You can contact LEARNZ, part of CORE Education, at:
Postal Address:
PO Box 13 678,
Christchurch 8141,
New Zealand
Children loved every part of the experience- thoroughly engaging. Really cool for the students to be able to participate with a group outside of their immediate context!
Great for students to have new people connecting to them in a different way, linking many aspects of the curriculum in a real setting.
Engages the students. Interesting material which covers a breadth of issues and topic areas. Students gained an understanding of the Antarctic food web.
Interactive, engaging and highly motivating. Helps create partnership between home and school as students are extremely keen to share the field trip experiences with their parents.
This unit linked with our topic of sustainability and enabled cross curricular learning in a digital context. This type of learning resource helps students to work at their level, irrespective of where they start and their reading ability.
It takes us to a place we have never been and experienced before and it gives us more insights of what's happening there. It's incredibly interesting.
The students were highly motivated throughout this field trip. A fantastic resource that can be used easily within any classroom setting to support classroom programmes around skills and attitudes we are fostering with our children.
Students were highly engaged, especially by the videos and photos of our ambassador. Students who need extra support with literacy really appreciated the easy to read background material.
This LEARNZ Antarctica field trip has given me the confidence to continue to integrate digital technology into my programmes. My class were very engaged in their learning and it was well integrated through Literacy, Science and Mathematics.
This field trip supported our science and geography topics. We found the videos very informative. It was great to listen to scientists and the artist giving us a glimpse of what living and working in Antarctica is really like.
Fantastic links to the science curriculum AOs - lots of learning due high interest and combination of videos and great background information. Learnz is real world and happening at the moment. Where else can you get this sort of access to scientists and researchers?
This was so engaging for our class. This is a great way to bring science alive in the classroom and it led to so many discussions.
My class of all boys love the LEARNZ background readings and activities; their non-fiction reading levels have all improved. They like the fact that they can work at their level and at their own pace. They all love science and anything (like LEARNZ) that helps develop their understanding of how our world works.
This is an effective and engaging part of my literacy programme. My Pasifika students, in particular, are much more engaged with a Learnz field trip than other academic activities. Especially relevant in meeting the vision of the NZ Curriculum.
It motivated my top reading group. It was well organised, informative and something different to use as a reading tool/experience.
Excellent presentation and a great learning experience for the students. Students really enjoyed a different approach to learning and it was good that the weaker readers were able to participate.
LEARNZ is a great way to study a topic using a medium that is accessible to all, even my low vision student and those with poor reading skills. The Antarctica field trip supported the science and social studies areas of the curriculum and much more, such as the key competencies.
The idea of virtually going to Antarctic created such a buzz and a HUGE level of engagement. It's great the way LEARNZ leaders connect with students - they present everything in such an accessible way but have high expectations that students can and will be able to understand fairly sophisticated concepts.
Great for Nature of Science. Also enviroscience topics. The kids were really interested - we found all the science fascinating and it was delivered in a way that made it understandable for the class. Also just the glimpse into life in the Antarctic.
Students became very curious with lots of wonderings about Antarctica and they decided that science is really cool. The field trip made for fun learning and helped us use the i-pads and laptops more effectively for independent research.
It was in line with our learning focus for this year of being a fully digital classroom. Online help was all good.
The students particularly enjoyed the videos and the quizzes. They also commented on how much they liked how the diaries were written as if they were there. This LEARNZ Antarctica trip fitted in well with the Nature of Science aspects of questioning and using vocabulary that we were focussing on.
My Year 3-4 students found the field trip extremely interesting, particularly as we had an ambassador join Shelley on the trip, too. We used the background pages for our reading programme and used the videos. There was a high degree of curiosity from the students, and their questions were answered at their level.
My curriculum focus was supported fully by the LEARNZ Antarctica programme and two NIWA scientists visiting the class in person helped no end to endorse what we had learned. Some students were able to really drive their own learning, while having the two levels for reading enabled some of my less able readers to participate more fully.
Catered to the needs of all students. Tasks were easily differentiated for all curriculum levels. Great opportunity for students to make connections with the wider community.