Thursday, October 11, 2007

Its been a while


A photo from our recent fieldtrip to Queenstown and Fiordland. It was extemely cold on the two boats we had and great fun. One of our students is going back for work experience!
AJ Hackett's bungy jumping operation put on a tour for us and three students took the plunge.

Yes it has however I had done this post as draft in September but when I went back to it couldn't figure out how to post it. So I have rewritten it.

We have finished delivering tour guiding and are now working on assessment activities, marking guides and evidence and judgement statements to be sent to ATTTO (our training provider) for pre-moderation.

All of the activities for tour guiding have been designed by us andthis has been a substantial piece of work. The small amount of material which came with this programme when we purchased it was either incomplete or required further work to bring it to a level we felt happy delivering. There was also the problem with not being able to put any of the acquired material on the wiki. Whereas all our activities (OP) go on the wiki as resource for the blog.

We also realised the tour guiding outline within our programme document also needed to be changed to reflect our local area, industry and the unique flora, fauna and landscape we have in the South Island.

There changes along with three new course outlines will be going for academic approval as a category B change. The specialties: Reception Services, Tourism Enterprise and Adventure Tourism still require the development of teaching resources. Two of these will be completed by the end of the year and the third will be held over until 2008 and be developed along with two other specialties Conference and Events and Sustainable Tourism.

We have also been working to improve our content with regards to local iwi and treaty content. I have had successful discussions with Kate Timms and Willie Campbell and we will be looking to add content in year one and two of the diploma.

I hope to get the team to look at the core skills section at the end of the teaching year. This course requires some additions, editing and review before delivery in 2008. When it will be revamped to meet the requirements of ATTTO who have changed the national qualification linked to it and the unit standards that form it. This will be part of the curriculum development identified for 2008.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Hillary,
Nice to hear you have met with kate and Willie. I spun around in my chair and talked to them about it - just to get a catch up. I ended up asking them if we could develop a generic activity sheet that would help your students to find out local Maori history, legal and cultural presence in an area. kate said it would be nice to see a layering of interpretive activities being done, which would see Maori being one such layer. Willie advised that a generic approach that tour guides could take to find out about local Maori would be:
1. Contact local authority (council, police etc)
2. Contact Te Puni Kokiri
3. DOC.

So I think we could incorporate these steps into activity sheets hey?