iPad or laptops? A whole school inquiry.

At Fendalton School, we like to make sure that our children are given great opportunities to use technology. We believe that technology is an integral part of children's lives and will continue to be so as they move into the workforce in the years to come.

Each year we spend some money updating our hardware so that it is useful and effective. This year, we have a choice to make. The new Apple iPad has a great deal of potential for education and we have decided to explore this potential with our children. However, the children are already very familiar with laptops so these might be a better option.

We have an iPad in school and it is being tested by all the classes to see what works and what the problems are. We will use the feedback from the teachers, children and community to make our final decision on buying new laptops or iPads.

This is a great opportunity for our children to take part in some authentic and purposeful writing. So, if you have an opinion on this and would like to have your say, please visit our new blog and present your ideas!

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.