The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Barri Dullabh – Year 1 and 2 Teacher, Discovery School

“We use the Internet in all sorts of different ways – from the simplest things of the amount of interactive online games that there are to reinforce what we’re doing in class whether it’s numeracy or literacy or that kind of thing. We also use it for our class blog where we post up our learning, things that have been happening in the class and the school and it’s a really good opportunity for them to get a share there – what they’ve been doing with their parents, their families, with the wider school community, with the whole world. They just love being able to look at where people are hitting our blog from – they just get so excited seeing that there’s someone from South Africa, someone from Chile, the UK, France and they get a real buzz out of that. It’s been really helping them to understand that there’s more to this world than just New Zealand and that they can actually see that there are people who live in other countries who are doing similar stuff to them... and that’s really exciting for them too. There are a lot of really cool Web 2.0 tools out there and I think that’s really changed the way that things happen in classrooms, the fact that people can now collaborate. They post something up onto their blog and someone can comment on it so they’re getting instant feedback on what they’re doing and I think that’s really exciting for them: “Oh someone’s actually looked at it and actually values what we’re doing”. They just get a real kick out of that. There are all sorts of tools out there, there are websites like XtraNormal where you can actually make your own little videos. In my class, we have class robots Robert and Eddie and they tell the kids what’s going to be happening every day. They think Robert and Eddie are real and they love the fact that they’ve got these entities that interact with them to a point. The fact that videos and things that they’ve done in class, that they’ve made, photos that they’ve taken, stories that they’ve written – we can podcast them, post up the words... All that kind of thing makes it really interesting for the kids.”