EPS

Welcome Liz to Bard Wired! Liz Malone has just taken over as Principal @ EPS. I spent some time bringing her up to speed on our cluster’s learning journey together so far. Phew – hope I didn’t confuse Liz too much!! But she is all logged on to Interact now – and able to check out our milestones there and try and get her head around it in her own good time. I also made sure to tell her what a great teaching team she has joined but hey she had already figured that one out.

Had a short time at staff meeting to introduce the DLOs (Digital Learning Objects) to the EPS staff - which turned into a bit of a fizzer as Firefox doesn't play a lot of them - i think something to do with the ActiveX on the pages (Firefox doesn't support ActiveX- which is one reason it is a more secure browser than Internet Explorer). I hate wasting teachers' time at staff meetings specially with technical difficulties!! Oh well, we did in the end get to browse some of the collection, staff were interested and keen to try out some of the CHOCOLATE DLOs. (It was great to find a relevant resource - the DLO collection is not wide enough yet to make relevant connections to a lot of classroom topics) Some advice for teachers - plan a structured use of DLOs to support learning in the classroom (as you would any learning resource) I am a little worried because these resources are digital & some of them are pretty cool then they will be used randomly, out of context, perhaps as rewards (some teachers still do this!!) and not in the powerful ways they could be used. Before you begin to use DLOs with your kids i recommend you read this article from Learning Media - Quality Teaching Using Digital Resources.

Bernadette is really progressing on the web site maintenance and has learnt how to create new links and make new pages so the newsletters can be archived and available on line. The real challenge is file management – how you organize your files so you can link to the right ones, & upload the right ones. Looking good check out www.eltham.orcon.net.nz Lots more photogalleries to check out there too.

I know it’s not my job to do technical stuff but if it’s a 5 minute job it’s worth it if its going to make the difference with a teacher getting onto it with their kids. (Though we all know it’s rarely 5 minutes ;-) So there were a couple of little jobs like that & worthwhile doing too…


Jackie’s kids are starting a unit on Chocolate so they spent some time exploring KidPix and decorating chocolate cakes - you can see more of their yummy chocolate cakes here and there is a full lesson plan on our Interact site.