C4 students gave feedback on their class through www.surveymonkey.com. A little over a 3rd of the class completed the survey (7 students)

Here are the results of their survey:

What does C4 stand for? Do you think the activities were relevant to C4?

• co-operation: we all had to be cooperative when other peoples vc cameras were not working and we all work together!!!
• communication,computers etc
• alot of things: communication, creativity, conferencing etc.
• C4 is a place to just hang out and learn with other schools
• C4 has been awesome for learning how to interact over the video conferencing equiptment. the chat rooms on nthe computer was good for interecting with others as well.
• Yes
• Connect, Communicate, Collaborate & Create

What Activities did you enjoy the most?

• Stu’s Double Jeopardy!!!; Riddles and that stuff
• te papa squid disection, duble jeopardy
• talking to the visitors
• JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!
• Doing the video conferencing with the other people like the minister and the other people was enjoyable and also playing Double Jeopardy was fun as well!
• Just the chatting and debating of the video conferences we have done. Talking about problems that are out there and giving everyone our own opinions. And the Jeoprady things.
• I enjoy the quiz games

What activities did you enjoy the least?

• NOTHING!!! it was all really fun!!
• none
• none
• I liked them all
• I like doing everything so there nothing i don’t like!
• The VC about the fish

What suggestions do you have for improving this class?

• Nothing it was great
• to invite us back next year
• none
• I think that we should have more people so other people can enjoy this wonderful experience
• Nothing its really good. I hope we might be able to carry on with it next year!
• none
• No i dont have any suggestions

Holly’s movie of the Big Day Out!

After two terms of learning online we get to meet f2f for a day out in New Plymouth. A visit to Taranaki Fortunes exhibition at Puke Ariki, lunch at Centre City & the afternoon 10 Pin Bowling.

C4 has been a great opportunity for this group of students to be engaged  in a variety of learning opportunities and to experience the unique nature of learning online. I hope that the skills they have learnt will stand them in good stead for when they may enrol in online classes in the future.

I would love to be able to offer this class again but with funding cuts to my TaraNet position it is not looking likely in the forseeable future anyway. Still I have learnt lots from this experience that i would be happy to share with other teachers

Today was our last C4 VC this year. Stratford shared their ‘Postcard from Stratford’ video. Everytime students share on C4 it motivates the others so when i left St Mary’s the girls were out with the cameras planning to finish their Postcards project I am not sure if we can continue to run this programme next year as it needs schools to contribute staffing. Student feedback on their surveymonkey should be helpful in advocating for this.

Students chose on their last VC together to have a game of Jeopardy, luckily i anticipated this as i know it is their favourite & had a quiz ready to go. Well done Jarad you are C4 Jeopardy Master!

All are looking forward to their Big Day Out in New Plymouth next week.

Today was one of the highlights of our C4 class when we had Diana-Grace Morris & Melanie from Te Papa join our class to talk about and show us the Colossal Squid. Diana told us the story of how the Colossal Squid was caught and came to be on display at Te Papa. We learnt about the anatomy of a squid as Melanie dissected a smaller version. This would be a great VC to do with our own squids & scapels in front of us.

Students can follow-up (or prepare for) this VC with hooking into the Colossal Squid Website and ask anymore questions on their blog there. Good question Lewis about what they are going to do with the Squid when it comes off exhibition. Given that the little squid in the dissection above was pretty stinky (thank goodness you don’t get the smells over VC imagine how stinky the colossal one will be!

This is a great website, you can engage in questions and discussions through the blogs linked from there and ‘play’ with the interactives. I really liked the build a squid interactive, not only do you learn about the body parts of a squid but when you have finished it you set it free and can check in later to see how big it has grown and what it’s been doing.

Do you know that as of today there are 1071 Squids named Squidward swimming around in the Te Papa interactive!! Here is my Squidward above.

One of the things we do a quite a bit of in this group is discuss issues that are topical & relevant to young people. This topic hit a chord & everybody had an opinion to offer and were prepared to debate the issue with others in the group I think technology is extremely important to  many of them especially the personal variety.

I chose to use Create a Debate as an area for them to take this debate into with the purpose of teasing out the issues they raised in their VC discussion further, and to widen the conversation & viewpoints potentially with a wider more diverse group. So that’s C4 homework this week

Today was also a bit of a catch up day with a roundup of our conversation with Steven Joyce from last week, for the benefit of the couple of schools who couldn’t make it and also to prepare a letter of thanks to go to the Minister. Next week we are really looking forward to Te Papa joining our class to show us the Colossal Squid

Today C4 students met with Steven Joyce to find out more about political life and discuss the Road Safety Review. This follows on from C4 discussions back in August.

Our kids soon felt at ease with Steven when they identified with his local connections. Steven was born in Kaponga, lived in Eltham, went to school at Francis Douglas. His mum went to St Mary’s & his dad went to Stratford High. Steven founded Energy FM, Radio Works including stations the Rock & the Edge. This provoked some discussion amongst the students about which was THE station to listen to… Steven is Minister of Road Transport, Minister of ICT & Associate Minister of Finance. Here are some of the questions that were discussed:

What qualifications do you need?

