Hanging Out at Toko School

Hanging Out at Toko School
Originally uploaded by rache65.

What better way to spend the last day of term than hanging out at Toko School. Everyone feeling quite relieved that ERO had done their dash & been & gone. I went to see the great presentations that the children had done on their Action Learning. But the Toko curse hit me again & after this picture my batteries went flat! There was a variety of presentations about Mt Taranaki from Claire & Kelly's children from Tourist attractions on the mountain to what to do if there is an eruption. I enjoyed the musical presentation and visuals from Cathy's class who had illustrated the song Horse with No Name, presented on the Data Projector and with musical accompaniment & singing :-) Heather's children had some interesting digital artwork to present based on photographs of themselves - look out for the teaching resource for this on TKI Learning Experiences. They were really effective. Have a great holiday everyone :-)

Farewell Simon

spspukeariki
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Off to Puke Ariki to farewell Simon Pickford today. Simon has been managing the Taranaki Information Network - Puke Ariki Portal computers in our schools for the last 2 years and is off to work for the New Plymouth District Council on another IT project there. Here he is with our SPS children impressing the ComputerWorld judges to gain a Digital Excellence Award. Thanks Simon for your contributions to our cluster - delivering workshops at our first Teacher Only Day & after school workshops. Also for continuing to work with us right up to the end and setting things in motion for our 6 Eastern schools to get their PukeAriki computer (& Internet subsidy) - Don't forget Principals from these schools to get back in touch with PukeAriki and say YES - your computers are ready and waiting to be delivered and installed to your networks!

Infolink Over (Nearly)

Infolinkers
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Our last Infolink session at St Josephs. Phew what an effort guys! Well done for your hard work, persistence, patience & enthusiasm - all in different measures from different areas :-) We chose Infolink as a PD focus because of course we think Information Literacy is really important in the skills set of a 21st Century learner, but also because this course is school based and is based on affecting classroom practise. There has been some awesome things happening around our schools as you all work through Action Learning with our kids. The big positives have been the sharing within and across our schools and the excitement in learning that has been articulated by some of our children. I hope you have all fed back your evaluations on the course, some of which we have already discussed in other forums. Still one assignment to go which I guess some of you will be working on over the holidays - check out the links on Interact that may help you with this.

Huiakama School

Huiakama kids have been doing some great work this term! Good to look at their portfolios and I love the little business cards they have been making. Some of the work they have been doing on Len Lye, animations & flip books fitted in well with the work we did today on cartoon animation. The children storyboarded a very basic 8 scene animation. I showed them some animation examples & they set to work - creating characters in Paint & animating them using PowerPoint. They made the connection very easily between flip books and the changing slides in PowerPoint. Learning outcome - not sure - an extension on the work they have been doing already & a bit of fun at the end of the term. Clare and I went onto Interact where she learnt to upload documents for sharing G & T Policy - this is a great forum for sharing so keep putting stuff up there guys.

Stratford Primary School

Yay, after a year puzzling Kerry and I finally worked out how to use the school Intranet. All you need is an index.html page saved in the right place & voila you have a 'front end' - web interface instead of seeing a load of directory files. Don't follow that - no matter - you have to see it in action to understand. We have spent 3 days working with a team of Y8 students creating webpages for their class page. These pages are to showcase the what is happening in their classroom. The children brainstormed ideas for appropriate pages then chose the ones they thought most relevant - Our Work, Art Gallery, Sports & Events + the Home Page. They discussed a design theme but once they got started on individual pages the theme went out the window as the kids experimented with banners, colours, buttons, linked pictures & shapes - so every page was very different. They looked at other school sites for ideas - & I didn't tell them (honestly) the first site they looked at was Toko School! One student was straight into Paint trying to create a road sign that he could cut up into Hotspot links from FrontPage - this didn't eventuate as he got frustrated with his Drawing skills & opted the easy way into Frontpage buttons. The hard lessons learned were in File Management when on the second day one of the students overwrote the home page with his own page & it was completely lost. We had an interesting discussin on using mistakes as learning experiences :-) The children were enthusiastic about using their Intranet pages as a media to publish their work and communicate with the school. They were wanting to take it further and publish to the web where they would have a wider audience. This would be the logical next step and easy to do through SchoolZone hosting. Now the structure has been set up and some skills learnt, the challenge for Kerry is to keep the enthusiasm going and continue to make opportunities and time to publish to the school through their pages.

Makahu School

Makahu Tunnel
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Welcome Eden, Jenny & Hannah to Taranaki. Good to visit today & touch base with where you are at and where you want to go through the opportunities provided by the cluster. Eden has some great ideas about using MSN to communicate & share with the wider school community. Today we helped all the kids set up their own group area in MSN which they are going to use as an online portfolio of their work. It was a good opportunity as we worked together to reinforce cybersafety issues. Though their groups are private they are only so through invitation and anyone can email them to ask to access their sites. We talked about keeping personal details private and what to do if they received email or found sites that were not appropriate.

Te Maunga Taranaki

Te Maunga Taranaki
Originally uploaded by rache65.

This is why I am not very good at time management when I make my way to our Eastern schools - I keep having to stop & take photos.

St Josephs

Mindmapping
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Busy time supporting Infolink at St Josephs. Working with John, Vicky & Kim. Here are Kim's Y2's mapping their ideas - see the beginnings of a Venn - to sort their ideas that fit between categories. Lots of good discussion & questions - you can nearly hear the brain cells ticking over. Good stuff :-)We spent some time (hard work it was too for the little guys) formulating good questions. We talked about fat questions and thin questions by thinking about the types of answers their questions might generate. Moved on to looking at a variety of information sources and practised using the internet to search for relevant information on key words.

Rocky Shore

Rocky Shore
Originally uploaded by rache65.

Vicky's classroom display on the Rocky Shore showing some of the various stages of the Action Learning process. It was really hard to find book information sources on this topic as every other Taranaki class seemed to be doing it too. On the day this class visited the rocky shore at Kawaroa there were 3 other schools there too! Can you imagine over 150 kids & teachers out on the rocks. It is great to see so many of our schools turn to our environment for their learning focus - if they weren't out on the beach they were up the mountain. Look out on Interact for some links to Rocky Shore resources.