

8 men and 2 boys need to cross a river. They have a canoe which cannot carry more than 1 man or 2 boys at one time. How many river crossing does it take to get everyone across?

We decided to enter the Wai Math's Competition, the area that we decided to concentrate on was the video section. Coming up with an idea that was going to be 'Mathematically Themed' and interesting turned out to be challenging. I had to stress to the students the need to think about 'wow'. The concept changed during the course of the 'networking' process. The original idea was to see how students/people around the world would solve the problem so we could focus on identifying the strategy. Pretty much everyone that we saw right from the start did the same thing, they used resources to work through it. I don't think that the answer, once materials were used was particularly challenging. So at this point it was more or less foundering, as the original point was getting lost in the fact that a) everyone was getting the right answer b) the method that was used involved using materials to represent the Canoe and the students and the adults. Grasping for ideas I spoke to the main student and asked him to estimate how far that the problem would travel there and back, he said 500km, at that point I had no idea myself what so ever but I thought the estimate was on the 'low' side. As it turned out it was because later that day Mr Mac from Australia (Ulearn 2009) delivered a video which meant that the question had already travelled 2,500km one way. I'm still a little wary at this point if we've created truly a 'Maths' question, although I hope that the Judges will see it as that (its due next Wednesday) rather than an ICT question. The other issue that I have to resolve is the way to green screen it. I've got a limited ability myself and also restricted to Moviemaker for production purposes. At this point I've decided that the best solution is to show each of the videos from the other classroom/countries on the data projector with Bradley talking about each one and physically standing in-front of the screen and talking. We'd then edit down considerably and take the highlights, put it all together and have something in the three minute range (maximum of five minutes for the competition).

This is our 27th July Update with the links to the various class pages with links:
It started with an idea about a Mathematical Problem and solving it for the Wai Maths Video Competition, the idea being that we're looking at different ways to problem solve an answer. We're also keeping track of how far the question 'travels' and comes back in two weeks that we have to create our video, totalling the distance. Bradley's estimation for the distance that is travelled is 500 kilometres.

We've had our first answer from Otrohonga in the King Country from Otewa School, their answer is here - a distance of 60 kilometres (120 round trip), we also had it answered from Bairds Mainfrieght Primary School in Otara, Auckland (200 kilometre round trip) and we've just had another answer from New Zealand from the BestLittleClassinNZ! - Broadlands School in Reporoa.

Just today we have a video message from Mr Mac's Classroom in Australia, that meant the question had travelled another 5,000km there and back! We've still got until Sunday and have more answers and more videos on the way.

Thank you SO much to everyone that's taken Bradley's question and viewed it and especially those who have taken the time to prepare an answer for us, we're really excited at this end and the journey hasn't finished yet!

Thank you also to our global audience who have been passing this question on to have more people check it out and spread the word about it. We're very excited to be entering the competition next week and look forward to having some additional problem solving taking place from around the world!

At the end of the day, where's the seperation.

I've always been very careful to make sure that there's adequate separation between my online persona related to my school work and my own personal preferences. I think this is a hugely important area related to 'Digital Integrity'. I don't believe that its appropriate for teachers to allow their personal opinions and beliefs to go into their class pages, that's just my personal thought but I strongly believe it. I see all sorts of online work that I would cause me to question the 'digital integrity' of the teacher. This site as its not specific to my class site, I see the separation as being fine. Thus me putting this video on here which I'd never do as part of my classwork or official school work is perfectly reasonable.

However I don't really think its appropriate for a teacher to put their holidays photographs up. I've only been online for a relatively short time, three years or so. I haven't seen it all but I've seen some examples that I couldn't believe. Teachers filming themselves doing the 'catch/trust' exercise into students arms (tell me where the learning intention is with that!), teachers complaining about their own school through their own class page, in a cluster that I was once part of I saw a teacher post 50-60 photographs of herself on holiday on her class page. I am not criticising these examples, although I think they range from preposterous to silly in my opinion, but there's no guideline for how people should operate online other than individual sense of right.

