Allanah's Appleby Showcase

At the end of last term Discover IT Tasman teachers and principals went on tour of a few Nelson Schools. Brightwater School was the first on our list and we learnt much about the the journey taken by Brightwater School to cater for their 21st century learners from Janice Gulbranson.

Well worth sharing.

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8 minutes 55 seconds

After spending time learning about pre-European settlement in the Appleby are Moutere classroom have built their own Maori legend by combining their knowledge of legends and creating one that fits well with the local area which was well known for kumara growing. Kumara are like a sweet potato. Very yummy.

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Miriam has gained the confidence now to sing for the whole school. It is great to see how Miriam's voice is developing.

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As part of Spanish Language Learning at Upper Moutere we called Chrissy H who is in Argentina with a Language Immersion Award.
We used Skype and Apple’s Call Recorder to record our conversation and edited it in iMovie...

It is a great part of my new job to facilitate engaging learning experiences like these.

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Today I got a quick Skype call from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach who was talking to teachers in Buffalo about the sorts of things you can do with Web 2.0 technologies and I thought I would share the call with you as I haven't made a podcast in a while.

Here is a link to the wiki we were talking about.

Comparing Hemispheres Wiki

We are at the end of the 2007 school year at Appleby School and what better place to review some of the projects we have undertaken over the year.

This movie was compiled by Raewyn, Moutere's classroom teacher.

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This week Moturoa class went on camp to the Abel Tasman National Park staying in tents at Bethany Park camping ground and exploring Kaiteriteri Beach.

We also got to take the launch out into the Abel Tasman National Park and walk back to Marahau.

It was a fabulous experience enjoyed by all and well supported by parent helpers.

These excursions help broaden the children’s experiences and hopefully help them treasure New Zealand’s beautiful national treasures.

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Kieran, Zach and Josh got together to create this podcast about Shaun Tan's book, The Lost Thing.

You can hear how much they enjoyed the graphics and storyline.

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Today while the Year Five children were at Inter-school Athletic Sports the Year Fours made a few podcasts.

In this one Georgina, Miriam and Amberley chose to share Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes with you.

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We are learning about people's occupations and we thought we would interview Grant, our school bus driver.

Grant is a great bus driver who helps us get to and from school safely.

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This week Waimea, the New Entrant class, shares their animation based on the Maori legend 'How Maui Found His Mother'.

Maui's mother wrapped him in her topknot because she thought he was dead. He was taken to the beach but his uncle found him and taught him many tricks. When he was older he went back to the beach and met with his mother and brothers.

Maui and his brothers went on to do many wonderful things like fish up the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand and slow down the sun because it was travelling across the sky too fast.

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This week's homework focus was music- making it, listening to it or performing it. Lots of children had great things to contribute.

I was amazed particularly by Miriam- who sings 'Johnny One Note'. We knew she went to singing lessons but we didn't realise that she has such a great singing talent until she brought along the CD she had recorded with her singing teacher. She is only nine years old and has such a strong voice. Thank you for sharing with us, Miriam.

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After reading the School Journal story, 'Who Gets Tiger?" we decided to record the story and take photos of our classroom fish to illustrate it. We found out that taking photos of fish is really hard. That's why lots of the photos are a bit blurry!

Our classroom fish are pretty special- one was named by us, one was named by children at Cefn Fforest School in Wales and one was named by children at Binghamton Elementary School in New York.

Here is our post about it.

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Stickers are the latest fashion at Appleby School. All the girls are spending their playtimes and lunchtimes swapping and trading stickers. Everyone has their favourites.

Which are yours?

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This Friday Appleby School showed all of Nelson their wonderful masks as part of the Nelson Arts Festival. Families, groups and schools all worked to create masks and join in the fun of the parade through the streets of Nelson. The theme this year was 'Sparkling, Sustainable Future'.

Our theme was 'When the wind changed'- you can see the wind coming through our ranks. Children really enjoyed themselves and worked together to create a masterpiece of music, art and creativity.

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Georgina composed this music by herself using the Apple application Garageband. I never taught her how to do this- she taught herself.

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I made this podcast to accompany my Bling4yrblog blog post trying to explain how to embed your Podomatic podcasts into your Blogger blog directly rather than using a link to it.

People at my workshop on podcasting were finding it difficult to understand so I thought a podcast that you can watch a couple of times after you have subscribed in iTunes would be useful as a reference if they get stuck again.

To subscribe to this podcast in iTunes just click on the iTunes logo on the right hand side of this podcast page.

To get the code I am talking about go to the blog post I have linked above and download the pdf so you can just copy it!

