Around the Schools

Just a quick round up of what I've been doing around the Bard Wired schools in the last couple of weeks. This is just the tip of the iceburg - loads of things happening ICT-wise that I'm not involved in!

WebChallenge is a big thing at SPS and St Joseph's at the moment. My role is to help out on the 'How To' side of things. A sense of deja vu - been here, done that.
It's great to see the teachers released at SPS to work with me and the kids, Tracy is making her own pages about Te Reo week - a quick learner too :-) I think it's really important that when kids begin to make pages they have an understanding of how they work so this little activity HTML Easy Peasy is a good starter to play around with basic code before they go onto use a Web Editor. It becomes glaringly obvious when we start working on projects like this how lacking many schools are in having good software. What i would give to have site wide licenses for StudioMX in all our schools but all we have is Microsoft everything and all we have to work with graphics is MS PhotoEditor or Paint. If you want a site to look original you need to create original graphics so will look at trying to get some serif software available and also ArtRage to create banners and buttons.

Many of our schools are well underway on the Great NZ History Challenge - lots of research and reading happening, clues being shared, emails back and forth - some challenges have already been cracked. Thanks Richard for all the work and time you are putting into this :-)

Toko School have been making documentary movies to demonstrate their learning about "Sound". Heather's kids have been hard at work finalising their entry to the NZ Herald Make a Newspaper competition. This has been an event at Toko for the last few years, a huge effort involved but the learning taking place is so much more than just desk-top publishing. Last year a special mention, this year..... certainly a quality product.