Macandrew+Bay+Milestone+5

At Macandrew Bay School we are pleased with the progress and development in ICT skills and pedagogical knowledge that we can clearly see in our teachers. This is flowing through into classroom programmes and the children are directly benefiting. In the year to date we have sent two staff to the Rotorua Conference and to Auckland to have a tour around schools with exciting schoolwide ICT programmes (Principal and Lead Teacher). This started the year in an energized and motivated way and has really helped me as Principal see where our school is headed with ICT. On our return we presented a session on Thinking Skills at the Cluster Re-launch in March. Our Lead Teacher was one of the Cluster Facilitators last year and so he has run in-school staff meetings on blogs for all staff. As a result all class teachers have set up a class blog that they are adding to frequently and the children and parents are enjoying seeing their learning documented in this way. We are also excited to see the hits we are getting on our blogs from all over the world. Senior children have had a lot of involvement with the blogs taking photos of class events and visiting speakers, posting reports, uploading and posting photos and images etc. Class blogs have also been used so children can access Maths, Literacy/Spelling games and homework tasks. As a school we support each other’s ICT learning in staff meetings and in our spare time. Our URL links are In Term 2 all staff have enrolled in at least one of the workshops on offer from the Cluster. All staff visited Musselburgh and Andersons Bay Schools in Term 1. In Term 2 we are hosting a visit to our school for the rest of the Cluster. 3 staff also went to the Jamie Mackenzie Seminar. We have an ICT target as one of our annual targets and have developed an ICT skills individual checklist to help us monitor the progress that children are making in their skills and use of ICT tools. In Term 1 the whole school taught a fully integrated topic using the Kath Murdoch Inquiry Model for Science. We used a Thinking Matrix and the Senior Syndicate used an MI/Blooms Taxonomy Integrated Matrix for the children to use for their learning activities. Inquiry Journals were also kept to document learning in at least half of our classes. We made continuing use of established tools within the school – Thinking Hats, Thinking Keys, graphic organizers etc. Established staff shared their knowledge with new staff to support them. We feel we have been able to consolidate last year’s PD Cluster learning very effectively and are now seeing the exciting application of things we learned about last year eg blogs and Inquiry models. This is despite a change of Lead Teachers as we are now onto our third Lead Teacher after 5 terms in the PD Cluster. This term’s workshops should help broaden our skills and repertoire of ICT applications within our classrooms even more.
 * __ PRINCIPAL __**** Bernadette Newlands **
 * __ LEAD TEACHERS __**** T.1 Richard Murray **
 * T.2 onwards Beth Wells – Junior **
 * Judy Hawker – Senior **