Testimonials

It has provided us with a valuable resource about a local area and allowed children to ask local experts some questions. The information was easy for the children to understand and the videos were very informative.

The material was age appropriate (particularly liked the audio links, reading the material).  The participation levels at school and at home were a lot higher than usual because material was readily accessible and easy to read and understand. Audio conferences were excellent. Having the few visual photographs kept some of my less focussed kids engaged, as did the summary sheets that they had in front of them.  I was surprised at just how much they picked up.  It was great to be able to ask questions via the backchannel and get immediate responses - the kids loved that.

It helped my students understand about estuaries as they had no knowledge of what they were before we read about them and participated in the audioconference. Two of my students with ASD are highly excited and showing the site to their whanau, which is great. The Te Reo content and Maori perspectives in the texts and from Guest experts is also excellent and much appreciated.

Owing to time constraints with other curriculum areas, I sadly did not get an opportunity to use this wonderful resource with my class. I will be using it retrospectively however.

It provided a quality opportunity for integrating eLearning into the Inquiry programme. As part of our inquiry we will be researching possible sites at school and in our local area to plant several Kauri. I really like the questions and activities for further inquiry in the green boxes at the bottom of the Background pages. The videos also provided excellent class discussion with the questions that were attached to each video. Many children revisited the videos frequently during the trip.

Adds to the learning experiences of our topic studies. We are studying kauri dieback using the "Keep Kauri Standing - Kauri Dieback" school resource so this trip supported that learning. It visited some of the areas we had already learned about and added some information from experts that helped to answer some of the questions we had.

Very informative as to what is happening on our doorstep, and we did not know about it. We are now going to contact DOC in our area and finding out more that we can do to help locally. All children saw things they related to, and saw the relevance of what they were learning. Nice to have the extra background from maori perspective.

We are in a reasonably remote area and it is great that we can interact with other schools. The Web Quest was fantastic for a range of abilities. LEARNZ is wonderful for those students who learn in different ways e.g. listening (and they can refer back to recordings to check information). We are now interested in "adopting" a local reseve and planting some natives, including kauri.

It illustrated clearly community engagement, ecological sustainability, participating and contributing. Students were interested. It also helped in the Nature of Science ... seeing how the community can work with the scientists on an issue.

We live in the north and are surrounded by Kauri trees. Our students are now aware that kauri trees are under threat as they did not know this initially. I feel science is a very important part of the curriculum and want to encourage students to interact with the New Zealand environment. We are now going to visit the local bush and observe our trees.

Ties in so well with the guiding principles - Education for sustainability, Treaty of Waitangi etc. My Year 4 children were engaged and able to relate this field trip to our term concept of Turangawaewae. Content interesting and informative. Well presented as usual by Andrew with passion. Children with different learning styles are well catered for and my special needs children are also keen to engage in this type of online learning.