Finding out that I had been selected to join the 5th Regional Innovative Teachers of the year conference in Kuala Lumpar as a member of the student forum blew me away. It's not every day that I’m selected as 1 of 15 to represent millions of students across the region so I was speechless when I received the phone call from Microsoft, totally and utterly speechless.

I had never Travelled further then Australia before, and coming from New Zealand that’s pretty pathetic really as Aussie and NZ (although we hate to admit it) are relatively the same.
So the length of the flight in itself was even a shock, and the fact that once we had arrived I realised that I had just lost 12 hours of my life, I felt older! I must say the service on the plane was exceptional, much better then Air NZ. The Hostess was happy to pose for a photograph with us tourists and you only just had to snap your finger once to get a Pepsi or juice... Heaven :)

But that service was nothing compared to the 5 star hotel we were placed in. For a teenager coming from a small town it was quite a shock to see how the ‘other half’ live I really got used to the ‘waiting on your every hand’ service from the hotel staff and the endless supply of bottled water was quite call in itself. I looooved the air conditioning especially when it was 30+ degrees outside!!!! The bed with its Egyptian cotton sheets will also be missed along with my rooms amazing view of the train stations dirty roof and a construction site.....and half of the longest pool in the country!

Oh and I suppose I will also miss the people... maybe ;)
But seriously there were some amazing people there, to the whole team you guys are ‘oh so cool’ people and I feel very lucky to have had the chance to meet you and form real friendships which won’t just go away but will stay strong through the help of TIG, our projects and the internet. I would like to thank Mike and Kat for this experience, you put countless hours of work in to a very short space of time in order to not just tell the teachers that student voice is a necessary but to show them a ‘new way’ of doing things which needs to start to be put into place across the region in order for us all to become ‘partners of learning’. This you did extremely well and I am happy to say that it was a life changing experience. Personally to me it was like visiting more than just one country. Having a mix of people with different backgrounds who come from different countries and cultures working together was something new. It was an amazing to see our similarities and differences in black and white. We have the same needs and wants for education, we have the same desires but we have different ways of getting there. Some are working some aren’t so much but if we work together further we could really accomplish something.

I thought it was really cool having a chance to meet 50 local students from a local school in KL. As simple as that sounds it was a highlight for me. It will seem funny to some of you reading this but as I have said I come from a small town in a westernised country. Now KL is a country with its main religion being Muslim, it was so amazing on my behalf to see how down to earth these students are. They were laughing and joking and so friendly, they all wanted photos with me and I felt like a movie star :P

Another highlight of my conference time was how I was being constantly pushed out of my comfort zone. During the conference I was one of three students selected to answer questions on a panel in front of over 150 government officials and teachers. Scary stuff especially as you have no idea what kind of questions you are going to be asked :) And then of course there was our project presentation day and of course being males we left our PowerPoint presentation to the last minute, and just as we finished it found out that actually our idea had already been implemented......uh oh.... we had to come up with another brilliant idea and have it in a state ready to present in less than 2 hours!
I can happily tell you that we did manage this and after presenting our idea we were one of three teams selected by Microsoft to be funded a Micro Grant of US $1000 to help turn our project idea into reality! Also TIG has kindly offered their support to fund the hosting of our project website and the purchase of a domain name!

Luckily while in KL I had the chance for a bit of shopping, I say lucky because I spent the majority of my time in the hotel and although it was a great conference it was nice to see the city sights and the sounds and smells of the local markets and attractions etc. A highlight was visiting china town and buying a couple of fake Rolexes and a Gucci Tie for my Principal by special request :) I also bought a few nick-nacky souvenirs but nothing too extravagant... I also took a tour of the city on the ‘Hop on Hop off’ bus which was great, had a chance to see what KL was made of!

The only minus about the trip though is that I got sick from the change in climate. NZ was in its winter when got back and KL had been entering its summer and was warm... It’s only really been today when I haven’t had a blocked up nose! My mates at school thought I had swine flu!!!!
Thanks again to everyone who I met on this trip or who played a part in organizing it! And most of all thanks to Miss Trisha who I think we all had a soft spot for :P

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=f57448b8-e04a-424d-bedf-1866b74238bf" target="_new" title="Haka">Video: Haka</a>