Our Mountain Project

At our Lead Teachers Meeting today we invited Amanda Hewlett & Marisa Swanink from Puke Ariki to talk to us about initiatives coming up. I first met Amanda at TUANZ earlier in the year and she was very excited about the possibility of strengthening Puke Ariki community involvement through the use of things like blogs, wikis, podcasting etc. I spent some time with her & Marisa chewing the fat about all this sort of stuff. So it was really great to see them again today with news that a firm project is in place with support from the Community Partnership fund through the NZ Digital Strategy. We were pleased to hear that now building knowledge will not be one way traffic pushed out of Puke Ariki but something that we can all contribute to & participate in. Amanda & Marisa have worked quite a bit with Tahora school - researching & creating stories of the district, also with Richard Barnes at Matau School. Our team were really interested in how they could contribute with projects they had planned to do & Amanda left with quite a few further meetings with our individual schools organised - very productive meeting :-)
So more info - if you would like to be involved here are the notes we were given:

Our Mountain Project

• Is a project designed to help collect and record historical and environmental material
• It is aimed at strengthening the links between the various parts of the Taranaki region
• It is providing a place for individual regions to show the uniqueness of their area
• It encourages the development of and strengthens the research skills of the students
• Provides a venue for their research projects to be seen by a wider community of people and therefor opens the possibility of links being formed.

How will it work?
It is a partnership between Puke Ariki and the school or community group.

Puke Ariki staff can help with

• Planning the unit
• the developing of students research skills at the Taranaki Research Centre
• Assisting with the publishing phase; we can work at your school or at Puke Ariki. Having the students in small groups works the best for this.
• There are 4 iMacbooks with professional multimedia software, scanners, video and digital still cameras available to enable students to present their work in multimedia format
• technical support
• site for work to be displayed on the Taranaki Wiki

Topics

• an environmental issue
• changes in the landscape
• people stories, family histories
• historical issues / events

Developing a PodCast
(normally no longer than 2 - 3 minutes - a small audio file that can be accessed through an MP3 player or iPod)
Examples are:

• an interview with an expert
• poetry reading
• a recording of an experience - creative writing
• this has bee used where two paintings adjacent to each other on a wall have a conversation together; it could be about the painter, the people who have viewed them, their past life, the techniques used to create them
• radio drama; a rock on the mountain telling its story of being in a lahar
• a person talking from the past using a photo as a focus

A Photo File

• A collection of images taken by the students to record an event, place, experience. Some examples are;
• 7 images of Taranaki taken at the same time each day
• A collection of images taken from around Taranaki
• A collection of images taken of people whom the students regard as being important in their community
• A collection showing a process such as the making of something
• Recording of geological features

Video

• Taped interviews
• News reporter at the scene

Other

• A compilation of scanned images, maps, diagrams, text, to tell a story

We are open to ideas and would ideally like to meet with teachers to see how this could possibly work for them."
You can contact Amanda at hewletta@npdc.govt.nz