Manaiakalani Student Leaders Conference 2013

Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend the first ever Manaiakalani Student Leaders Conference at Tamaki College. I was one out of four people to represent my school at this years student conference.

When we entered the foyer people handed us schwag bags filled with different goodies. Tamaki College’s hall filled up quickly with different leaders from all the schools in the Manaiakalani cluster. After a quick introduction from Mrs Burt we had to mix and mingle with all the other students there at the conference.

Later, Andrew Patterson had a very inspiring talk about technology and our future. He introduced different websites including TED.com and khanacademy.com. Five students from Tamaki College advertised their business, ‘Geek Cafe’. After their talk we had a delicious morning tea  which was provided by Tamaki College’s Year 13 Catering and Hospitality students. Lunch was also catered by them.

We then did a design challenge provided with smartphones from two people from Telecom, Devon Stewart and Dion Keating. We worked with the students sitting with us at the table which were the leaders from Pt England School. The scavenger hunt was difficult because we had to download different aps and we had to text in our answers. We ended up coming in second place to Stonefields who came first.

Our second challenge was to make a video using the ap dropbox. In our little video we involved our highlight of the day which was how we needed three things to get to our dream job. They then showed all the videos on the big projector.

After a long day at the Manaiakalani Student Leaders Conference for 2013 I learnt about how important it is to have a plan B if your plan A doesn’t work out. Overall, the whole day was very inspiring. It made me think that if you have a goal you’ll need to have a strategy or a plan to get there.