Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Presentation 26/7/2013

First Impressions. 
The first success was a video entitled 'Learn to Speak Samoan' this was created by an ESOL student who did not speak English, and was attempting to fill space at the time with the student concerned as they could not take part in regular lessons. On reflection the video lacks a number of factors that would make it considered to be successful - however its impact was more on the class page - this then gave the page an original direction which then drove the page to a series of videos (learn to Speak Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Maori) which increased traffic. The 'original' post of the video is located here.

Cross Pollination:Youtube
The first youtube videos were posted with this site.  The 'best' video from this site was 'Best Rugby Tackles 2008' which received feedback, some of which was challenging, which caused the comments to be disabled.  As of July 2013 this video has been viewedover 30,000 times.  The original site based on Tamaki Intermediate, Auckland, was created for the 2008 School Year.  The school closed at the end of 2012 and was a decile 1a school located in Panmure, Auckland.

Using the Relevant Culture of the Students to Promote Collaborative Success
The youtube site associated with the online work of my students has two other flag ship videos - the most popular is Maori Haka Tutorial.  This was a contribution to a collaboration between ourselves and a class page from Hackem East School in Australia.  The video was intended as a contribution to their Kapa Haka performance.  As of July 2013 65,000 people have viewed this video on Youtube.
The best 'minutes viewed' youtube video is the third in numbers of viewers - 25,000 have viewed the How to Make Poi Video.   All these videos have come as the result of class work rather than specific videos targetting the Youtube audience.   The total views for the Youtube account, as of July 2013 has just gone over 200,000 views.

Cross Pollination: Twitter
Twitter has been used to 'tweet/ping/message' followers of my Twitter account to alert them to the postings on the class page.   The teachers Twitter account has 1,600 followers (nearly all of whom are educators).   They are automatically messaged when a post is made from the class page.

Cold Calling Collaboration:
At the current school the focus is on things that our school does well and intergating the class page with the class program.  The stand out colaboration that occurred in 2013 came as a result of 'cold calling' commenting on another class page.  The page, which belonged to Lochiel Primary School in Scotland had had over 20,000 visitors to their site however they had not had a single comment from overseas until one of our students did so as part of our 'relating to others'/interviews.  Having responded with comments we added a video to the corrrespondence and they responded back.  This was unusual as I had anticipated that the commented to establish new contacts was not likely to succeed.  From here we were looking at relating to them in a further situation which is how the sampling of Iron Bru came about, which then led to our class featuring on the Iru Bru Facebook fan page.

Commenting to get  a response and digital footprint 
This year I kept track of the number of comments that he was leaving during the cour se of the year.  The comments are left as feedback to other students, classrooms or work and also create a digital footprint that could be followed back to the page.  Something in the region of five hundred comments have been left to this point.  Having left comments for just over five years online I am finding that is proving successful

Quad Blogging Aotearoa.  Room Five signed up for this, with a little trepidation having previously been signed up for the 'regular' Quad Blogging.  Partially due to the fact that a match was made with other intermediate classrooms and partially due to the fact that working with other New Zealand classes was a better match.  We had success with a number of aspects of this, however probably the most successful was the collaboration with Tawa Intermediate where we used Quiz Revoultion to create a quiz about their own school.  This created an active teaching moment when one of the students from our class couldn't find the relevant information about their school and created the answer to suite his needs, in doing so he falsely assigned Tawa Intermediate a swimming pool but however this then led to another discussion about publishing information that was accurate and true which became a great teaching point.

School Events and Activities - promoting the school and putting things in context. Whats the opportunities that you have to be unique? Who owns the material, the blog - who should have publishing rights to the material that is created? What happens when your asked to take material down?What's the school policy on what you are creating? How can you interact with your audience? What resources do you need to have to be successful and what defines successs? What production translates well to video? Are students engaged by text? Can the speed with which you produce material be an advantage?  Should you be publishing material that is outside of the regular program or should you just continue with the regular program?

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Ibid

Last week there was quite a bit in the news about the visit of Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas to New Zealand. While he was officially appearing here as part of clothing company promotion, he also visited Point England School and the Manaiakalani cluster in Auckland and made a donation of $100,000 to the cluster!  The students from our class were wishing that they lived in Auckland for this experience.   This video is from Point England School of the event and was embedded from their site.




