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?