Poi E - Boy Inspired Video

This was never suppossed to go online. The back story of it is pretty simple. Room 14 at Melville Intermediate School had a student teacher who wanted to do something special for her classroom. I got involved because there was a missed connection when the video was finished, they wanted to put the music to match the video. They were inspired by the movie "Boy" which finishes with a music video along similar lines. I wasn't there when they filmed it, prepared it, and it only really came together thanks to an associate "Rob" who had the original song on Nature's Best, Volume Two (I'd tried locating it as a download online and couldn't find the song) my contribution was simply to publish the song, I liked the input from the students (the adults of course are the teachers) but strictly speaking it wasn't produced by my classroom. I'm not about not promoting it, so hence the decision to publish it online. A good bit of fun, I can't comment on the teaching process involved in this video as I wasn't there for the planning, all I did in this instance was facilitated the publishing of it. It took something fun and turned it into something online. Does it need polishing? Absolutely. There's a significant part of the video where the idea was to use the stage curtains as a "black" area, the student filming didn't adhere to the boundaries of the curtains, so you can clearly see the edges. We've got some students dancing out of time. In my editing defence I received fifteen minutes of footage and what was included in the video (which is about four minutes) was absolutely the best fit, I considered doing a second one but couldn't really see the point.

Room 14 Matariki Video: Poi E from myles webb on Vimeo.

Collaborating using video across the world

Mrs Yollis Classroom from California, USA is one of the classroom that we've been learning from and interacting with. We received a comment today from Mrs Yollis talking about a video her students had created from learning how to use Maori Rakau sticks from a video that we made! You have to see this, its such a wonderful, wonderful video! Firstly, lets recap on the original tutorial video that was created by Anahere, Benita and Nathalie from Room Eight.

Raukau Stick Game Two from myles webb on Vimeo.

Well we've had lots of people view this video, its been downloaded a few times and we've also put it up in a few other places. This is the video from Mrs Yollis students in California that we've just seen today:

Connecting with Mrs Yollis in Califorina

Today in the classroom we spent a considerable amount of time viewing the following video form Mrs Yollis's wonderful classroom site in California, USA.  We are going to be looking at examples of online things that we can learn by looking at other classrooms, and Mrs Yollis has the sort of blog that you can learn so many things about.  The original video which Mrs Yollis' classroom produced and we used as a guide for the lesson was this:

Let's Learn Spanish! from mrsyollis on Vimeo.
We really enjoyed watching it (and I think that Mrs Yollis and her class showed so much expression, it helped us enjoy it!). So while we had PE last block we produced this video of some of our Room 8 students speaking Spanish...

Speaking Spanish from Mrs Yollis from myles webb on Vimeo.

There's no such thing as bad publicity...

I use Feedjit a lot as a way to monitor where traffic to my class page is coming from.  Its not perfect, although I have to say that overall I think it provides a good free service.   Its been a way of locating classroom blogs and I really believe the importance in paying dues and acknowledging sites that are promoting yours. 

Its also been the source of three sites that have 'riled' me over the past three years.

The first was in 2009 from a blog in the USA.  It was directly critical of the semantics emanating from my class page.  I know that my language can be a bit loose at times, it always has.   At first I was offended by the criticism that I read, and it was very negative.  However I effectively took the bait and commented back. That's what the sites author was after and they took it upon themselves to launch a series of posts criticising the work that my students were publishing online.  On behalf of the students I suppose that I took offence that someone should criticise them, and tried to stand up for them on their behalf.  The funny thing was having done that, to little effect (except as I said fuelling the 'fire' of the other blogger) we had a class discussing about it.  One of the students in my classroom during that discussion likened it to name calling in the classroom.  They said "Mr Webb why don't you just ignore them so they get bored and go away and bother someone else?"   I just sat there and had one of those moments of clarity thinking "uh-huh".

