Tamaki Int - Blog Year in Review

Now that we've just broken for the holiday we'd thought we'd take some time to review some of the highlights from tamakitoday and the 2008 Room Six class blog. This blog was started as part of our schools involvement in the EHSAS project (Extending High Standards Across Schools). Our school is part of the Tamaki Cluster of Schools in Auckland New Zealand. You can visit our offical cluster site by clicking here.

Our literacy cycle which is in the left hand side bar, is an example of some of the collaborative work that we've completed. Although the academic year in New Zealand starts in late Janurary we didn't post our first 2008 online work until mid March 2008 with our Virtual Tour of School Video... March saw the premier of our 'Learn to Speak Samoan' Series of Language lessons. These started as a vechile to get ESOL (English as a Second Language) students involved in our online work and have expanded into Learn to Speak Maori, Learn to Speak Tongan and Learn to Speak Fijian.

Our most popular video at this point was 'Learn to Speak Samoan Lesson Two'. This was featured on a Professional development site as an example of intergrating ICT in the Classroom, and this was our first recoginiton of our site. We were very excited by this first recoginition. We've also been featured on other sites such as this Massey Tech.

By May we were publishing 'full steam' as we were constantly brainstorming ideas relating our students culture and material that we could publish online. We were also very happy with the numbers of visitors that we were starting to have. By June we'd had 820 visitors to this site, which was just over three months into our existance. This is when we created our 'Best Rugby Girls Tackles' video which is now our number one viewed material... this has had our 3,000 views and continues to climb all the time...

By August the Rugby season may have finished but we were working hard at our Quest Production which we were able to post material of online. The Y8 students went to Camp on Camp Bentzon, Kawau Island. Although not everyone could attend the brilliant thing was by going with our cameras meant we could share the experience with those who couldnt make it.

September saw our Science Fair, the big AIMS Tournament Trip to Tauranga for our Girls Basketball team competing in the National Finals. Tamaktitoday saw our 2,000 visitor come through the door and our 8,000 view of our teachertube material (six months after our start!)
October saw our 2,500 visitor and Learn to Speak Samoan saw its 20th Episode...

October saw our Learn to Sasa/International Sasa work that involved Mister P Class in the UK, Grey Lynn Primary School and Mr C's Page in the USA. The final product was produced for the Cluster Film Festival which was an absolute highlight of the year.

We celebrated 4,000 visits as of December 1st - nine months after we have started. The massive cultural festival Haka Waiata took place, as we celebrated a major achievement with our 2008 Edublog nomination for best use of Video/Visual. We finished the year with our 2008 Tamaki Idol Talent Quest... as well as having our 4,800 visitor on December 20th. Its been an absolutely amazing 2008 and its not finished yet!