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.