ePrincipals Hui – Rotorua

An ePrincipals’ Workshop day was held in Rotorua ahead of the annual Learning@Schools conference. Thank you Cam & Eddie for facilitating this day for us - it was a great opportunity to further develop the connections between all of us working within the New Zealand Schools Video Conferencing network. Some old friends and new as more clusters have join the eLearning network - some supported through ICTPD, some with EHSAS, many with interim funding for eLearning Cluster Leadership and some independent but all together for the same reason to collaborate together to improve opportunities and learning outcomes for our students.

There were ePrincipals from all elearning clusters: OtagoNet, FarNet, AorakiNet, Volcanics, Baylink, Cantatech, SILC, WELCom, TaraNet, CentreNet, CoroNet & WestNet; representatives from Paerangi, Westmount School, Southern Regional Health School, the Correspondence School, Kavanagh College, Aotea College & Manawatu College. Also off and on throughout the day were most of the team from the MOE eLearning team as well as Marg from Core-Ed. A group of mentor Principals from elearning schools participated in the workshop day and helped lead small group discussion.

The agenda for the day was around the nuts & bolts things like programmes & processes around the Virtual Learning Network and the enrolment of students; the requirements of leading an elearning cluster such as action plans, objectives, reporting & review including a research component. There was discussion about the role of the ePrincipal, cluster expectations, & leadership development and PD to support that. Although many of us VC together once a month we have never had such a complete turn out of personnel as we have today and our VC meetings tend to focus more on the management side of things than areas of professional learning such as working on developing our own leadership capabilities.

This was a really valuable day for me with lots to move me forward with in developing the TaraNet cluster:

• Finding out what our contract is so we can develop this into an Action Plan 2008
• Developing a PD programme drawing on the experience of other clusters
• Exploring a new lms for TaraNet & our cluster schools – probably Moodle
• Working with our eteachers to use Tandberg content server to record & save lessons, explore LAMs & exe editor for developing sequenced learning activities, Adobe Connect – how can we use this
• Setting up my own VC connection from home so I can access all of my schools and connect with the wider network more readily
• Working further with schools in our region who are looking at beginning with Video Conferencing
• Developing relationships with our local tertiary (WITT) & community education
• Further developing our lead teacher group and getting more support for them from school Principals – they are the ones who will really drive things in their own schools
• Working with the wider community to further improve the broadband network in our region by investigating how we can develop a ‘loop’ that will in the future hook into national networks such as the proposed National Education Network (NEN) – look to Otago as they are developing this themselves now.

Many of these things have been sitting in my ‘must do some work on’ basket for some time but now with a full time position I feel like I can begin to make some headway with them.