Acknowledgment must go to Jing for the free Mac and PC download that allows video screen captures and to Audio Hijack that allows some tricky audio capture but mostly to Chris Betcher in Sydney that tried to help me with some even trickier swf file conversion.

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Each year we bring together a group of keen, talented students to be in our school band. They practice one afternoon a week at school and go on tour around some local schools to show what they have been learning.

This year's group is called Blue Moon and we filmed this at Moturoa (Rabbit Island) which is about a five minute drive from our school.

Aren't they very cool!

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It has been two years to the day that we made this video- I publish it for the first time in memorium to those lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina.

We spent one school day preparing and filming the video. We based the day around Bloom's Taxonomy with the class gathering content through the discussion of photographs I had found on the internet the night before.

We then divided into teams and each prepared a section, tying it all together by making a news report. We started to run out of time as the three o'clock bell came so we had to film some of the rain sequence inside as we didn't have time to go outside to film!

Because of the tight time frame we had little time for rehearsal and the children had total control over what they wanted to say. I edited that night in iMovie and was pretty pleased with the result- both with the children's learning & engagement and technically with the production.

It is good that we can publish our work to a wider audience for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit.

I do apologise to those for whom the video took a longer time to download but did not want to miss anything from what the children had done.

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Every second year the whole school learns more about Keeping Ourselves Safe. The programme is supported by parents, police and a variety of videos as children are helped to understand more about being safe and getting help.

The Year Five and Six class prepared this animation using the Apple application I Can Animate. The animation script follows closely one of the support videos 'Home Alone'- what to do if you find yourself arriving home and your parents aren't home yet.

Everyone in class had some role in the production- script, set,animation, filming or production.

It was a great effort- deserving of a wider audience.

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New Zealand is heading for a win at the Rugby World Cup. To celebrate that fact I thought I would publish this video that we made a few years back. The Daniel that we refer to is of course our hero, Daniel Carter. The video was played on nationwide TV in the afternoon kids' programmes. It was the first time we had been published.

I had written the movie to DVD and long ago deleted the source files. Thanks to our podcasting buddies at Cefn Fforest School, Wales we were able to use the cross platform download Handbrake to turn that DVD into a file ready for podcasting. It was all so easy.

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Towards the end of last term I gave children free reign to create podcasts of their choice and create music with Garageband. Jordan chose to make this podcast using the memorised template that we often use to scaffold our podcasts.

She had previously taken home my camera to take photos of her family's newest arrival, baby Luke. Luke is really a child of the 21st century- his first podcast!

The photo was composed using Scrapblog and captured using the wonderful new tool, Skitch

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In New Zealand if you need to call the police, ambulance or fire-brigade you call 111 on the phone.

Zach made this animation to help people know what to do in an emergency- he made it using Quicktime Pro. To make it you take all your photos and then go FILE- Open Image Sequence- find the first photo of your animation, choose how many frames per second you want and Quicktime will do the rest. How cool is that!

We used Audacity to record Zach’s narration. Then I put them both together in iMovie.

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Last year I posted a video podcast of our school band and thought I should do so again with this year's band as last year's bad got really good reviews.

From Moturoa classroom you will see Tegen singing, Tyler on drums, Elliott on keyboard and Kieran on guitar.

Our band is very good and we like to listen to them play at assembly.

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In the last week of our school holidays Jason Hando from Macarthur Anglican School in north Sydney put out a call for educators from around the globe to discuss their experiences with Web2.0 tools.

The call was taken up by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Jen Wagner and my good self. I was aware I was boxing above my weight but am always up for new learning with others around the globe. These opportunities always present opportunities for me to learn as well as share.

Jason made a wiki to co-ordinate the venture. The concept was a fun one- that of speed dating!!! The idea was that participants would have 15 minutes to speak with each of the experts via Skype and then move on. Sheryl, Jen and Jen's cat, Mac were on one computer and I had to hold the fort on the other.Scary stuff. I can really recommend you listen to Sheryl and Jen's podcast which is much more eloquent that mine!

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I am starting to feel a bit better after the dreadful cold I had the other week and we are keen to share a couple of new podcasts with you. Thank you to those kind people who emailed, blogged or left me comments about my attempt at podcasting from home last week.

Today was a first for us, Elliott, Nicole and Zach were chosen to go to a Lead Children's Day with our ICT cluster at which they were able to use Quicktime Pro to make short animations on our safety theme.

They will be able to show us how it was done.

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I have been at home this week with a nasty cough and cold and tomorrow I need to set a new homework task so to help get my message across I thought I would send my class a podcast explaining what I want.

Each week we have a homework Bubble Map that we have brainstormed of activities we can do to support that week's target. Over the year the grid has built up over time so much of the grid just ticks along and children record what they have done in each of the grid boxes as they complete it.

