Duration: 2:17
Principal Jane Danielson explains the different applications they are using to connect with their community. Their aim is to connect with as many people as possible both pushing information out and encouraging feedback and engagement from the community.
So with our motto of tikaranga, the weaving together - the right path, it’s really important that the elements of home, school, and child are woven together but also the elements of creative and collaborative and agile learning, and e-learning facilitates all of those things.
We created a blog which is our website. We have a wiki where we store information and we also use Facebook and Twitter to reach out to the community and invite them to take part in what we’re doing. Being the foundation principal, as well as being a new principal, I thought that it would be a useful tool for the next year’s schools (because there are always schools being built in New Zealand) so I thought that it would be a useful document for them to see what we did and when we did it and I also wanted to reach out to the people who were in the community.
One of the things that I wanted to do right from the beginning was to involve as many people as possible in our journey. So, for example, on our Facebook today one of our parents actually posted a video that she had found of 21st century schooling and she’s posted that on our Facebook page, so that’s fabulous. It’s a way of us communicating, not just pushing information out there but it’s not just push marketing, it’s the pull marketing we’re trying to get people to engage with us and ask questions so that we can respond.
We also wanted to gain the community’s ideas and beliefs and values that we can implement at Hingaia Peninsula School and use those ideas and collaborative decision making with the board.
We envisage that our children will use MyPortfolio as their e-portfolio. That will be a way for them to collaborate both within school and out of school with their families, both here and overseas. We also imagine that our teachers will use Google Apps for their planning and that the children will eventually be able to opt into workshops using those Google docs so that there’s that transparency of learning for the students and for the teachers and that the parents are able to see what’s happening in the school.