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.