The Competition
The Gigaschools Video Competition challenges students to create a video showing what they think learning will be like in the connected schools in Gigatown. John McGlashan College, led by myself won first prize national for the secondary school category, gaining Dunedin 300,000 gigapoints, and over $7,000 worth of prizes for the school. Dunedin later became New Zealand’s Gigatown – the first city in the southern hemisphere to have a Gigabit internet connection.
Gigatown is a year-long competition being held by Chorus, to determine which New Zealand town will be among the first in the world to have access to broadband at 1Gbps (one gigabit per second). A gigabit per second is around 100x the connection speed of most internet connections in New Zealand today, and 10x the current 100Mbps UFB connections.
In The News
The Star (Dunedin) Thursday 7th August 2014
School wins technology boost
By Jonathan Chilton-Towle
A team of year 12 and 13 pupils from John McGlashan college won Chorus’ Gigaschool video competition by showing how “handy” it would be if the school had gigabit-speed internet.
The video showed senior pupils talking about the benefits high speed internet would have for the school in a mock professional presentation style.
The performance included various jokes and puns, including two pupils high-fiving while describing access to better internet as “handy”.
The video won the senior category of the competition, netting the school 10 digital cameras and $2500 to go towards technology.
Otago Daily Times Tuesday 5th August 2014
Win for John McGlashan
By John Lewis
A SATIRICAL video about the benefits of ultrafast broadband and gigabit services in the classroom has won John McGlashan College top prize in the national Gigaschools Video Competition.
A large group of pupils spent a month and a-half shooting and editing the video, which is an amusing account, part parody, of the impact on future schooling that access to increased internet speed and sophisticated digital tools has in the classroom.
Principal Neil Garry said the school was proud of the achievement.
“They’ve spent a long time working on this, using quite a lot of intricate equipment and technical knowledge”.