Kawhia+M5

Te Karahau and Leanne (principal) attended L@S for their first time. Leanne attended an excellent session called "Useful tools for Busy Principals" presented by Mike Malcom, principal at Leamington. He introduced Leanne to [|dropbox.com] and now she and at least one other teacher use it actively to make work more efficient and easier to share. Teachers had to write and save their class reports in dropbox. He also offered some excellent email protocol which has literally liberated Leanne (Barbara - if you have dropbox I can share the powerpoint with you - better if she puts it in her public dropbox and shares the url to the specific file here)

Te Karahau attended a session focusing on ipad and music, which he was amazed with - now we just have to find a way to buy enough for the school!

Leanne will be following up with Microsoft from their trade stand to come and give a presentation about Office 365 to the staff. They said they will travel anywhere so we will test them out :-) We also want to find out more about Onenote.

The greatest opportunity was networking and catching up with former colleagues. Leanne found out that Kawhia is not alone - she found another school has a very similar profile to that school and was able to share celebrations and ideas. Kawhia School's 2012 target is focused on raising student achievement in writing. Te Toi Tupu is providing the professional development with staff.. We have only had one writing PLD session so far so are very much in the early days. Implementation of writing ICT teaching and learning experiences is one of the strategic outcomes.

Our writing PLD will focus on teaching as inquiry for both school and individual teachers.

Students are active self-managed learners in maths through studyladder and sumdog, which is used to support the teaching programme. Teachers select specific tasks based on specific learning needs which the students are required to complete before trying some of the other challenges. Studyladder helps the teacher track what the student strengths and learning needs are and these were used to show parents during parent interviews.

Sumdog.com was recommended through Edmodo.com - students enjoy the basic facts focused website immensely and are more knowledgeable about how to use it than the teacher. This is not tracked as there is a cost component to it.

We are looking into sending at least one student to the film-making workshop that Barbara made us aware of to extend him, although Hamilton date and venue have yet to be confirmed.

We continue to use our Kawhia School facebook as an important medium to communicate with our school whanau as well as make contact with past students. [] Although we have only a school population of 43, we have 130 people following us.

The tablets purchased at the end of last year are being trialled by one teacher to use with partners where 'partner a' will create an image using a specific programme and give instructions to 'partner b' to try and recreate the image without showing it. They compare results after the instructions have been given.