A few weeks ago I found another linking site to my class page taking the work, taking one piece of work from one of the students in my class and using that as the basis for the critique of teaching, students and the New Zealand education system.  I felt it prudent not to respond in a similar vein to the point the child had made about "ignoring" them.  So the other day I received this comment from the author of the same site, which was left in a form of a comment on my class page.   Again as I felt it wasn't in the correct context I chose not to publish it, but felt it was worth repeating here:

"Is it wise to get young children all worried about things like global warming? Especially when it isn't scientifically proven. I worry that such teaching is merely going to raise a generation of neurotic overly anxious young people who have little hope for the future.  It seems wrong to inflict such concerns on the young who lack the maturity to process it. Childhood should be a time of joy in learning not taking on the concerns of the adult world."

As I say I believe the person leaving the comment was looking for a reaction for their site.  Its taken a piece of work from an individual student, completely out of context I believe and made some assumptions, and judged a particular student for it.  I know on some class sites that comments are automatically published, and possibly I could have published this, but where do we as 'gate keepers' for our site draw the line?

Did I do the right thing in choosing not to publish this comment? Has anyone else had similar experiences?
Should I have discussed this with the student concerned or the classroom? In opening our students up for the greater community by publishing it online do we take the good with the bad?

Thinking about taking the next step

New Zealand Compared to Thailand

View more presentations from Myles Webb.

Its not going to be a surprise to anyone where I am going with this. I really can't explain to everyone how valuable I see the slideshare/powerpoint connection. I have always felt that blogging should be the publishing of the classroom work rather than separate stand only material just for the blog. By using third part uploading utility locations I think Slideshare meets that criteria. Slideshows are bog standard, I don't think you have to be particularly clever to produce them, however what I can never understand is again why students and educators seem shy about publishing them online. As a PC school they'd be one of the first and foremost things that students can produce work that's accessible on. I've seen so many "Digital Classrooms" not take the next logical step and publish online, the fact that some don't really surprises me. I have to be diplomatic about this, but anytime I don't see that I see it as a missed opportunity.

Planning Idea's Off the Cuff!

Learn to Count to 20 in Thai from myles webb on Vimeo.

Currently we have two students from Thailand in our classroom for two weeks, who are departing on Thursday.  They've been learning more English while at the same time teaching our own students some Thai.  This video is focussing on teaching our students to speak Thai and also there is some bonus footage of the students showing a skill that they learnt, using Rakau sticks!

This is a natural progression.   We had two students who were placed with us for two weeks.  Our students had to interact with them, which we did, and we also took the opportunity to produce some material that related to their stay.  It allowed our students to interact with them successfully, allowed our students to produce material that I believe had an interest to others, and allowed the students to have meaning through their work.    Was it the best produced video ever? No! Were the students the most confident, no not really, but did they achieve something with what occurred.   Yes.  I have always said that by FAR the most popular thing that students in my classrooms have authored has been the "Learn to Speak [Samoan]" series of lessons.  Its something that I am sure must exist somewhere else in some format produced by educators but I haven't seen it.   Perhaps I'm missing something but I would love to see 'Learn to Speak Spanish' or 'Learn to Speak French' (actually I have seen a rip off of my idea by someone who told me that yes that's exactly what they are doing I couldn't believe the awful quality of it to be honest).    I don't understand why educators don't take the plunge and do it.  It would a) be easy to produce and straightforward b) it would bring in an audience not only as part of school work but a wider educational audience [google searches] c) the kids would get a huge thrill out of it as it would empower them by involving their culture!

Melville Intermediate - Room 2 and Room 13 Slideshow

My PLN - They Can't Take that Away from Me!

One of the things that's become apparent over the past term has been the importance of my PLN. Primarily through twitter, although also as a result of my online presence over the past three years, I have established a network that continues to serve me in good steed. I have blown the numbers away from my previous blog. Its not in comparison, and should everything at my current location turn to custard I could re-establish myself quite quickly though my PLN.  One of the issues that occurred in the past was over the ownership of the online work that I was doing with students, whether it was owned by the students and myself or school.  I don't want to get into that particular discussion or thought, as I have very strong opinions on the matter and not all of the information relating to that issue has ever been made available.  However there are a great multitude of blogs and learning sites that are available now, I just despair as an educator how many of them are either rubbish or simply not being maintained.  

