Keeping up with Student Voice

One of the key goals of Manaiakalani has always been to hook our students into learning through a few identified avenues.  One of these is to use the engagement of an authentic audience to encourage them to develop their 'voice', particularly in writing.  By the end of 2012 across our nine schools we have more than 1000 active student blogs. It is a real pleasure to monitor what our kids are saying, but it is a lot of writing to keep up with.

I have posted before about some of the ways I have explored to keep up with this rich flow of student expression. I am very pleased I began using twitterfeed several years ago to feed the posts through to the @clusternz Twitter account.  It is a bit unwieldy and is quite slow to input new accounts, but once done it provides lots of options for ongoing monitoring of the blog posts.

Teacher Dashboard is by far the easiest way for an individual teacher to access the blog posts (and comments) appearing on the class blogs, but I am also looking for public solutions.

My most enjoyable way of viewing the feed of student blog posts is through Flipboard on my iPad, but it is limited to the most recent posts.

I was happy to discover RebelMouse over the Christmas break and have set up an account here and embedded it on this blog here.  It gives a user experience a little similar to Flipboard on my laptop.

I will continue searching for ways to best access and display all the writing our Manaiakalani students are publishing.  There are lots of possibilities.

Not as easily solved is the important need for this writing to be taken seriously by those assessing and researching improvement in these kids' writing.

Pt England Year 6 Ambassadors 2012

In 2012 a wonderful group of 8 children in Year 6 (10 year olds) rose to the challenge of representing the school and the Manaiakalani cluster by hosting the many hundreds of adult visitors to Pt England school and the cluster. This link will give you an idea of who they were.

Wyatt, Calvin, Tyla, Isara, Kaycee, Jouan, Gloria and Rocky were selected from a group of about 30 who applied for the role of Pt England Ambassador.  Their written application focussed on things they would like to share from what they had been learning the previous term. They application had to include hyperlinks to the outcomes they had created and shared online - living examples of "Learn, Create and Share".

The movie below is about 20 minutes long and the script was co-constructed on a Google Doc with input from these children, several teachers and the principal.  Each term they updated the presentation so it was kept current with their latest learning.

2012 Ambassadors for Pt England School from KPE TV on Vimeo.

This is a video of the presentation the Pt England Year 6 Ambassadors gave to hundreds of adults who visited the school during 2012.
As they changed their presentation each term, this video version contains the content each child chose as their favourite speech during the year.

Open Source Award 2012

The 4th annual New Zealand Open Source Awards ceremony was held in Wellington on 7 November 2012. According to the New Zealand Open Source Awards website, the Open Source community nominates outstanding projects and people who make Open Source the vibrant and successful force it is in New Zealand businesses and communities.

So it was a great honour to hear that two nominations had been submitted for the Manaiakalani project. One was for the outstanding work done by Nevyn Hira since September 6th 2010 developing an Ubuntu image for the Manaiakalani children to use on their netbooks. The other was for the impact of the Open Source technology on teaching and learning. 

We were surprised and delighted to hear that the Manaiakalani programme was a finalist for the category Open Source Use in Education - For the outstanding use of free and open source in education in New Zealand.

It was a fitting acknowledgement that Nevyn was able to attend the ceremony and accept this award for his work. Followers of his blog will see that Nevyn is continually developing the image to make it more responsive to the needs of the teachers and children.

Video footage of the entire presentation for this category is available here.

Open Source Awards from KPE TV on Vimeo.

APPA Fellow 2012

On the 7th of December 2012 it was my pleasure to attend the Auckland Primary Principals' annual luncheon and to witness Russell Burt being presented with this award, "Fellow of the APPA". It came as a great surprise as his colleagues from the Manaiakalani Cluster of schools submitted a nomination on his behalf to acknowledge his contribution to Manaiakalani since its inception in 2006.

The submission began: 

"Russell has lead the Tamaki cluster of schools since 2004 from the ICTPD cluster contract – leading to an EHSAS cluster contract and which now takes the form of the Manaiakalani Cluster project – eLearning/Digital Media pedagogies being brought to a community which had minimal computer access.

Manaiakalani has developed into an initiative that is leading the country, bringing 1:1 computer devices and free wireless internet to the Decile 1 communities of Panmure and Glen Innes. The project has developed an exemplary set of pedagogies which has brought a consistency of teacher practice in eLearning/Digital Media to a whole community...."

The video attached includes a full reading of the submission statement by his peers...

APPA from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Manaiakalani Film Festival 2012

Thanks to Iisa for the graphic
standing on the podium in the spotlight.

The 5th annual Manaiakalani Film Festival was held at Hoyts, Sylvia Park in the Extreme Screen cinema on November 14th.  This has become the major celebration event for our cluster of nine schools and this year we were pleased to have even more movies and bigger audiences. There is a 'live' component to the festival as each movie is introduced by one or two children who have 30 seconds to engage the audience before their film plays. Check out these two cuties undaunted by the blinding lights and huge venue.


One highlight was the noticeable increase in the number of movies entirely produced by students.  A number of movies were introduced as 'the winning entry from our class movie competition", implying that groups of children had made movies in each class. Because we are a Year 1-13 cluster we had a huge range of themes and subjects with kids ranging from ages 5-18 involved in the making of.  All our movies can be accessed from this link. 

This year we were at capacity for our daytime screenings and our evening showcase sold out with many disappointed parents.  We are looking at hiring more than one theatre next year and running the daytime screenings of the movies simultaneously.

An important aspect of this celebration is bringing our schools together to create the sense of community between our schools which inspires us to share our goals and dreams and learn from each other. It is lovely to see students crossing school boundaries to leave supportive feedback on each others' movies.  This year a number of students have dedicated posts on their blogs to movies from other schools.  This slideshow embedded below links to a sample of the many student blog posts reporting on the movies they saw.



  Other links: 
Film Festival planning website 
View all the movies
Post by Karen Ferguson (Tamaki College Facilitator/ lead teacher)