ICT conference

This week we had our very first Kilbirnie ICT conference.  The conference was led by the students for the students - with minimal adult intervention.  The older students in the school planned workshops, covering topics such as Comic life, Superclubs plus, using imovie, photography and sports skills.  The day was a huge success, with the added addition of a shared lunch (bought in by the children). The buzz of conversation over lunch time just added to the conference experience.  The day finished with a closing ceremony, during which the students looked at some of their photographs and work from the conference. What a great day!

Ulearn

Wow! What an experience! Watch this space for further updates and photographs.

ERO report

As lead teachers, we were really proud to be able to report our progress to ERO with regard to our ICT development.  We focused on the main 5 areas that ERO look at.  Documentation is available from our principal if required.

photos from the expo

MCLD Expo 2011

During the first two days of the holidays the staff at Kilbirnie School attended a 2 day conference in Lower Hutt.  We had a keynote speech from Jan Coleman on the first day, followed by two workshops of our choice. These ranged from using garage band effectively to blogging for beginners.  The work shops were led by Stuart Hale, Allanah King, David Young and Innes Kennard.  The staff were inspired and equipped  ready to plan lots of new opportunities.  We finished with a panel discussion on e-learning and the future horizons.  We were really proud of the enthusiastic way in which our staff approached the expo. Thanks to all involved.

Twitter #mcldexpo11

Tuesday 21st June 2011

On Tuesday, we met with Mike to discuss where we are currently with our ICT project and where we wanted to go next.  We talked about our finances, purchasing of new equipment, staff survey, mathletics, our wireless system and many other issues.  In the afternoon, we met with a sales rep, from one of our local firms.  We discussed the cost of installing a more robust wireless network and mobile devices.  We had a very productive day. 

supportive staff

Great to hear staff helping each other out with ICT.  I often hear small conversations going on and hear staff giving each other tech tips as well as classroom ideas! Fabulous and worth a mention!

Road trip to Palmerston North

On Tuesday this week, Peter, Mike & myself along with our ICTPD cluster set off to visit two schools in Palmerston North.  We visited Whakarongo School and Riverdale School in the morning.  Both schools have made huge leaps with their ICT use in school and provided us with some inspirational ideas.  We were able to form some clear ideas of where we see our ICT progressions in the future.  In the afternoon we listened to a Principal from a rural school in Palmerston.  They were in the second year of their PD project.  Once again, we learnt a lot from this and took on board plenty of new ideas.

On our return to school, Peter and I met on Wednesday afternoon.  It seemed appropriate to spend some time reflecting upon the progress we had made in school in our project.  We have now arranged a meeting with Mike to consolidate these plans.

A poster seen at Whakarongo school, Palmerston North

School newsletter

Great to see Room 6 using their blog to it's full potential:

Parent's ICT Evening

This year we decided to organise an evening for Parent's to attend so they could deepen their understanding of the ICT that takes place in our school.  We had an 'open classroom' situation and during the evening we ran min-taster sessions about blogging, IWB, Windows live and Super Clubs Plus.  Jan Coleman attended the evening to support this by talking about Super Clubs Plus.  The evening was a great success and we were really delighted with the attendance by parents. 

After school Workshops

Our Week 4 after school workshops went extremely well.  The simple ICT presentation was popular and hopefully we communicated some easily accessible ICT ideas to our guests.  The Open Source presentation was attended by some enthusiastic staff within our own school - it was an informative and enjoyable presentation.  The presentations for this can be found on our cluster wiki-space. 

Wednesday 18th May 2011

Today is our lead teacher meeting for Term 3, at Normandale school.  We begun the day by talking about our collaborative projects between schools. The Juniors link to this project can be found in the links section on this blog.  The senior project is in its beginning stages - watch this space!
The next discussion was about the school visits to Palmerston North. This is scheduled for Week 8 of this term, the photography competition and also the expo scheduled for the coming holidays.
The lead teachers then shared their latest ICT happenings in their school.
Points to note - camera boxes - using lanards for the younger children to hang cameras around their necks.
Using the school network to post notices etc and website, moving towards becoming paper free!

In the afternoon we looked at managing change in schools - through our role as ICT leaders.  Jan led an interesting PD session highlighting important points.

Following this, we discussed as a group e-portfolios. 

Tuesday 17th May

Today Peter and I reviewed the information that was requested for our workshop on Wednesday.  We had a discussion about the points raised.  We also talked about the forthcomming ICT parents' workshop. We sent the note out that informs parents of the plans for next Tuesday evening and drew up some further information for staff. 