One school that I know quite well, has just branded itself as an 'E' learning school and subsequently the entire staff, every classroom and everyone employed by the school have started their own blog.   This was four weeks ago.   Three out of the 15 have any content at all, one's alright and the rest are just rubbish. 

Now I am all for getting staff motivated online, given the right circumstances and drive it can be a powerful, powerful tool, probably the single most important thing that you can do within your classroom.  If I look at the work that I have been involved in online over the last few years my pre-online work, as much as it pleased me at the time dosen't rank in terms of my professional development at all.   It's only since 2008 that I consider that I have been truly up and about to the level that should have.  But surely there is little or no value in every member of staff including all the administration staff running their own sites? Where is the audience going to come for that? I guess I have to reference my previous school in this.  Now that my old site is not being maintained its still the number one site associated with my old school.  I decided previously to maintain the site as an archive.  However there was a school of thought at the time that I should have surrendered the site, the passwords and the material to my old school upon my departure.  I didn't primarily as a result of the situation that developed as I was leaving. 

Term One 2010 is Over.

Term One has drawn to a close and overall its been much more positive than the corresponding time last year. The students in the class are different, I've certainly opted to aim for more collaboration this year, that's been important. The kids have been excited by that more than anything. That's fed excitement with the blog.

Resources have played a point too. When I started I was told that I would have a digital classroom, a data projector and 12 classroom computers. Due to the fact that I have only two power points in the classroom, we had six computers last year and two never worked and no data projector. Maybe I should have kicked up a fuss earlier but its made such a difference. We've had eight computers running consistently this year. Plus the kids overall are a lot better. My school has abandoned streaming for students, which means the best kids are split amongst the five core classrooms. In the past they were all in one (non digital classroom).

Google says we've had 3,200 classroom visitors, and while this is inflated (its not unique visitors) for a start its more than acceptable. Its onwards and upwards from here. We've just started looking at adding material through teachertube and youtube and that should start driving visitors through the site. We've got a lot of momentum, last year I was a bit shy with hyping the site through third parties, I guess deep down I knew it wasn't strong and I was repeating Tamaki Today in a diluted format. Interface Magazine had a feature about Blogs and I decided to nominate myself for it, not because I believe its particularly newsworthy but thought that it would add to the traffic that is going through the site. I guess I am playing the game. Next step I want to start looking at awards that I can nominate myself for with myself and the students online work.

Putting 2010 into Perspective - Russian Mihis

I haven't posted in a very long time, and its been all about perspective. For starters this site isn't even officially open. I still am a little unsure and I haven't really shared it yet with anyone. But I digress - I wasn't suppossed to be working on it now but have some down time. Like last year we've started off working on our Maori Mihi (Greeting/Introduction) with the students. Last year one of my goals was to take these and get them out there, cross promote them with Youtube, Teachertube and generally spread them around (with an embed from our site to get traffic back of course). I can't recall specifically why this fell by the wayside like so many of my ideas last year seemed to but they did. Anyway I have one student whose really strong in her Reo and things Maori this year, a real leader and after three attempts this is what we came up with.

Last year I don't know if I would have persisted with this video. I knew it was valuable but I would have probably settled for the original version that wasn't very good. Originally we were going to have the student teach another student who wasn't comfortable and show a lesson. It just didn't work because the Girl speaking who was really confident seemed unsure of herself as soon as someone else was introduced to the equation. We tried the original concept twice and both times I said no to the footage because it wasn't powerful enough. The final version that you just watched came about because I said to the student, go ahead and create a practise version for the other student to watch, when it came back I just thought, no that's good enough to stand by itself. The 'magic' that was part of this didn't come from our side of the world it came from these two students in Russia. Watch this.

To me its everything that you could want. I know its short that some of the translation is not completely perfect but what I love about it is the concept, that students in New Zealand can teach students around the world (or in Siberia anyway)

The fact that the teacher encouraged her students to create the videos - I didn't have any input into that it was completely on her own initiative. I was just thrilled another positive was that because of the nature of the collaboration I could take this to other teachers and show them and get a reaction out of them. I was on a site the other day, looking at a High School Cultural Video, it was some of my ex students, preparing for the Polyfest. Normally I would have been keen to see it, then I saw the video length which was thirteen minutes! What I like about the Russian Mihi's is that length wise theyre short and sharp. In out. Result.

