Melville Intermediate - Photostory Tour

This is Lana's Photostory of the School. We are attempting to extend our students by increasing their use and familiarity and web 2.0 tools. Photostory is a simple way to achieve this. For this term we are establishing and maintaining relationships. The idea being that you will view this Photostory of our School and make comparisons with your own school or location.

Melville Intermediate - Story Starter Ideas

I saw this through Allanah K wonderful blog at Moturua's Web Log from Appleby School near Nelson in New Zealand.

It's a resource for story starting for ideas and other random (and it can be quite random) ideas but the potential to be really useful in the classroom. Room 8 will be road testing it tomorrow.

Melville Intermediate - Comments Reminders

A reminder to all students of Melville Intermediate that comments on this blog need to include your first name only and your classroom.

Comments should be written in full English not in 'text language' or using 'slang'. If you are not sure ask one of the students in Room Eight and they will be happy to assist you with your comments!

Thanks for your input to our site and if your not sure about something don't forget to ask one of the friendly faces from Room Eight.

Melville Intermediate - The Literacy Process 3

Today students spent the time in class preparing the drafts of the story board for their ICT presentation. Students had to prepare a minimum of five squares and write a description of the shot in each box as an explanation as to what was happening. The students have been working on this now for nearly a week and its only now that they will begin the process of filming the clips that will soon appear. You'll of course see the finished products but don't forget the work that's gone on beforehand!

In other exciting Melville Blog News our students were thrilled that their Mihi work is now appearing on google searches allowing people to locate the site. It's our first google top ten hit for 2009 and the students were very pleased to be featuring worldwide as a result of their work! Hopefully it will be the first of many as this site gains in popularity!

Melville Intermediate - The Literacy Process 2

Students are well on the way to completing their first special online presentation for this site. They have organised themselves into groups of between 2 and 5 students. They have decided on a feature of Melville Intermediate that they want to promote or explain to their audience. Students completed a brainstorm of ideas first on Wednesday, reworked and edited the material Thursday and started drafting their scripts for the written component of the posts on Friday.

This approach has already paid dividends for our group working on the Environmental Worm Farm at Melville Intermediate as on Friday afternoon Mrs Bleakin (Deputy Principal) had to move the worms from the 2008 worm farm to the new accommodation. We already had a group of students ready to go to produce online material related to the shift! The photographs from this were a great element of 'opportunity' and one the students involved grabbed with both hands! Look for the photographs tomorrow!

Melville Intermediate - The Literacy Process

At the moment students of Room 8 are working on a variety of project related to Melville Intermediate. Currently our students are planning tours of different parts of the school, special features of some of the special areas of our school, and writing scripts related to these pieces of work.

The literacy process is very important and although its the publishing side that you'll see through this blog it is important to appreciate that the students carry out a significant amount of preparation work before anything is published as this is very much the last part of the literacy cycle. The first of this work will be appearing online tomorrow and over the next coming weeks.

We'll also be starting a series of tutorials and language lessons based around some of our students at school. We have a huge number of activities at Melville Intermediate from our wonderful CPA (Cultural Performing Arts) Group, Wearable Arts Competition, Music - including a band and orchestra! not to mention Sport and will be trying to cover as much as possible of this online for you to see.