Lady of Lourdes - ICT Cluster Day 19/6/08

What a fantastic day. Thank you to our hosts Jacinta and Jodi for the opportunity to watch Inquiry learning in action. It was great to have the opportunity to interact with your students as they worked. A special thank you to our lovely student guide 'Waikeria.' She representted your school showing courtesy and peacefulness.

Highlights from our perspective for continuing our ICT journey

• Internet Integrity/Safety - We were impressed that the school's practice around internet access for students was linked closely to their school's value system. We intend to "creatively SWIPE" your ideas around this to ensure safe internet access.
• Tuakana/Teina (Buddy system) It was great to observe the senior students reinforcing their own learning by taking their skills and guiding the junior students in their use of Kidspix
• School Webpage - It was refreshing to see alternative ways to communicate with the wider community about student learning, administrative notices and school events calenders etc
• We agreed with their process of borrowing ideas from existing models to create a 'best fit' model that caters for the needs and the special character of the school.
• Students Blogging: Going into today, we have had reservations about our students being able to blog without teacher checkpoints. We were pleased to hear about "Blogmeister" and it's ability to be screened by first requesting teacher approval before going out into the deep dark World Wide Web. Yee Haa!
  

Where to from here?

We intend to feedback to our staff information gained from this day. We will then choose a focal point for further development and invest time in this area.

I.C.T Professional Development for our Staff

We came to a realisation that in order to move forward with ICT in our school, we needed to have regular scheduled times to upskill our staff. Firstly, we developed a survey to find focus areas for all our staff, including our Teacher Aides to ascertain what gaps they had in their own knowledge and confidence in implementing effective ICT in the classrooms. From this survey we have developed a long term professional development plan and are currently meeting once a week with all teachers to continue upskilling and empowering them. Initially we were having constant problems with the 'basics' e.g accessing the Internet, printing to the photocopier etc. Now that all of these problems have been ironed out, we feel that we are in a position to increase our momentum with ICT. We have decided to focus on developing our skills with using existing programmes that we have readily available e.g Powerpoint, ensuring that the programme's potential is maximised for student learning.

Our ICT Inquiry Journey thus far

We are beginning to make in-roads with ICT inquiry. Our next step is to look at other ICT models in order to develop an ICT model that is tailor-made for the students at our school . The current model we have developed is still being reviewed and trialled to check whether it fits across all curriculum areas.

Our current model is as follows:

Area for Development
Needs/Extension/Future Plans

Students/Staff/Gaps and Strengths

• Where are they?
• What knowledge and skills do they bring?
• What are their learning styles?

Research

• Consult the Literature and report back
• Syndicate/School-Discussion and Consultation
• Talk with Experts

Trial

• Prepare a proposed way forward to implement:
• Ensure all teachers are familiar with the intended outcomes

Evauate

• Reporting and Sharing the results of the trial
• Writing up the programme/protocols etc

Implement

• School wide implentation
• Teacher reflection/journals
• Senior management monitor/observe
• Experts monitor/observe

Review

• Takes place after a sustained implentation period