Student ICT conference

On Wednesday, we took eight children to an ICT conference, led by ourselves (lead ICT teachers from our cluster).  We took 4 senior children and 4 middle children.  The children were able to select workshops prior to the conference from a list compiled by the lead teachers.  Our children participated in workshops involving skills to use software such as Comic life and Kids Pix, online resources including study ladder, voice thread and study ladder.  They also experimented with some hands on activities using digital photography and clay animation.

Peter and myself led two activities - using digital photography and pages software to create a movie poster with the middle children and studying abstract photography with the senior children.

We have put the photographs from the day and the resources that we created to support this onto the school wikispace. 

Week 1 Term 2

Today Peter and I have met to plan our sessions for the student conference.  We are pleased with the sessions that we have developed - one for the senior children and one for the middle children.  For the seniors we have planned a session on digital photography and taking abstract images. For the middle children we have planned a session on using digital photography to create a movie poster using pages.  We designed a keynote presentation and also some work cards for the children to use during the session.   We also had a meeting with the children that we are taking to the conference - they were very excited to have been selected for such an event.

Following this we met with Mike to look at the ICT element of the teacher annual appraisals.  We were pleased to be able to make such positive comments about the staff and our team.

For the final part of the afternoon, we attended to some house keeping issues - raising some problems with TELA, emailing people about various issues including the school website, collecting a list of the broken hardware in school for equico and the installation of office 2010 on Liz, Kristy and Mike's machines. 

Easter Holidays

Over the Easter Holidays we have had to install a new UPS system. This was eventually done on Friday 29th May so we now have a system that can hopefully run through a power outage.

We also tried to put our new website live, however we were not set up as a Joomla website with WCN. Clinton contacted them and we should now be ready to go. Theoretically this should have been done during the final week of the Easter holidays, but unfortunately there still seems to be issues surrounding the migration.

Thirdly we had to fix Liz's office computer as this needed a new CD drive in as the old one was not working.

Preparation continues for the student conferences in week 2 of term 2, and hopefully the parent evening on the 24th May.

Saturday 19th March

ICT Day
Peter and I met today to attend to the following items:
1) Ordering new laptop from tela.
2) Work on staff meeting for Monday.
3) Work on the strategic plan.
4) Look at the website.
5) Work on beginning to design the photography session for the student conference.

Release day objectives for Faye - Week 7

        Order new TELA laptop

Get rid of the 3 OHP's

Put the screens onto TradeMe

Perhaps get a screen for the hall, or see if one of the old ones fits

Get the student presentation organised

Get the Opensource presentation organised

Get the simple ICT presentation organised

Load office 2011 onto Kristy's and Glenys's macbooks

Lead a staff meeting on where we are going

Think about IWB training

Get the website up to standard (before Monday so we can show staff)

Develop a plan for the photography competition

Finalise the strategic plan

Get started on documentation for school ICT started 

Have another clear out of old computer hardware that does not work - Faye to check each classroom and see which machines need clearing out. 

ICT PD Lead Teacher Day 2

Another busy day discussing the plans for our second year in the cluster. The rubric creation we did in the afternoon was good as it gave me some idea about what we should be looking for in our schools, related to the students, teachers and community. The morning session building up to that was also quite useful as it reinforced or reminded me of all the tools out there that we can use in our teaching.

The short session on the student workshops was interesting, I think we could have spent a little more time on that as it seemed a bit rushed at the end, but we now have something to focus on for that and look forward to sharing it with the students in week 2 of term 2.

Peter

ICT Blogging staff meeting

On Monday afternoon, some of the staff attended a meeting to get their blogs set up.  We went through the set - up procedure on blogger (this was helped by our new school email set-up).  We looked at design, posting, adding images and video.

We had an interesting staff discussion on our privacy policy regarding images of children and refreshed and informed all staff members of this.

Finally, we linked this together with our school wikispace, reminding each staff member that this is where they can find information surrounding blogging.

A very successful hour and a half ! 

test blog

hi Faye

Friday 11 March

An ICT day for Peter.

First 2 hours was spent trying to get easttle working for room 8, however we had several issues. The students got onto the test but could not see any of the text or pictures, they could see the questions though.

We purchased Office 2011 for Mac and installed it onto Tony's macbook. Unfortunately we still cannot do online registrations so resorted to a phone registration and ended up having to talk to Microsoft for the authentication code.

Fixed up Ros's computers so she now has 2 connecting to the Internet and one for games only.

Emailed Clinton for documentation templates so we can ensure we know passwords, hardware id's etc for school and it is not only in peoples heads.

