Allanah's Appleby Showcase

The New Entrant class at Appleby School have prepared a co-operative digital story constructed with iPhoto describing the things they like best about being at school.

13 MB 2 minutes 42 seconds

Ko Waimea te awa. Waimea is our river.

We care about it and want to be healthy. This week we had the opprtunity to go to the river and test it for clarity, conductivity, acidity, flow, temperature and to see how many animals were present in the water. It was exciting because the water level kept on rising because of the extra big high tides that we have been having were pushing the fresh water back up the river! After all those tests we decided that our river was healthy and we pleased about that.

The sound volume is not great in places but it was recorded on the move.

This week Brittany, Amberley and Miriam prepared our podcast.

2.3MB 4 minutes and 21 seconds

Today before school I had the privelege of chatting with new on-line friends, Mrs Sullivan and her class of Year Five students from ,Horace Mann Elementary School Binghamton School District in New York, USA. We have been chatting through Skype for a week or two and a preparing a collaboration between out two classes that will foster links between our schools and help us to learn more about each other.

It was close to their school home time and things were totally unprepared but the young voices from America sounded full of excitement at the prospect of making a new link with us.

We look forward to further links in the future.

2.1 MB 3 minutes 31 seconds

We were lucky enough to be able to talk with Dr Barrie Frost from Ottawa, Canada, who is a very clever neuro-scientist. One of his research projects is to study the migratory paths of monarch butterflies. He showed us some incredible photographs that took our breath away. We learnt some really interesting facts about these incredible butterflies.

Here Dr Frost tells us some of the wonderful things that the monarch butterfly can do.

3.7MB 6 minutes 15 seconds

This is our first truly mobile podcast recorded on location at our Wakefield School Swimming Carnival with the iTalk attached to my iPod. It was lovely to be able to capture the candid reflections on the day's events as they happened. It was a great morning, very well supported by the parent community.

I was able to speak with children, parents, organisers and friends of Appleby School.

1.8 MB 2 mintutes 44 seconds

Jessica Ahlberg came to visit us in our classroom today. She is an excellent artist who has illustrated three children's books. We enjoyed asking her questions about what she does. She liked being with us as well and came to watch us swim.

Jessica is just visiting New Zealand and is going to fly out to Los Angeles on Wednesday. We wish her all the best with her work. We really enjoyed having her with us and we learnt a lot from her.

The skish, skish noise in the background is the sound of the cicadas in the trees calling for each other. A cicada is a flying insect thing that sheds its skin as it grows. Children like to collect the shells at playtime.

Elliott composed the theme music for this podcast.

5.2 MB 8 minutes and 43 seconds

Technorati Profile

We started our new school year this week in the sweltering New Zealand sunshine.

We used my new 80GB video iPod and iTalk attachment to record our holiday introductions. I was really pleased with the ease of use of the iTalk so you can look forward to further podcasts out in the field rather than being tied to the computer or traditional microphone. A very cool first attempt.

We got some encouraging feedback on our podcast from another school I taught at many summers ago, Coley Street, in Foxton which was nice. Welcome to the podcasting world, Coley Street. We look forward to hearing from you.

Children have been enjoying listening to last year's podcasts on my 'old' iPod Nano. Most had never used one before and quickly caught on to the click wheel controls.

3.4 MB 4 minutes 50 seconds

This is the last of our poems for the summer.

School starts again at Appleby on 7 February and we will start podcasting again as a fresh group of students learn the art of podcasting.

This poem is written by Dianna Noonan, a well known NZ poet. The poem mentions a pukeko feather. Pukeko are a beautiful native bird of New Zealand with feathers the colour of paua.

Pukeko Web Site

The poem was cleverly presented by Gloria, Emily, Georgia, Ruby.

500 KB 51 seconds

The school holidays are nearly over. Our northern hemisphere listeners may think it strange to have our long summer holidays over Christmas but we go back to school for the new school year on 7 February.

The photos were gathered from Flickr. I recently got into using Flickr because I have added an uploader from iPhoto directly. You may like to look at our Flickr photos of Tiny Ted, our geocache bear's, travels. I have added a link from our podcast's main page.

This poem was read by Jessica, Jordan I, Raven and Brittany.

1 minute 11 seconds 1.2MB

This poem is a poem dedicated to all the grandfathers in the world who love and care for their grandchildren.

It was ably read by Susa, Maddison and Jillian.

The photographs were gathered from the internet.

1.5MB 1 minute 30 seconds