Thank you Jane again and through her to a link on Chris Sessum’s blog to this Alan Watts You Tube video. It pretty much sums up how I feel about life.

In NZ Maori have a whakatauaki (proverb) that I like…

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people, the people, the people.

It is the aroha and caring shown to people on a personal level that is more important than learning outcomes and teaching targets. Children need to feel loved, valued and cared about to become successful adults.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ERbvKrH-GC4″ width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

I’ve been tagged by Jane Nicholls on the 8 random facts meme.

First, the Rules:
1) Post these rules before you give your facts
2) List 8 random facts about yourself
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

Here we go…

1. I have written three resource books on reading- Close Reading of School Journals.
2. My great-great grandmother was the first pakeha girl born in Nelson.
3. When I am not playing on my computer I like to do scrapbooking with photos.
4. I am taking this term off school to care for my mother who entered a rest home today- I hope she is OK.
5. I lived in a hospice for a couple of weeks as I cared for my sister- strangely it was was one of the most heart wrenching yet rewarding experiences in my life. It affirmed what I believe about family, caring, trust and loyalty- who had those qualities and who didn’t.
6. I like to swim and am learning to like bike riding as I return my injured knee to good health.
7. I love going to live musicals- I once played the clarinet in a production of Oklahoma.
8. I won my laptop in a radio competition. You had to answer seven questions over a week. I Googled the answers to the first six. The winning question was, “What are the upright wickets in cricket called?” I knew!

My Audio of my computer win

Click on the above link to hear me win my computer!!! As an aside getting this MP3 file into my blog was a little technical wizardry in itself. Newstalk 2ZB is a pretty cool radio station as it podcasts much of its stuff and you can listen to the last 24 hours programming. This is how I captured the sound byte. It was WMA format though and I wanted to edit it because it was 15 minutes long. To be able to edit it I opened it with Quicktime, then imported it into Garageband podcast, edited it, exported it to iTunes and then converted it to MP3 for uploading to Edublogs! There is probably an easier way but this way works fine for me!!!

Now I tag

Jocelyn Mackay

Suzie Vesper

Marnie Thomas

Brett Harston

Jason Hando

John Pearce