Last week there was quite a bit in the news about the visit of Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas to New Zealand. While he was officially appearing here as part of clothing company promotion, he also visited Point England School and the Manaiakalani cluster in Auckland and made a donation of $100,000 to the cluster! The students from our class were wishing that they lived in Auckland for this experience. This video is from Point England School of the event and was embedded from their site.
Firstly we heard about it originally through our friends from Room Thirteen at Point England School. They've been one of our longest buddy blog sites and the students have always got wonderful work that is posted. We have their page on our side bar, so when the visit happened at thier school we heard about it quickly. From there we were able to look at other reports and see this wonderful video. Over the following days some of the students from Point England School wrote about their expereinces. You can see Darius recount here. Josephine is another student from PES, she's been featured during the holidays on this blog because she was posting so regularly and also because she was out posting our entire class earlier this year you can read her thoughts on the event by clicking here.
The other great thing apart from hearing and seeing this event so quick is that the students present have blogged about it in detail, much more so than we were able to see on the news later that evening. There would have been students from our school who would have known more about the event than before it aired on the news later that evening.
And at the end of the day thats really the experience that we should be working online for our students for. Getting an amazing experience is one thing but linking it in with the literacy of the event and the whole process just adds value to an amazing experience.
I was very fortunate to have some experience working in the area where this all took place, and while it was some time ago now the project that the students, the schools and the community are involved in is breath taking. If you have an opportunity to ever hear anyone from the cluster speak, as they have presented at numerous conferences, then it is a jaw dropping I-can't-believe that they're doing it and doing that much for their students way.