This week I want the children to think about something they can teach the rest of the class. This task needs to be ready for us to hear about next Thursday!

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Rob Waddell won an Olympic Gold Medal for rowing the single scull at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Now he is grinder for the Team Emirates New Zealand yacht to help us to win back the America's Cup in Valencia, Spain.

Following from our contact with Zoe's parents in Valencia we were able to talk to Rob and ask him questions about his work.

This was our most ambitious podcasting project yet as TVNZ, our national television network, got wind of the story and sent one camera crew around to film us at Appleby and another to Zoe's parent's flat to film Rob. We are going to be on TV!!!!!!

Rob Waddell was a fabulous person to talk with, his sense of humour and warmth came across so well to all of us assembled at 7pm back at school on a cold winter's night. Thanks for your time, Rob- it was great to be able to talk with you.

I am sorry that I had to edit out some of the interview as it was just too big a file but we will enjoy watching the full movie played back at school.

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Today we had a sharing day showing other classes at Appleby School some of our learning about our 'Destination' studies. You may have seen our sharing video about our Destination- New York, in last week's podcast.

The New Entrant classroom, Waimea, learnt about life in Tonga. We had a shared umu lunch for the whole school. Waimea also made this video about how to get coconut cream from a coconut.

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We are coming to a close with our learning topic, Destination-New York and one of our homework tasks was to present a talk about something we had found out. We made a short movie but when it was finished it came to 21MB which was probably a bit much so I uploaded it to Teacher Tube so it could stream and be less of a problem to those on slower connections.

If you would like a look please click on this link to our class blog so you can see the movie.

Our Class Blog

What an awesome week we had with linking across the globe!

On Wednesday Lauren spoke to some students in Outram School, Dunedin who have been learning Spanish. Lauren spent last year in Chile so is a fluent Spanish speaker.

On Thursday Moutere classroom spoke to Zoe, whose family is in Valencia, Spain, as part of the New Zealand contingent to help us win back the America's Cup. Watch this space for a further podcast with crew from Team Emirates New Zealand. Listen to our first podcast in this series

On Friday my class came back to school on Friday night to catch up with Dino who is spending the morning with Cefn Fforest School who we link with in Wales. He was able to meet in person his on-line buddy, Harry.

It was awesome also that, because it was night-time many mums and dads, grandmas and grandads, were able to come down to school and see how the children were linking with each other and better understand what we are doing.

These opportunities for learning and communicating are so rich, real and relevant. An awesome and exciting time for us all. Thanks for the team from Skype who offer us these Web2.0 tools for free!

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Ryan impressed us with his go-karting trophies that he brought to school to how us for news time. Appleby School is lucky to have a go-kart track really close to it. Dino and Ryan travel all over New Zealand to go to go-kart meetings.

Ryan, Elliott and Kieran recorded this podcast.

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We are learning about living in America and our friends in Binghamton, New York, are helping us answer some of our questions. They sung us some songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance for us. We tried to say it with an American accent but are not too sure how it will sound to American ears. We also learnt God Bless America which we sing with much enthusiasm.

Then we thought we would sing New Zealand's National Anthem in Maori and English.

Lastly it was my birthday last weekend and our friends in Wales sung Happy Birthday to me in Welsh and English which was lovely and well worth sharing.

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This week Nicole, Tegen and Shania chose, prepared, photographed, recorded and edited this podcast all on their own. Other children helped them with the bee drawings.

It is great how children are getting more and more confident at using the technology and speaking clearly for an audience. A few children are even making podcasts just for fun before school!

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ANZAC Poem

They shall not grow old
As we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning,
WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

Shania, Tyler and Elliott put together this podcast about their attendance at New Zealand's ANZAC day dawn parade. ANZAC stands for Australia & New Zealand Army Corps- a grouping of our soldiers who fought and died on the battlifields of Gallipoli in the Great War. It was on 25 April 1915 that some say New Zealand was born as a nation, through the sacrifice of our soldiers on foreign soils.

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One of the families from Appleby School has recently left to go to Valencia, Spain for a few months to be involved in the America's Cup. Zoe's Dad, Rod, is helping install animation software designed by New Zealanders that will help people all over the world get more enjoyment of the America's Cup because they will be able to see in 3D where the yachts are up to.

Rod came to school and spoke to our senior classes about what he is going to do and then we each took a photo and spoke about it so you would know more too. The beginning sound bite is of when the New Zealand yacht 'Black Magic' won the America's Cup in 1995.

We hope to hear more from Rod while he is in Valencia.

Wouldn't it be great if we brought the America's Cup back to New Zeland.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Here is another poem written by Philippa Werry.

