Welcome Penrith PS to the 21st century!

In a new message from Michelle Du Ross-Smith, the next meeting for the PSP Regional Initiative IWB Middle Years is on Monday 15th June at 4pm at the Gallery, Mt Druitt Office.

The agenda for the meeting is to discuss how schools are going with their action plans and how have they collected data for the action research question “Does the use of Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom assist with student engagement in their education and therefore improve students’ numeracy, literacy and IT skills?”

Schools may like to share how they have been able to change the teaching pedagogy in the middle years to engage students as active learners through the use of interactive whiteboards. Could you please bring a copy of the schools action plan for the PSP initiative with you. As discusse at the previous meeting it is a requirement that School Plans incorporate the PSP IWB Middle Years Project.

Have Professional Development ideas suggested at previous meeting for staff been utilised or do schools need support to do this? Ideas from last meeting included:

* team teaching with staff members
* visits across project schools, visits to other best-practice schools
* focus on Quality Teaching elements such as higher-order thinking
* sharing resources, websites, creating a blog
* linking with the IWB Primary Project schools on TaLe.

As a network we need to discuss the interim report due to Equity on Friday Week 9, 26th June, relating to project targets and financial accountability requirements. A reminder funds are to be used for the professional development and relief of staff to participate in the project. Resources for the project may be purchased if they total less than 20% of the total allocation.

If you have anything else you would like to discuss at the meeting please let me know and Michelle can add it to the agenda. Please indicate if you will be attending this meeting by Friday 5th June via email or phone.

The next network IWB meeting will be held on Wednesday, 15th October 2008, at 3.45pm – 5pm.

The meeting will be at The Gallery, Mt Druitt District Office, unless any network schools have an interactive whiteboard and would like to invite the network.

Please email or phone Michelle Du Ross-Smith, Relieving PSP Consultant, to confirm you are able to attend the meeting.

If you’re finding the concept of “signing up” to edublogs a bit daunting, Scan editor Cath Keane developed this simple visual pathfinder for how to sign up:
http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/raps/identity08/pdf/signrapblog.doc

I tried emailing invitations from this site to everyone in the group, but the messages bounced back – unless you’d already signed up to Edublogs.

Regards, Ian

Penrith PS

If you could encourage your staff who are showing an interest in using the IWBs to attend this will be an inspirational session to get everybody going.

The Professional Learning afternoon will be held on Wednesday 11th June at St Marys PS from 4-5pm. RSVP to Michele. Afternoon tea will be provided.

Hope to see you all at the next meeting: 11th June at 4.00pm.

The purpose of this blog is to have a space where teachers, teacher-librarians and PSP (Priority Schools Program) consultants and committee members in our professional learning group can share the journey of our forthcoming adventure with interactive whiteboards (often known as IWBs). At the same time, we can become more familiar with blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools and ICT (information communication technologies), and gain insights into how to start using them in classrooms and learning spaces.

In the coming weeks and months, many of us will be grappling with preparations to integrate the use of interactive whiteboards into our NSW DET school programs. (Being the Internet, this blog may also end up with interstate and international browsers and contributors.) We know that interactive whiteboards have the potential to allow us to make powerful enhancements to programs and the learning of students, upskilling of teachers and new ways to communicate with our school communities.

I have organised this blog, and a wiki, for us to be involved in as part of our first joint IWB project. (The wiki is based on the picture book, Arthur by Amanda Graham and Donna Gynell, which is the book being used for the upcoming ALIA National Simultaneous Reading Day on Wednesday 21st May at 11.00 am (Term Two, Week 5). The Penrith Reading Project: Books from Birth group, another of the local PSP initiatives, has also been invited to join us for the reading.

I will be soon be showing representatives of the IWB2 PSP group how to access (and add to) the wiki site, and highlight some teaching ideas and interactive TaLe activities (learning objects) to support the book. Even if schools do not have interactive whiteboards available to them yet, the interactive activities can still be used on regular computers, or via projection devices. Please check your email for the memo from our PSP consultant, Michele Hedge.

Michele and I are looking forward to seeing you at the meeting (13th May at 3.30pm) to get our joint projects off and running!

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