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!