By Mike Charles, Dorothy Burt, and Mia Kim Williams
Lessons from New Zealand
Thirteen members of ISTE’s Spe- cial Interest Group for Teacher Educators (SIGTE) traveled to
Auckland, Rotorua, and Christchurch
to visit seven schools and present and
attend the Learning@School 2010
conference as part of a travel tour
last February.
This second installment in our
three-part series features ways we saw
technology used in New Zealand to develop student voices in the classroom,
in the community, and across the
world. We observed students engaged
in peer listening and sharing activities
as well as student/teacher cooperative
practices that valued the students’ as
co-developers or co-researchers in the
learning processes.
was turning to fall in New Zealand
and school was getting underway.
Imagine walking into a year 5 class-
room (what we call fourth grade in the
United States) at Pt. England School
in Auckland. It’s the second week of
school, and students have been dis-
cussing how the Māori (the indigenous
Polynesian people of New Zealand)
migrated across the Pacific to Aotearoa
(the Māori name for New Zealand)
aboard double-hulled ocean-faring
sailing craft called waka. Pt. England
students have a personal connection to
this story, as many of them are Māori
or Pacific Islanders, and studying this
history is part of the school’s effort to
help empower them to have a sense of
their personal voice as well as their
interdependence with others.
In education circles, New
Zealand has long been rec-
ognized for its work with
the literacy cycle. As students learn
about something important in their
curriculum, they illustrate and write
about what they are learning in order
to share it with a broader audience. At
Pt. England, this is described as qual-
ity teaching of the traditional concepts
of literacy.
22 Learning & Leading with Technology | December/January 2010–11 Digital Learning Objects As winter turned to spring in the Northern Hemisphere, summer
Year 5 students at Ilam School near Christchurch, New Zealand,
created this painting of a kia kaha (stay strong) waka. It represents
the contribution of each individual to the team.