Tried to download camp photos from a CD so we can have some confidence photos up on the wall, but unfortunately the CD was not readable. I did manage to get some more photos from the year 6 directory and the photos are now up on the wall and looking good.

All the student laptops now have power leads and are charging.

Room 10's new desktop is now running authentic office software after I registered it, again by phone.

That's about it.

Week 6 Term 1

This week Peter and I had our first release day for our ICT PD this term.  We had a rather extensive agenda to cover.
1) We met with Mike to discuss various issues for the school including eTAP, our school wiki spaces, our cluster group meetings, school equipment and the website.
2) We met with Jacqui B to begin to talk about the development of our new school website.  We have been working to maintain our existing website, this has proved rather problematic owing to a corrupt file on the website documentation. It is now up and running again on a temporary basis.
3) We attempted to purchase 'office for MAC' to enable word etc. to run on all computers in the school. We are currently having some problems as the programmes are out of date.  We as yet have not been able to purchase this as it has been out of stock in all shops that we have visited.
4) We planned an ICT staff meeting for 21st March.  All staff are requested to bring their laptops.  We have decided this term to look at our school wiki space, our class blogs and to revisit what is expected of us this year with in relation to our ICT Cluster responsibility.
5) We have made an ICT Notice board in the staff room to raise staff awareness of the current ICT activities in school.

Week 3 Term 1

This week, saw an incredibly busy week at Kilbirnie school.  We have been experiencing problems with our email, so after many conversations about it, we decided to go ahead with a change in email provider and made the beginnings of a transition from using 4d to gmail.  This involved Peter and I proving our authenticity as an educational establishment and then setting up gmail accounts.  Next week, Peter is going to make the final changes on this.
We also renewed our microsoft licensing agreement.
On Thursday we attended our first ICTPD cluster group meeting at Maranatha Christian School.  We began the session by working through our group wiki to confirm dates and ideas for the forthcoming year.  As the day progressed, it became more obvious that this year would hold much, much more progression in our ICT development.  In the afternoon we began to look at 'super clubs plus'.  Jan introduced us to the basic outline of how the site works and what the benefits are.  Peter and I decided that it might appeal to our middle/senior syndicate, but it might be a bit challenging for our younger children at this stage. 

14th Feb 2011

This week has begun with enthusiasm in the Junior syndicate.  I was delighted to see staff members using the data projector as an addition to their teaching in the hall. I demonstrated how to set it up and then two junior teachers led a singing assembly.

Later in the week, I was able to work with another teacher to solve a few technical hitches with etap and get her started on her blog. We were able to discuss possible uses for classroom blogs....this led me to update our wiki page and add plenty of ideas about class blogs. 

New Macbooks

After 2 hours on a Wednesday evening we finally got the newest macbooks imaged, not as easy as the older ones as Apple have decided to remove the firewire port.  The cloning from the external HD did not work as smoothly as we would have hoped so we ended up setting up a software update for each.

Also managed to fix the printing problem on Jacquis laptop, seemed as if there was some conflict between the print driver setup and the printer page. Each time you wanted more than one copy it multiplied it, effectively squaring the number of copies you recieved. Took out the collate button in the driver and it seemed to work.

Hopefully fixed up the dead spot for internet coverage at the back of the hall so both Jacquie and Rachel will be able to use the laptops there.

Week 2, Term 1 2011

We are continuing to image the student laptops.

Monday's staff meeting was dedicated to looking at performance management and electronic assessment.  Both of which are high priority for Peter and I.  Our performance management is changing to be syndicate focused, with a strong emphasis on ICT.  Mike has asked Peter and I to work with our syndicates on this.  We will also be moving towards using Etap this year.  We are initially going to enter our literacy reading ages and our NUMPA data.

I worked with my syndicate this week to go through the basic options and commands on Etap on Tuesday night and many syndicate members have already entered their data - Go them!!

Wednesday night saw Peter and I updating software on our new pod of macbooks and once again trying to rectify a few glitches on the staff computers.  We managed to fix several issues, so gave ourselves a big pat on the back!

We have also listed one of our now, out of use data projectors on trade me - watch this space to see what funds we raise.....

Year 2 of ICTPD

Week 1, Term 1
All the normal back to school glitches....Peter has been working to image all the student laptops - with the new macbooks not playing ball, the email has had a collapse and needs attention..., many teacher laptops not happy to be back at school.  All being attended too as we go along.

On an extremely positive note, many of our new interactive white boards are up and running and it is great to see the teacher enthusiasm for them.  We were also delighted to see our middle syndicate running literacy topic on blogging, emails and wikis! Fantastic!