There aren’t qualifications to be a politician. Steven has a background in communications (media industry); a zoology degree though not directly relevant having studied at university teaches you how to learn; life experience is also really important as you are in government to represent people.

A Day in the Life?

Lots of reading, lots of meetings, the diary is full 6 months in advance with two people working on it, time in cabinet & time for communications.

Everyday is different for example today have been up since 3 am & just flown in from Raratonga. But usually the day starts at 6.30 going over paperwork at his office, 8.00 Management meeting, mornings taken up in meetings, afternoons and into the evening are questions from parliament, sitting in the house & more paperwork. A long day!

How do you get to be a Cabinet Minister?

To get into parliament you firstly have to belong to a political party that you agree with, get to know the people in the party, work for the party such as campaigning.  Steven has been an MP for 12 months. To get into cabinet the Prime Minister invites you to be a Minister. In the Labour party they vote their cabinet ministers in.

Road Safety Review

Why did we have this review? The previous strategy was running out and needed review anyway though as a new government wanted to improve the road toll statistics so brought everything out on the table to be discussed. Nothing has  been decided yet, submissions are still coming in and still discussing them.

Young people were targeted as these are the main group having accidents. Steven raised some different ideas with the students to get some of their feedback. Students thought that the age of getting a learners licence shouldn’t be raised but the period of holding a restricted licence could be extended with compulsory defensive driving courses. Most of them also thought it was a good idea to restrict the engine size of learner drivers (similar to bike licence) so that young people were not at risk in fast, powerful cars. Some thought though this would  be an inconvenience for parents to  have to buy a different car for their children to drive. Zero alcohol in cars, meaning nobody can be drinking in a car, young people even though sober can make unwise decisions if they have a party-car full of their mates egging them on.

This was another great opportunity for our students to connect with the wider world, we should be doing more of this in our schools – keeping it real & relevant!

What a hassle we had with the VC today! It turns out that Coastal was set to 128 speed when everyone is supposed to be set to 256. If sites run at different speeds then you can get problems logging on.

We watched an awesome Patea movie from Sean, Milly & Kris today! And looking forward to seeing some more from our other schools





The soundtrack on this movie is a well known NZ hit song – so we will need to gain copyright clearance on it… but the this movie is just too good not to share… will pull it if it is an issue.
We also prepared for next week when our guest Minister Steven Joyce hopefully will be joining us. We are unsure on how to address him (Honorable, Minister, Mr?) so  Jared is going to find this out before then. Our discussion about questions today seemed to focus on three main themes: the Road Safety Review, Politics in general & Political Life.
Road Safety Review
What was the reason for the review?
What has been decided from the review?
What was the reasoning in the decisions made?
Politics
How do you get into cabinet?
What qualifies you for it?
How do you get chosen?
How long do you spend in parliament before you can become a Minister?
Political Life
What do you do during an average day as a politician?
How did you get to be a politician?

Today our students began to discuss & plan a C4 Day out for the end of the year. We first met on VC then went over to a chat room.

Well CHAT wins hands down as the medium to get students interacting. We ran into audio problems from Patea’s VC unit today which was a bit of a hassle as i was leading the class from there. So the back up plan was to meet in our Moodle Chat room. Well our kids had more to say (even though it takes longer to type than to speak) than they have in a whole term of VC. As a technology, VC doesn’t support interactive participation from students but drives more a ‘talking head’ style of delivery as it is so structured, one at a time to speak, and almost always controlled by the teacher.  Research findings from VLN schools supports that when students say they have less opportunity to interact during their VC classes. It is really important that all our elearning students have access to connected computers. A computer in the VC room would be better as VC is handy for immediate communication & ‘broadcasting’ delivery of information.

We also used EtherPad as i thought we needed to keep notes of what the students were discussing.

This was great at the time, with the students adding their ideas & chatting about it in the sidebar of EtherPad. Since that time though, it hasn’t been the most productive place to work as kids have been too busy chatting & not actually contructively planning. So a change in tack & technology – a Moodle Wiki will do the job a lot more constructively – Phew!

St Mary’s students led today’s C4 VC. They were running a Jeopardy Quiz game they had created for the other students using Adobe Connect to host the Quiz & provide the communication medium for other students to respond with their answers to the Quiz.

Challenges were the ability to see the chat box (with incoming answers) while we were sharing our desktop. We overcame this by using two computers to manage the game. One which the QuizMaster controlled the game with and the other to manage the communications (our team of ‘adjudicators’).
Bandwidth was also a huge problem and reduced the fairness for all because of the varied response time. Coastal was the worst affected so we tried to balance this by allowing Coastal to contribute their answers through VC & making the Quiz available on VC as well as Adobe Connect.
It was lots of fun & a great example of student driven learning – once i had help them set up on the technical side of things it was a ‘teacher free zone’ and they were away laughing (literally).