Communicating: home & school

Now that the Beijing Olympics & Book Week 2008 rap has come to a conclusion, I decided to select a variety of extracts from my groups’ rap responses (sports articles, a few photos, a wrap rap up message) and combined them as a mini-newspaper (double-sided A4, folding down to make a simple four-paged booklet of The Shaggy Penrith Times), which will slip inside our school newsletter tomorrow. Price = three carrots.

The back cover of the booklet explains the educational parameters of this rap, shows a frame grab from the blog, and gives URLs for both the NSW DET rap blog site, and our own Library wiki pages, encouraging our parents and caregivers to look at the students’ work online.

It didn’t take me very long – but a wombat probably could have done it faster (see The Shaggy Gully Times by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley). An efficient way of communicating with the parents, and giving them access to further information!

A brochure that came out to promote National Reading Day – 3 September 2008 suggested doing something similar online, or in hardcopy, and that was always in the back of my mind as we added things to the school wiki pages, but it’s only now the rap is over I found time to dig back through the archives. Of course, schools needed to have registered between 3rd and 7th September, when the rapping schools were all deep into the rap! Maybe next year?

AGQTP NSW newsletter

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m off to demonstrate the new blog (and wiki) I set up for local schools in our interactive whiteboard professional support group. With perfect timing, a Departmental newsletter popped up today with three great articles about NSW schools incorporating IWBs into school programs.

Issue #1 (April) 2008 of the AGQTP NSW newsletter has its focus on Interactive whiteboards:

* “Working mathematically with interactive whiteboards” at Illawarra Grammar School, Figtree (p 2)

* “Not just all play” with Belmore South Public School and innovative ways to teach writing, especially narratives (p 3)

* “A catalyst for reflection and change” with St Canice’s Catholic Primary School in Katoomba (p 4).

The newsletter is a Quality Teacher Programme (QTP) project funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace relations. The issue mentioned above is also available online.