The following guest blog post is from Menai High School, winners of last year’s Enviro Inspiro competition…
Enviro Inspiro! is a student led environmental competition. Open to NSW public high school students, the competition offers you a chance to win $3000 for school environmental projects. To enter you need to create a 5 minute DVD showcasing your environmental project and explain how you’ve improved the environment in 750 words or less. Entries this year close Friday 22 June 2012.
Here’s what last year’s winners of the competition, Menai High School have to say about the experience of making a video about their project to deal with some litterbug cockatoos. Menai is also a member of Sustainable Schools NSW where you can find lots of great resources to help protect your school’s environment.
Enviro Inpiro! wasn’t something that we had planned extensively on doing, nor was it seen as a fierce competition – fighting to win that $3000 we really wanted.
We did see it as a great opportunity to make our school aware of our environment issues in a funny and informative way, while we brainstormed, organised and created our video.
For Menai High School, the win didn’t only mean that we had achieved beyond other entries and won $3000, it also showed our school peers that when you set your mind to something and are willing to put in the time and effort, you really can achieve it.
The money that we won didn’t go to waste (except for a small SRC pizza day!) as we used it to purchase more bins to keep our school rubbish free and cockatoo-friendly.
When making the video, our filming was done over a couple of days throughout one week using a basic video camera and filming on the spot. Some parts of the film were scripted, such as the voiceover, but the rest were made up on the day as we spoke about many of the issue we had with the cockatoos.
All of the music, voiceovers and editing of the video was done on “Windows Live Moviemaker,” which was really easy and convenient to use as we are definitely no computer gurus. So, anyone can do it! Editing probably took up most of the time (approx. 2-3 weeks) because we had to try to fit in as much as we could in the 5 minutes allowed.
Every school should get on board with Enviro Inpiro! to help improve their school’s environment and even win a nice prize at the end. It’s easy and fun, and you will love knowing that you have contributed in helping your school’s environment. No problem is too big or small!!!
Zoe Xirocostas and Brooke Giffe
Year 11
Menai High School
Enviro Inspiro 2011 Winners – Check out there video!
1 Million Women 
Getting people in school invovled in the environment and teaching them to take pride it in is very important. This is such a great idea and really gets the creative juices of the students flowing. If some of the students are interested in environmental issues that affect wider society as well as themselves ad their schools they should look into the illegal dumping of rubbish. More information can be found on our blog which focuses on this issue http://dbad1.wordpress.com/ . Thankyou and great work with this project!!