How to Tread Water in 2009

In 2009 I significantly increased my PLN by taking Twitter seriously. I initially started with Twitter in October 2008. To start with I didn't embrace it completely and was a little shy in using it, I thought it was a bit gimmicky . I've found in useful in bringing traffic to my class site, but it was only after paying close attention to my Google Analytic information that I realized even with a limited PLN how valuable it was. 8% of the traffic from my 2009 site accessed it through Twitter, and that's without me being particular to advertise every post.

At that point I had about 200 educational followers. However the advent of the 'lists' for twitter has been something of a revelation for me. By selecting a dozen or so educational lists I have nearly tripled the number of followers. Potentially therefore I am looking for Twitter to have a serious impact the the audience that it could attract for my students class site in 2010. I know that there are educators who have a classroom Twitter account. I'd be a little reluctant myself to do that at this stage given the random tweets (Hello Britney et al)that you can receive. I defiantly think that twitter has its place as a useful tool for increasing your online audience.

My 2009 site Melvilleroom8.blogspot.com has 7,800 unique visitors in a 12 month period but on personal reflection there's not a particular strength to the site. It's the very essence of 'treading water', there's ideas on but too much starts and not enough endings. I was throwing a lot of material at the proverbial wall to see if it stuck, and a lot didn't. If anything its a repeat of what my class from 2008 did, but at that time it was fresh and I was incredibly motivated because as much as the students I was going through the process for the first time. This year at times I was a little jaded and also comparing the apples and oranges of 2008 to 2009, and I think that was passed on at times to the students in my room.

I was also trying to convince my staff to take blogging on board by covering as much of the school activities as I could. Having just changed schools after six years I was hoping that my new school would embrace some Web 2.0 technologies with open arms. I felt a new teaching environment would enable me to bring everyone on board with a real willingness to be involved.
However I was also moving to a location that other than a standard website had no previous history of being online. I think that professionally the steps that I had to take frustrated me somewhat. In addition to that despite my keenness, and my motivation a lot of the patterns from the staff that I had seen in the past repeated themselves in my new environment.

Refreshed from the end of year break that's currently in progress I am determined in 2010 to develop as an educator and continue personal online development. Upon reflection I didn't do enough to ensure that I was developing as an educator in 2009, that I was challenging myself and that I was evolving in an online sense.

Collaborations inspire me, people inspire me.

There have been times recently when I have reflected on the journey that I've gone through as an educator in the last two years. Joe McClung inspires me, and I hope he dosen't mind me saying this but I marvel that someone so relatively young in the teaching field can do so much. Having another 12 years of classroom experience on him I just wonder where he will be at in 2022! Just as much as Joe inspires me for what I've seen from him and I really hope he dosen't mind me saying this but Dr Strange and what's been ongoing with his work in Alabama is something that I am watching with interest from afar.

This year it will hopefully come to pass that Jarrod Lamsheds Class in Adelaide who we've shared some very special collaborations with this year, may even make it to New Zealand to meet our school, which would be a huge, huge moment. Last but not least Wm Chamberlain is someone that I aspire to be a shallow imitation of, his work online his effort and ethic are something that I consider to be outstanding.

Going Back to Square One - 2009

At the conclusion of 2008 I had decided to depart from Auckland after 12 years and move to another school. That meant starting again blogging wise with a new site. Tamakitoday was left 'dormant' while I started again with a class site, this time at Melville Intermediate School in Hamilton. As a slight homage to the old site I retained the same Photostory Intro/Outro sound effects, but replaced the 'Settlers' statue with a picture of the school sign from out front. It was in essence on reflection now a 'holding' year when online wise I was probably treading a bit of water. This was partly due to a focus on a new teaching environment and in some ways our school was taking its first online steps, so I always had that in the back of my mind. In two years of online work for instance I've had four or five comments that I have categorized as inappropriate but I'd never set blogger to automatically publish comments, just in case. Our online work was in many ways very similar to work that had been done in 2008. I had the benefit of having students who'd contributed to a very successful class site at a lower teaching level. We had a few 'wow' moments and probably the best example of that was our interaction with Jarrod Lamsheds class in Adelaide. You can follow the story of it here, but it culminated with our instructional video on how to do a Haka. Again if you look at the video its one take, there's a few moments that in hindsight you could say it could have been edited out and improved, but overall I think the rawness of the video the effort that went into it, everything in my opinion was as close to perfect as you could get and it very much blew me away.



