Engineer wanted!!

We are nearing the completion of the design stages for our playground seating and shade project, but we need some help! The footings for the wall and posts in the plan need to be looked at by an engineer. If there are any parents who are (or know) an engineer who might be able to help with this please could you get in touch with me! paul.sibson@fendalton.school.nz.

Thank you.

Fendalton on Google

Throughout 2008 Rob Clarke and I worked on setting up FOS Live, a new way to share our learning online. We began with the aim of creating a new site which was easy to update by the right people in our school but more importantly was a portal for sharing the learning that takes place every day across our school. Running in parallel to our work on the website was the continuing drive to make better use of online tools that allow children to collaborate and share online. By combining these two strands we have been able to create FOS Live, a website which shows learning as it is happening across the whole school. Whenever a child, or teacher, in school posts to their blog it appears instantly on FOS Live. Whenever children upload new photos to their class Picassa account, those photos are instantly fed into slideshows on FOS Live.

This has all been possibly thanks to the incredible (and free) online tools that Google provide. Blogger, Google Docs, Picassa, YouTube, Google Apps and Google Calendar are all tools that we use extensively across the school.

Keep your eye out in The Christchurch Press next week for a story all about us and how we are using these online tools to support our children's learning. We also appeared on the official google blog in 2008, you can read the post here.

Of course, sitting underneath this is a robust digital safety programme designed to make sure that children understand the risks of using the internet and how to keep safe online. We never use the full names of children online. Parents give permission for all images and video footage that goes online.

Soaring Blade!

This morning, year 4, 5 and 6 welcomed two visiting authors from Australia to Fendalton School. Meridith and Hilary Badger are hugely popular authors of the "Go Girl" and "Zac Power" series of books. They spent time with our older students, inspiring them with the power of stories and even giving some of them their own secret spy names (my spy name is Soaring Blade and I look forward to being referred to as such in the coming weeks!). It was great to see our students in awe of the authors and, from the discussions on the way out of the village, we will be seeing some budding story-tellers emerging very soon.

A big thank you to Desna for arranging the visit and doing a great job of organising the event, including another fabulous performance from our Kapahaka group. Meredith and Hilary were blown away by the welcome that they received, the boys and girls who performed overcame any nerves to do a stunning job, as always. Spine tingling!

An exciting year ahead.

Welcome back to school! It has been a long, hot summer for those who sensibly stayed in New Zealand through the Christmas and New Year period, however for me it was a cold, cold winter in the northern hemisphere visiting all my family and friends back home. I had a fabulous time away and loved seeing my family, but it is great to be back and looking forward to a really exciting new year at school.

The staff kicked off the year with a bang last week with another very successful retreat in the mountains. We set up camp at Pudding Hill Lodge and had a very productive (and fun) time planning the year for the children.

One of the main discussion points over the two days was how we can do a better job of aligning our assessment and reporting procedures. It was broadly agreed that the current written reports sent home to parents in term 4 are not feeding into the children's learning as well as we would like. The reports are too late in the year to have a direct impact on learning and need to be more reflective of what is happening in the classroom.

I asked the leadership team to write down what they believed student reports should achieve and their thoughts are shown through the wordle picture below. It is pretty clear that "Learning" is the key element and we believe that a reporting system should be a natural part of our assessment process. We would like our reporting to be reflective of what is happening in class and feeds into discussions with the children about their learning and next steps. Over last year I visited or spoke with a number of other schools to see how they report to parents about children's progress. Those visits and the discussions with the staff last week have led to us revamping the reporting process for 2009. I will post more details about this in the next few weeks along with details about a series of meetings with parents to look at the new format and gather feedback.