Duration: 3:21
Students and parents talk about the difference marae-based learning has made to their engagement, motivation, and confidence. Students are sharing their learning about their own history with their parents and also using digital technologies to share it more widely.
Probably one of the biggest things with the programme in terms of seeing with Tuawaerenga is the fact that he’s come home really engaged and motivated in what he’s been doing. So beforehand we had sort of “how’s your day been?” “oh yeah it’s been ok”, but now he’s sort of got something he can hook himself into. Like the other day we were driving into New Plymouth and he said to me as we were driving along “hey mama do you know how Mt Taranaki got it’s name?” and I said “oh no, no I don’t know that” and he, what he did is he retold the story with everything, all the detail and using the right kupu and just he knew exactly what it was all about. So we picked up the cellphone and he recorded it just as that. So he’s sort of starting to use devices like he hasn’t before. Starting to think about being able to transfer the knowledge of using the iPad into cellphones and things like that.
The benefits I’m seeing for Dane has been amazing. He’s been quite shy but having been doing this he comes home, his te reo is really awesome, he’s really good at pronunciation and he’s come out of his shell.
I explained how Taranaki got it’s name, and usually I’m shy pronouncing it to other people so I used Tellegami and then I gave the iPad to the person I wanted to show it to and then they’d look at it and then they’d give me the feedback and then whatever they said I could work on. With Tellegami you take a picture and that picture is the background, and then you’ve got a little character and when you speak the character does the gestures. If you make a mistake you can erase that one and make a new one, and if you don’t like that you can just keep doing it and doing it as much as you want to make it perfect.
I like making things on Educreations, like little pictures of the thing that we’re talking about. You can use tonnes of colours, you can record your voice. So there’s like the words down the bottom and then I record my voice saying the words with the, and it’s kind of like a slideshow of the comic.
I think the biggest thing as a Mum is it made me realise how, like the real value of the programme because he felt so confident in being able to retell the story but really in his own words. So he could name all the names that I don’t, I’m not even familiar with the names, but he could tell me and his younger brother was listening, and the story, and it kind of led to this big discussion around Mt Taranaki, which then he went on to tell his grandparents and aunties and uncles. So as you can imagine, that gave him, you know as a parent, he was, there was that sense of pride about him knowing, having that knowledge that we don’t have and we didn’t have the opportunity to have as children growing up for whatever reason it is, so yeah.
(reciting a pātere)