Summer highlights

This post is not going to be a recount of what I got up to in the Summer holidays! There has been enough of that going on in schools this week as it is. It has been great to see teachers around the Manaiakalani cluster taking a 21st century approach to the old faithful first week back at school topic and using Voice thread, blogs, animations, Flickr, podcasts and other Web 2 tools to recap the past 6 weeks with the students. Some of this has started coming online already and more will be uploaded in the next week.
I want to draw your attention to a great idea Sarah at St Pius X had with her class of Year 7-8 students before they left at the end of last year. They all made a short MTV clip out in the corridor using 2 chairs as their basic props and Sarah released them one at a time over the Summer holidays on their class blog so the kids (and us) could be entertained and have good memories revived. Each of the links in this paragraph takes you to a different one. They achieved some great literacy results during the year through their involvement with the Maniakalani project and if you are interested, take a moment to flick back through earlier posts.
We are all looking forward to the approach they take in 2009 now they are confident in the Web 2 environment.