Testimonials

The content and style of learning is so engaging for the children. Love the strong Science focus. It was a good field trip to compare local, national and global - it lent itself really well to discussion.

I LOVE the trips, as do my students. They are fun, relevant, interesting, and informative. The videos are fantastic as usual and so informative. Those who are interested were given the class log in details and they are watching the videos at home with family. I have had several comments from parents about how much they are all enjoying them.

We were studying a local waterway and were able to compare the bio-diversity between our waterway in the Far North with a fresh waterway in the South Island. The students were motivated to research their topic, find out more about their own community and particularly enjoy the audio conference and following their ambassador.

Utilised the focus on te reo and cultural-history aspect of biodiversity. Students enjoyed the field trip as part of our ecology topic -they engaged well with the learning and were willing to contribute.

I feel it covered all areas of the key competencies - I used it to foster new learning relationships within our class, and it was an excellent tool to draw out my innovative thinkers. Due to the video nature of this field trip, the students were very engaged.

The students loved it. It gave me an easy way to extend the knowledge of my more able students while also engaging my less able students. Great for peer work. Because of the way this was set up, I was able to create links to my class page, which encouraged students to access the class page out of school hours. We are also currently in the early stages of Enviro-schools; this helped get students thinking about what is going on around us as well as human impact.

It saves teachers valuable time. It is great to have the experts and a meaningful context for inquiry learning. My Year 3/4s learnt about braided rivers and were able to develop open questions for the audio conference. It was good to have a voice-over for the background pages. The panoramic section was excellent for making inferences.

Many of our reading and writing strategies and progressions were able to be met by the field trip, as well as integrating our topic studies. I also used the diary readings as a shared reading activity, which was great. Students recorded questions throughout the audio conferences and we posted them in the Ask an Expert forum. Shelley responded that evening and we were able to integrate that into the classroom programme the next day. The students loved seeing their personal questions answered.  

It is a great way to learn. Students are made aware of important conservation issues in a fun way. The various activities cover a variety of learning styles.The topics can often be linked to local communities.  

They are well planned and provide us with a link to experts and sites we would not usually visit. Excellent for developing literacy and numeracy in a purposeful context.  

Great to learn about our New Zealand icons. I always enjoy Learnz and have been using it for the last 6 or 7 years because it is an absolute gem to all teachers and students.