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VOICE OVER: For our students, the barrier to come to school was really quite great.
It can be activities that go on in the home, it can be um the dysfunctional family nature,
it can be just poverty, which you may not see beyond the walls of the School.
For a day like today for our kids, school’s all about providing an aspirational opportunity
for students to shine. JAMES CAMERON: The classroom shouldn’t be
a box that you, that you go to learn. Learning should be the way you view the world.
I love learning, you know at my age I’m still curious, I still read veracially[sic],
I want to know more. That’s why I do this stuff.
If you teach kids early on to just be curious, to be learners, then the classroom concept
becomes much broader. The world is their classroom. ANNA COONAN: It was late on a night, I got
an email from Geoff, our principle, and he said make sure you’re at school early, I’ve
got some great news and I rushed to school the next morning. He sort of said ‘look,
you know, have you heard about this project’ and showed us a couple of slides and yeah
James Cameron came up and the fact that he’s going down the Mariana Trench 11 kilometres
deep and we were sort of going yeah, I’ve heard about it and what’s the deal and right
at the end he sort of said we’ve got the opportunity to talk to him and to study the
Trench and got goose bumps. GEOFF METCALF: We were approached by our central
office who’d obviously been working with Telstra in you know developing some of these
innovative sort of out-of-classroom opportunities and we saw this as a really good opportunity
to test the boundaries of what we can do in a school.
JAMES: Hi everybody, what’s the name of your school?
SCHOOL STUDENTS: Roseworth Primary. JAMES: Roseworth. Okay.
GEOFF: For these children this is what we’re saying to them, you are special, you, we really
value you as people, value you as learners and when you raise aspirations that’s when
you get, you know, children really pushing outside their boundaries.
JAMES: And we saw a pure white octopus with black eyes sitting on the bottom.
STEVEN DARGHAM: We got the call from James Cameron to deliver a professional full high
definition video link so that they can upload the recorded footage from the boat almost
instantaneously and distribute this footage to the rest of the world.
Basically we come up with the idea to utilise the same system so that school children can
communicate directly with James Cameron. It’s a complex set-up but Telstra is probably the
only company who can bring all those resources together.
JOHN LEAF: I’m convinced that there is a boundless opportunity to improve the experience
of the children in the classroom through providing this technology to them.
ANNA:And the kids are now really passionate about actually going to university, which
I don’t think many of them had even thought about as well, you know, it’s just like
oh yeah I’ll get a job whereas now they start to think well hang on, maybe I can do
a little bit more. STUDENT 1: I might actually become a deep
sea photographer. STUDENT 2: I would like to be a zoologist.
STUDENT 3:Doing this kind of thing made me love science more.
STUDENT 4: Very once in a lifetime. STUDENT 5: Listening to James Cameron talk
has just been a really great experience for our school.
ANNA: Having this opportunity has just enabled the children to really engage in school and
it has incorporated a lot of our attendance issues and the kids have actually wanted to
come into school. JAMES: Oh look at that guys, I recognise that,
that’s the Deep Sea Challenger. GEOFF:To be able to push out beyond the walls
of the school to use technology to link into other countries, other situations is so exciting
for us because we actually have the technology here to do that.
JOHN: Telstra’s one of those key leaders in that space and we identified that our aims
and Telstra’s aims in the education sphere were basically synergistic. We see enormous
opportunities moving forward with Telstra. STEVEN: We’ve enabled something that is
ah almost impossible a few years ago. I’m sure that few years time we will remember
this and will be the highlight of our careers. JAMES: I love how inquisitive ah everybody
was and and how attentive everybody was. I’ll call you guys up next time we discover something
and we’ll do this again. Bye everybody. STUDENT: Bye.