This year we had 2 workshops accepted at the Learning @ Schools Conference in Rotorua. So it was up to us to get it all organised
We had 23 children who wanted to go so we asked parents for transport. I had already told the children that not all of them could come but they still had to ask their parents. We got 5 confirmed vehicles which meant that we could take them all.
The next step was getting there on time and getting set up and prepared.
That meant that the children had to be there by 5:30 am (in the morning !!!!) ready to go to Rotorua. We finally left at 6 oclock and it took 4 hours to get to Rotorua. We wasted a bit of time just getting out of Auckland at that time - we did a great impression of a slow moving car park for about the first 20 minutes going through South Auckland. Once we got out of Auckland we were fine.
We arrived at about 10:00 am so we had a bit of time to set up and chill out before our workshop
We had one in the morning on Video Editing entitled "Our Children are Video producers not Video Consumers. In the workshop we showed the teachers what type of work the children were producing and then we showed them how to use the Adobe Premier Elements programme. We managed to cover quite a bit but still ran out of time. Some of the MVTV crew presented someof the segments on what to do for different aspects of the programme. They did exceptionally well.
In the afternoon we did another workshop on Visual Communicator 3 and how we use it in MVTV. We made a mock script and then showed the teachers how to insert video clips, pictures and special effects. We ran out of time again but the teachers enjoyed the workshop. A lot of them said how helpful the children were and that they learnt so much more with having a "teacher" beside them all the way.
After the conference we went to the park by the lake, ate pizza for tea and then travelled back to Auckland. It took 3 hours and 40 minutes of driving time - and that excluded the toliet stop on the way.
We got back to Auckland at 8:30pm - it was indeed a long day for the children - but even as they were going home they were buzzing about their day.
It was a bit hard getting up on Thursday morning but most of the children managed to come to school. Some stayed home until interval or lunch then came to school.