Matau School

As always – great to be out at Matau! Lots of things to go over today from discussing NavCon, trying to find out more details about next year’s Infolink course, learning how to create an Autoplay feature on a CD so it starts running in the right place. Richard has started sending some work home on disk with home sample books & needs parents to be able to access it easily. Updating & uploading the website. We tried to change the hit counter but it still isn’t working properly??? – still need to problem solve this one. Blogging is big at Matau School & all the kids have gone one – great writing & communication tool. They are all on blogger.com too – discussed the open internet environment as being unmoderated – Richard is monitoring things closely to keep track of what is happening with the kids blogs. Talked about kids blogging places as an alternative to blogger.com. Had a look around but not really much out there that we can find. Docking time at Matau so all the school were out to help – the kids took some photos & we made a little movie (as Richard say - hyped up slideshow) entitled Baaaa! The senior students are involved in a research project ‘The Road to Matau’ and were looking at ideas of how to present and share their work. I showed them the work I had done on ‘Jeffares War Archives’ and how it had been put together in webpages. Whether they make movies, powerpoints, or webpages – they can all be hyperlinked together so they can have a presentation that runs off a disc. There next challenge is to organise their work (categorise) and plan a structure & decide on presentation.
Called in to visit Huiakama & new Principal Claire Jordan on the way back to town. Claire is keen to be involved in what the cluster has to offer – has done an Infolink course earlier this year & is definitely on the right wave length. Looking forward to going back out there later in the term. Marilyn is taking WITTs computing courses once a week in town on a Friday and playing around on her home computer upskilling herself – good stuff Marilyn. Couldn’t go past Toko without dropping in to say Gidday Richard back into it after a week catching up from the holidays. Check out the 6 Stars http://www.toko.school.nz/