St+Peter+Chanel+Milestone+5

**__ Milestone Report # 5 __**
 * Name of School: ** St Peter Chanel
 * Name of lead teacher: ** Bridget Russell
 * Principal: ** Debbie Waldron
 * Date: ** May 2008

This year we had two new staff members who have been introduced to the Otakou ICTPD Cluster, both attended the New Cluster Members workshop. All staff have reset their personal, class and Schoolmaster goals, one of which is also an appraisal goal for 2008. Due to changes in staff the use of the protopage reflective journal has not been as consistently maintained as in the past, this is on our agenda for Term 2. Three members of staff attended the Wikispace workshop held in February and have set up new wikispaces which are updated with news, ideas and photographs. All teaching staff attended a second wikispace workshop where they continued to develop their skills and knowledge in this area. Particular difficulty was experienced by the staff when attempting to add photographs to the wikispaces using Photobucket. Staff collectively decided to leave using Photobucket until individual tuition could be benefited from. A new wikispace was created for a staff member when problems with her original wikispace were unable to be remedied. Links to class wikispaces are on our school website, where each teacher also takes responsibility for maintaining their class page. Two members of staff attended the Schoolmaster workshop on assessment and reporting but unfortunately due to accessing the schoolmaster site they were unable to participate. This problem was later resolved by a visit from Derek from Schoolmaster. The teaching staff visited Musselburgh and Andersons Bay schools to see ICT and Inquiry in Action. These visits proved to be very informative and beneficial to us as we begin our major Inquiry unit this term. We have already been able to apply some of what we saw on these visits to our teaching. We continue to focus on ICT in our staff meetings where time is allotted to discuss and share concerns, new ideas and findings. This time is invaluable as a support and teaching tool. In April we had a staff meeting PD where we were introduced to the EPIC website through the National Library. This was accessed to support a mini inquiry on the ANZACs and is now being used for our Brain inquiry. In the last term holidays we had a day where all the staff gathered to attend an inquiry planning meeting. We focused on revising our key understanding and preparing for our ‘Tuning In’ activities.