C4

http://www.wordle.net/

TaraNet’s C4 programme began this term with 21 students from across 6 of our schools joining together to Connect, Communicate, Collaborate & Communicate.

We meet through VC every week and use our Moodle site to communicate between times. So far we have defined our theme of C4 and you can see by their Wordle above that there are more C’s than just the 4. Student’s are learning to find their way around Moodle by successfully logging onto the site (this has been a problem for even some of our senior students…. i don’t know why….), they have completed their profile & uploaded a Fact File to tell me more about themselves. We have had a strong emphasis on ‘cybersafety’ - appropriate ways of behaving when they are online, and protocols for interaction & publishing online. One of their tasks was to work through our VLN cybersafety module and we engaged in some interesting discussion about issues that surround being safe online. We have started to look at blogging to connect more widely than our small group & i have started the C4 blog to model this.

Everything we do seems to take so long – we are already into Week 4 & it seems on the face of it we haven’t done a lot. For almost all of our students they have very little time to involve themselves in C4 activities. Only one school has cleared more time in the timetable for them. Almost all these students (being the G & T kids) are involved in anything & everything else that is happening at school too. I think this is the age old de-motivator for these types of bright kids. More stuff gets layered onto them – when really the extension work needs to be ‘instead of’ and not ‘as well as’ the everyday school stuff. BUT fantastic attendance from all of these students :-) Its good also to get around the schools as each week i am VCing alongside our kids from a different school.

Our first project is called “Postcards from Taranaki” – a short movie or presentation about our place. We hope to share with students from other clusters.