Tuesday 1 February 2005

Eltham Primary

Great to be back & to catch up with everyone around the cluster. Have been busy planning ahead for Learning@School, sorting out Infolink enrolments & the Teacher Only Day - Phew lots to do & busy out in schools too!
Very interesting to be involved with Eltham on their PD Day - Zeroing In On Quality Teaching. Chris Harwood is researching Curriculum Integration (CI) in partnership with Opunake and Eltham Primary School. There will be a lot that Eltham will be able to share with the rest of us in this exciting new project - schedule a couple of Wine Not Networks @ Eltham!

It is really positive to return to Eltham & see so much progress being made on the Infrastructure & the learning & teaching with ICTs - It just goes to show you that it won't happen overnight but it will happen! There are 10 Apple desktops all working (most things are) in the IT room and all the classes now have their own network log on. 5 new iBook G4s have been purchased along with a COWs to trial. Kimberly's PC Pod is also up & running in her classroom. And everyone is busy using them! Lots of kids around school with cameras now that Elise is on the job :-) and they will be used more and more for 'autophotography' & 'photoelicitation' Some of the tools of Chris's research.

On my three days here i have spent much of the time in the IT room. Yesterday I worked with Heather & Sue to help them reintroduce their classes to using the Apple desktops. A major focus was learning how to log on, open applications and save their work. For littlies this was still probably quite a big learning step. But little and often and it will be second nature to them. Need some suitable software for the Junior School - Image Blender (instead of KidPix) & Kidspiration would be good. Media Blender would also be good across the school. It would be great if Software companies provided Facilitators with free full versions of all software so we could model its use in classes (& get lots of cool stuff on our computers!)

Working with Kimberly and her kids using Keynote for presentations. Tomorrow i try & help Bernadette sort out the management & uploading of the web pages - hopefully with more success than i had last time. Will also be spending time with Megan reviewing IT & Cybersafety Policies, Strategies & Action Plans. Not to forget time spent working with possible computer mentors (?) Brushing them up on network, file management, internet, applications skills. But as usual i know that they are going to be able to teach me more than i could ever teach them :-)

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