Gerry's Evaluation

Isn’t technology brilliant? Despite the fact that half the time it doesn’t work, you can do things that a few years ago people could only dream about.

One of those things is seeing and talking to people across the globe. Room 5 have been Skyping to a class from Brigantine, New Jersey, USA.

Originally, it was for a blog, Teri Gragg (the teacher from USA) was Skyping countries around the world. They would ask us questions, we would answer them and vice versa.

But then Teri asked us if we would like to make some art for an annual exhibit. Obviously, we accepted.

We wanted to do something unique to NZ. We could have done faces with moko on them, but decided on pictures of the scenery around Nelson. However, anyone can do a landscape. We decided we would add English and Maori words into the pictures by putting them in whatever they were. So the word ‘ocean’ and ‘moana’ would be written into your picture of the sea.

Every now and then Teri would Skype and teach us about how to draw landscapes. That was amazing, having a teacher in America!

Once when Teri was Skyping, a reporter from the Nelson Mail came in to interview her a couple of people in our class.

Eventually, we finished our artwork and sent it over to her. Teri Skyped us a couple of times after that, mainly talking about our work.

Finally, the time for the exhibit had come. But, we had a problem. The weather wasn’t brilliant and Teri didn’t have a cable to help the connection. In the end we just chatted to people passing by. At the very end we talked to Teri and two of her students.

Then we said farewell.

By Gerry, Rm 5