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.