Brenda+-+Maungaraki



Hi my name is Brenda. I am the Assistant Principal and I teach a Year 7 and 8 class at Maungaraki School. My ICT goal for this year is to get my class to produce a fortnightly student newsletter using the Apple software Pages. This involves beginning with a newspaper based unit so students understand the contents of a newspaper and the purpose of each of these features. From there students will begin to build up their own newspaper with their choice of content. My other goal is for students to begin using the class blog for adding some of their own material and updating it so it becomes almost a diary about what is happening in Room 3. 26/5 Our class blog is finally beginning to come together. Students are about to post their recounts from camp with an image. 30/6 Our class blog is really up and running now. I have posted links for maths websites useful for basic facts revision and other maths. I have used it for recording events that happen during the week such as a comment about our author visit and a posted link for his website. Also a comment about our Careers week. I have also put on a Voki with a welcoming message, a cluster map to see where in the world people are checking our blog and also a hit counter to record visit numbers. We have not yet finished posting all recounts from camp but hope to do this before end of term so that each student has an item to begin with. We will be ready next term to launch our newspaper, as students have had plenty of practice writing reports after interviewing people and other necessary skills.[|Check out Room 3's Blog]



Great work Brenda- the blog looks great- I hope you are finding the parents are hitting it more often- an email with the link to your blog works well, as it is only a click away then! Nigel

22/9/08 Well here it is the end of term three and I have only just found the time to place a comment or two on my wiki. The term has been busy as usual however we have been successful with the publishing of our first copy of our class school newspaper. The students decided to call it the TOTARA TO KOWHAI TIMES as these are the names of the junior and senior syndicates. The students wanted to print it in colour however I had to explain the economics of this idea to them. So the idea grew that we could sell the newspaper just like any other paper so that we could offset the cost of the photocopying. This was a huge success and the students received as much satisfaction from selling their paper as they had from writing it. There was much celebration when we made over $20!! Anyway I have attached a copy of the first edition and we are currently attempting to get out our second edition before the end of the term. Despite my best attempts to place the student newspaper on here I have not been successful even when changing my file to a pdf so you may all have to wait to see the newspaper!!!!!!

The blog has taken a bit of a back seat while we complete other things however students do have items to add but not sure when this will happen!