One of the outstanding features of the School is the CPA (Cultural Performing Arts) Group. So much work has gone into this its unbelieveable. I have a habit of thinking in terms of school performances and school events when they occur - is this interesting? Would there be a wider audience for it? How could it be filmed? The CPA fitted catergory absolutely. It was a matter of getting a positive relationship established with those people in charge of the group, and upskilling the students so they could film it. Under the right circumstances the material was strong enough to be nearly all 'one take' material, that is filmed, ported across to Moviemaker and then split into three minute sections, then have a intro/outro put onto it, then uploaded. There's a typical example for you to see here.

What did my Class Blog Teach Me After a Year?

* You don't need a huge amount of resources either class wide, syndicate wide, or school wide to run a successful blog. We had two video cameras in the entire school. One broke at one point, and that left us with one, but will still kept going. One classroom computer was a stretch but you get around that by doing things like printing out comments, feedjit links and sharing that with the students "old school".
* Once you discover a 'niche' things will take off. Ours was using the culture of the students to share with the world. Once people starting locating our site due to the cultural work of the students (Learn to Speak Samoan et al) it became a successful cycle. I remain convinced there's a huge auidence out there for whatever your students can produce - that depends on the culture of students that you have in the classroom and your location, New Zealand is a place that some people have never, ever heard of. Its a wonderful buzz for students to get a comment from overseas for us and the reverse is true for us. We used clustermaps and feedjit to highlight everytime we got a hit from an interesting place, and even more so when we got a wonderful comment that we could share.
* Video is better [than written]. Writing plays a huge, huge part in your site but I think video is better for presenting the final produce. Point England School in Auckland have some wonderful examples of students reading their Literacy, obviously you can Podcast but nothing captures the sense of students than having them on screen. There are so many wonderful examples of this around the world. If you haven't already visited them, then have a look at Mrs Yollis Class in the USA or Mr Sloans Class in the UK. I'd argue that eventually when you get 'running' with your video work its easier than producing detailed written work, as an auidence I know what students want to see.
* They will come. My old site managed 4,000 visitors in 12 months. I was pleased with this, but in the year since its stopped posting (2009) we had 8,000 further visitors! Also the 2009 site managed to get 7,000 in its first year. I'd imagine that most people would have similar experiences. I know of four or five year old sites hitting 40,000 visits.

Tamaki Today - Girls Rugby Goes Global

As I mentioned the 'Learn to Speak Samoan' lessons was the second most popular thing that Tamaki Today produced. The first came as an idea from the students, were the best ideas have all probably come. We were doing a brainstorming session and one of the Girls said "Hey, what about putting together the best tackles from our Rugby Team's into one video". And that's precisely what we did. Nothing has had more views, comments or led to more traffic that this video. The students filmed it (I can be viewed refereeing about three of the games!) edited it and put together as something that they very much liked. Its strength came in the fact that it was child brainstormed, child created and featured the students themselves.

Again I know that its not the best recorded footage (Viliami 'shut up')should have of course gone out but with Moviemakers restrictions I could never really work out how, if you do know please enlighten me!) but the students loved it.



On a personal level probably the best series of videos that we produced that I felt had the most educational purpose were the Instructional Samoan Sasa videos. There were a number in ther series but again they all followed a similar format. Student brainstormed, student created, teacher editing, students filmed - in one take, published.