The photos were taken on one of our school camps. Every year I take the class somewhere. This time it was to the Abel Tasman National Park, We stay in tents at a camping ground and go out on the launch along the coastline and walk back through native bush.

Class Blog about our camp

Abel Tasman National Park

The poem was read by Sam P and Tyler

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'Write a Poem' was written by Desna Wallace in the Part 2 Number 2 2001 NZ School Journal. Multiple copies of school journals are a wonderful free resource given to all NZ primary schools to support the teaching of literacy. There are four general levels of journal published four times a year. I only have good things to say about these journals.

Seeing advertising is now visible on Podomatic here is a link to a reading resource you can buy. Allanah's Book. I get a grand total of $1.32 per book sold from which I have to pay tax and Accident Insurance (ACC). Paper cuts can be hell. Yippee! I'm a millionaire!

It was ably presented by Sam J, Fynn and Jackson P and Dino.

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In celebratrion of the New Year Jordy, Jackson P, Braden and Nathan recorded this poem by New Zealand poet, Philippa Werry.

They cleverly decided to add their own sound effects.

The video was recorded by myself at the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar which was celebrated in Nelson, NZ in 2005. They had anchored a barge out in Nelson harbour which is overlooked by the Port Hills. Everyone got an excellent viewpoint and the fireworks looked spectacular reflected in the water.

Well done guys.

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On the last day of school for 2006 we recorded some of our favourite poems that we had learnt over the past year.

Our plan is to publish a new poem each week over the holidays so you wouldn't forget about us. We know that a lot of people listen to our podcast in the northern hemisphere and your school only takes a short break over Christmas. We go back to school in February- that is a long time to take a break.

Check out our blog to keep in touch.

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Tonight was Appleby School's Year Six Leaver's Assembly. We sat in the evening under the canvas eaves of the ampitheatre to listen to Metamorphic, the school band, play a set.

Then we had some interesting speeches and all the leaving children got an Appleby School leaver's badge. Chanelle stood and gave a lovely speech on behalf of the children, we sang a couple of Christmassy songs and then had a family supper before going home to bed.

We only have one half day of school left before we break for Christmas but we are going to record some poems tomorrow so we have some podcasts to go on with over the holiday break.

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We have just returned from an outdoor education experience at Bridge Valley in the hills near Nelson.

We had a wonderful recipe for success- warm weather, happy children, great parent support and a challenging range of facilities.

This video gives you an idea of some of the highlights.

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One of the features of Appleby School is its wonderful yearly Pet Show Day. This year's one was really great with lots of entries in all the events. What a great day we had.

Through our podcasting we have found kindred spirits in linking with Cefn Fforest School in Wales. We have exchanged letters, emails, photos, blog posts, gifts and a very small geocaching bear which is travelling about in Nelson having a wonderful time. Look for photos on our Moturoa Blog of his travels.

After a couple of practice runs, Cefn Fforest School teacher, Paul H and I arranged to record a Skype conversation this morning. Children in my class decided on a question they would like to ask Paul and we started chatting.

It was a great experience for the children. I was really pleased with their new confidence in speaking. I am sure their podcasting experiences over the last six months have really improved their oral literacy and confidence.

We have come such a long way in those six months. My digital natives take it easily in their stride and think of it all as unexceptional. I have learnt a great deal and feel at home with the technology. Podcasting has given me a greater audience also which I am appreciative of.

Nelson, NZ is at the bottom of the globe but we are still 'connected'.

Please leave a comment. We love feedback and you get a pin on our classroom wall map if we know what part of the world you are listening to us from.

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I am trying to see what kind of podcast you can get just with Podomatic's recording.

As I see it the downside will be that you only get one shot of making the recording. If you muck it up you can't edit it, add or delete. It all has to be done in one go. It is a really quick way of doing the business though if you know what you want to say.

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I am exploring all of the different ways I can think of to make a podcast or vodcast. For this one the basis was a Powerpoint presentation I had made some time ago for my class on composing photos using the rule of thirds.

To turn the Powerpoint into a podcast I saved it as a movie then dragged that movie into iMovie to add the voice track.

I had found another open-source music website and couldn't get the music track I wanted to download so played it through the laptop speakers and recorded it with Audacity. The result doesn't have the same sound quality as a downloaded MP3 version but it is OK.

I hope the topic of the Powerpoint is useful to you.

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This week was a very busy one for us at Appleby School. Our senior classes performed on stage with Suzanne Prentice who is a famous New Zealand entertainer.

She has been awarded a Queen's Honour for her music services.

The sound tracks on this podcast are of Moturoa class singing a couple of Suzanne's Christmas themed songs. We recorded this part back in the classroom.

Our performance was 'wicked'.

By Braden (Year Four)

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