Infolink

Rachel our ICT advisor/facilatator convinced me to do the Infolink course. There is nothing really new in this as many of the ideas date back to the 80's. However everything is put together in a linear fashion rather than the holistic approach we used back then. Rather than go our own way I decided to give this a good shot in terms of time allocation. It's strange revisiting old ideas from a new perspective but its had a positive spin off. Sometimes I think its a good idea to revisit old ideas and teaching strategies.

Our weblogs are ticking along nicely. The writing has clearly improved as the children realised it was being read more widely. Two of the older children have begun to target specific audiences which wasn't really possible in the past. Current work is based around paragraphing skills in relation to non fiction. Our next step will be to look at paragraph skills with fiction. The children are getting to choose which work goes on their blogs and they have become a rather picky when compared to the work they used to display on their classroom patches.

The new i-Mac and highspeed internet access has also proved popular. The kids have made great use of it in classroom work and have also learnt about online gaming as well. This is closely monitored as these also have chat facilities but there have been no problems to date. Our next goal is to set up a video exchange with another Mac school. I have been informed that this is easy. :)

The other internet goal is to redo our website and include some interactive features on it such as a guided tour of the school. The kids have also wondered if they can upload their hyperstudio games or if they would need to used some other software.