Tamaki Today - Learn to Speak Samoan

It was probably the thing that started off the most success with the blog, and to say that it would be a complete accident is an understatement. I had an ESOL (English as a second language) student who spoke no English only Samoan who was placed in my class for the year. It was a matter of having an idea to send the student with the Teacher Aide to the Staff Room (vacant as it was the middle of the day) and film something, bring it back and then have a look. The first one was okay, it was the second video (imaginatively entitled 'Learn to Speak Samoan 2) that really came back with a good 'vibe' about it. From there it was a simple matter of using MicroSoft MovieMaker to put the Credits onto the screen where the students were speaking. As I have mentioned previously this video in the series were nearly all one take videos. I had students who had a natural flair for speaking, pride in their culture and it all sort of came together. Following the initial success of this video and reflecting the diverse nature of the classroom that I was teaching we branched out into 'Learn to Speak Tongan, Learn to Speak Maori and Learn to Speak Fijian'.


This is the second most popular piece of work that's spawned from the site, however one of the reasons that its done well is the relative lack of other material of this nature out there. At one point in 2008 in our classroom in Auckland, New Zealand was hold three of the top ten Google Hits for Samoan Language worldwide. We got a huge thrill out of this at the time, and its something that I know the students are still very thrilled with. We also received feedback from all over the world that the students treasured. We had a series of instructional Sasa (Samoan Slap Dance Videos) that were called "Learn to Sasa". We had our instructional video used as part of a school display in Rome, Italy where a class of Italian students using our videos as a lesson performed a Samoan Sasa! (and receiving a copy of footage of that show was, and is absolutely mind blowing for all concerned).

Tamaki Today - 2008 the Technical.

Everything on Tamaki Today that was featured as a video was recorded the same way. We had a single Sony Camera that recorded everything onto tape. Using a standard Firewire Cable the material was then transferred onto Laptop and the footage was edited using Microsoft Movie Maker. Moviemaker was great - one we were a PC school and two the students pretty quickly were able to edit and put together the movies themselves!

From the outset an attempt to 'Brand' the material was created by using Photostory to create a five second introduction. This animation was of a still picture that I took in 2003 of the 'Settlers' statue in Victoria Street, Hamilton, with a Tamaki School Uniform draped over the dog. The music that went with it was a five second burst of the official 'Mooloo Song' introduction from the Waikato Rugby Union (its a Cowbell Ringing). The closing credit is just a repeat of the banner from the Blog, with a five second burst of the intro to "Can't stand me now" off The Libertines second album. This proved to be useful as once I began uploading the material it was taken down and then spread elsewhere. I've since seen it taken/re cut/passed on to three separate locations, with the credits intact which has been great for continual traffic for the site.

I know there's much better software out there for production, Moviemaker never being anyone's favorite really, but it suited me, and I also wanted to guarantee access to the software, with the students eventually taking ownership for the editing (which they were able to do). It was not my intention to start churning out so much material but once it caught on with the students I was really happy for them to run with it. We also gained a way in which we could share events with our school and students, such as having an event broadcast and saved online.


The video above gives you a pretty good idea of how the 'Learn to Speak Samoan' Series was developing. I'd need to brainstorm with the students a rough idea (or more often that not they'd come with the idea) we'd view the script and then make sure the translation was correct (it did concern me that we'd have a problem with a word and teach something incorrectly I had a teacher aide who was fluent in Samoan check all the spelling before we put the credits on and published any material) and then film it. Something like this video, and in fact nearly every video in the series (which ended up being over 25) was recorded in one take. Occasionally we'd have a retake shot, but then it would be of the whole video rather than one particular scene. The idea was to get the video out and produce it quickly. Not for me endless retakes and re shooting to make sure there was a high degree of professionalism (resulting in telephones ringing, people walking onto shot, people in the background, noise etc) I felt much better to get it out quickly and get it out in short. Three minutes was the absolute maximum for a video too. Never produced a video longer in the past two years I don't think (we'll maybe four tops!)

The rest of the material that was online was effectively slide shows and the like that were primarily through Bubbleshare (before it went offline, which was a shame) which the students seemed to enjoy. That and the small matter of some language videos, which the site is probably best remembered for.