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.