Visit+Feedback+2011

Annette Found the visit to Fairfield Int. the morning most inspirational. Was very impressed with the lap top system and the possibilities this could have in our school with our year 7 and 8 classes. Also feel that the senior teacher at Fairfield (Erin) seemed to know what she was talking about and had a good direction and philosophy which sounded as though it would fit with our thinkings. Thanks Barbara for organising this. Very thought provoking.  Catriona It was great meeting Erin and hearing about her 1:1 class. Kristen and I are now looking into setting one up in our school. We are hoping to get Board approval and this budgeted for so we can start the class at the beginning of the school year. Erin talked about their experience with UltraNet and infrastructure problems. We now have good infrastructure and this will be improved with fibre in 2012. We have decided not to go with UltraNet but to use Google Docs and use the Hapara software for our LMS. I was keen on this when I went to the breakout at Learning at Schools in February but felt the timing wasn't right for our staff at that stage. This year we have used Google Docs more and it makes sense to look into this now. Kristen is keen to spend some more time with Erin talking through her programme in the lead up to starting her own 1:1 class. Amanda The visit allowed us to look at having students bring their own laptops to school, we are considering beginning with a laptop day, one day a week and continuing to build on our links with reporting to parents, class blogs and student self assessment. Visit to Pt England School. - Steve

One of the most noticeable features of my visit to Pt England school was the very high level of

engagement from the children in every classroom we visited. Those with ‘personal’ mini-laptops

were fully ‘on-task’ whatever that task might have been. Giving the responsibility of owning a

personal device to the children seems to have been a significant motivational factor and lends itself

to engaging the Learning Competencies form the NZC/Managing Self in particular. Limiting these devices to Y5 and above is an interesting point too as the Y4/5 room experiment was

deemed not to have worked too well.