Firstly we heard about it originally through our friends from Room Thirteen at Point England School. They've been one of our longest buddy blog sites and the students have always got wonderful work that is posted. We have their page on our side bar, so when the visit happened at thier school we heard about it quickly. From there we were able to look at other reports and see this wonderful video. Over the following days some of the students from Point England School wrote about their expereinces. You can see Darius recount here. Josephine is another student from PES, she's been featured during the holidays on this blog because she was posting so regularly and also because she was out posting our entire class earlier this year you can read her thoughts on the event by clicking here.



The other great thing apart from hearing and seeing this event so quick is that the students present have blogged about it in detail, much more so than we were able to see on the news later that evening.  There would have been students from our school who would have known more about the event than before it aired on the news later that evening. 

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Farewell to At the Teachers Desk

Its been going for four years now, and last week a post went from Wm Chamberlain which has essentially meant the end of 'At the Teachers Desk'.  The idea was started by Jarrod Lamshed and was originally great.  The idea was a collaborative site that was contributed to by teachers from around the world.  I remember when the idea first came up and originally I though 'well I wish that I had though of that'... but over time as it developed the work on the site rested primarily on the shoulders of one person, and it certainly wasn't me.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

A 1% return on my investment... but its ok...

Its been over two months now since I made my Elearning Resoultions, looking at improving my online work and interactions with the wider community.  One of my goals was to leave a comment every day.  This has focussed on the #comments4kids.  I've currently left something in the region of 130 comments specifically with that tag.  I wouldn't know exactly how many general comments that I have left this year so far, however I would suspect its nearly a hundred.  One of the reasons that I have targeted #comments4kids is that I wanted to experiment and measure how successful my commenting with that has become.  I've created a google drive document that's keeping track of every comment so when I say that I've used the # that many times, I can back it up.  (As a disclaimer I didn't do this for the first forty or so comments and I kind of wish that I had done).

As of today I've had a 1.5% return on my commenting.  That is having left nearly a hundred and thirty comments, I've received two comments in reply.  One was a one off comment that hasn't led to further collaboration.  The other '1%' has led to a collaboration with possibly one of the best collaborators that I have met online.

I'm not put off by this in the slighest - I've had considerable return traffic from some of my posting, but what's not coming back is the commenting.  Its by the by, at the end of the day I am increasing the size of my digital footprint, the comments that I am leaving are going to be around indefintaly.  It means that when the key site closes (melvilleroom8.blogspot.com) or more precisely when the site goes dormant it will have some life in it.   I'm getting to the point where I am repeatedly gaining pageviews in the region of 300-500 per day.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

New Years E Resoultions

Generally speaking I don't 'do' New Years resoultions, however I have been intending to revitalise my online work this year, with that in mind I felt that it would be appropirate to publish what I was intending to do as motivation for myself.

#Comments4Kids.  This comes from Will Chamberlain who is the major contributor to this site, an amazing concept, a great idea and such a worthwhile concept.  I've decided that I need to promote the hash tag as much as posible within my PLN and at other opportunities.  I also want to pledge that I will comment at least once a day for a full calendar year, which of course will mean 365 comments minimum on students blogs.  That's quite a few, but well within the range of what I have been doing in a general sense.  I've never actually tracked how many comments that I would leave in a year but I suspect it would be near a thousand.

I also want to involve myself significantly when theres the #comment4kids week, again its a stellar idea from Will, something that's such a great networking and collaboration idea.  When I think back to my online work the 'push' that I needed came from one teacher who left a positive comment to the students that were working with in my classroom.

#Twitter.  My PLN on Twitter (NZWaikato) has reached a point that its generating new connections all the time, I've got just over 1,500 followers.  I've been managing it pretty closely, I've included in my bio 'If you're not an education please don't follow me' this tends to keep away most of the commerical followers that my account attracts, it isn't perfect, but I do recognise the need to be more pro-active with my account.

#2012/2013.  In New Zealand the school year runs from the start of February to mid December.  That means a year of students has just finished and in four weeks time another will start.  I'm very lucky that the incoming group of students (23 out of class of 30) are students who have already been in my classroom.  I need to continue to develop the work with these students and utilize what they've done online to raise their work.

#Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration. I've had some great positive online experiences in the past five years, the length of time that I've been active.   The highlights have always started and finished with great collaboration, what ever the platform, what ever the site collaboration I believe is the key, if you haven't tried it, that's one challenge that I would encourage you to work on.  Share.

#ContinuetobeInspired.   If you haven't visited some great sites to get inspired then you should.  These four pages always inspire me: Linda Yollis - best class page in the world, two years in a row.  Will Chamberlain, Mr C's Class page, my biggest online inspiration.  Mr Millers Class - a great inspiring site with wonderful ideas, content and digital intergartion of the site.  Check them out they are all maverlous.