Belmore South Public School

Our Principal, Ms Gail Dyer, was invited to Canberra earlier this month to be awarded with a National Quality Teaching Award for Excellence as a Principal. Here she is sharing her success with our local member the Hon. Tony Burke MHR and Minister for Agriculture.

Ms Dyer was one of 52 educators from across Australia who were recognised for their work in education. She was one of 6 principals who achieved a highly commended and one of only 2 primary principals. Along with the Certificate of Recognition presented to Ms Dyer by the Deputy Prime Minsiter, Julia Gillard, the school has received $15 000 to put towards continuing to improve our students’ learning.

Ms Dyer stressed it is the quality of Belmore South Staff who are responsible for the recognition. She may lead them in their professional learning but as she reminds people who ask they are the ones who take the ideas and incorporate them into their quality classroom teaching practices. They have also embraced and acknowledged the importance of embedding technology into all learning experiences. Every teacher in the school confidently uses Interactive Whiteboards and many are skilful users of Web 2.0 applications.

She also feels she has great support and superb role models for the younger teachers in Mrs Kim Pericles who is a world leader in the use of Web 2.0 applications in her classroom, Ms Judi Leonard who led the development of ICT confidence as an Intel: Teach to the Future Tutor. Mr Greg McGuinness who translated his excellence as a classroom teacher into our magic Mr Computer. Mrs Vanessa Jenkins who is in there always ensuring she is leading the way.

We’re back. It’s only taken a term to get back to blogging. So many things happen in a school day, week, term that to have the luxury of blogging is just too much. The thing is  . . . it’s getting back into the habit. Maybe it’s the fact that next Friday May 9, 9 staff will be attending the Will Richardson, Judy O’Connell Seminar. Teachers and students are switching on and into blogging as part of their daily routine. Anyway watch this space as our School Blog gets itself back together.

John and Kath from Invercargill in New Zealand visited our school on Tuesday. John, Principal of St. Therese’s Primary School received a scholarship to research the use of ICT in schools across Australia and NZ. His wife Kath is a teacher at Sacred Heart Primary School.

They are doing some very exiting things with technology in Invercargill and talking to both of John and Kath we learned a lot about visible thinking and developing a curriculum for the 21st Century.

John and Kath gave most of our staff a quick introduction to Kidspiration a program we have just acquired and are about to start using in 2008 to support our thinking routines.

Sitting and talking with both John and Kath gave us new insights and ideas. It would seem fairly certain that we will be in touch with both John and Kath and their schools in the near future.

Thanks for your time John and Kath.

Mrs Pericles (in the red hat) has been recognised by the NSW DET and Microsoft for her outstanding work with Technology.

Mrs Pericles a self avowed techno moron was recognised on November 13 at a presentation by Virginia Judge MLA in the presence of the Director General of Education Mr Michael Coutts-Trotter and other members of the State Executive Service.

Mrs Pericles has worked closley with her students as they have learned how to best use technology and Web 2.0 tools to communicate with the world. She has also led the teachers at the school to understand how to use these tools to best effect in their classrooms.

Congratulations to a very fine teacher who is rapidly developing a world wide reputation as a leading 21st century educator.

We are all so very proud of you!!!!

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Today we had a visit a group of educators from the USA. The photos show how much everyone was enjoying themselves.

Our guests are members of the Board of the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Studies. They were led by their President Nancy DeFord and accompanied by Jenny Lewis who is CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders.

The group came to Australia to attend a conference and visit schools to see what is happening by way of educational innovation in our country.

We had about 2 hours to show them all the things we do in our classrooms. We had  4 teachers and about 10 students to take them on a guided tour through many of our classrooms.

The Board were keen to see how the teachers embed technology into theclassroom. They saw students making games, playing games, writing and reading blogs, using web 2.0 tools creating digital storybooks, making movies, building lego land and playing junkbots, doing number games, drawing like Picasso and testing their knowledge of the eye. All these activities involved using digital technology in the form of IWB’s, computers, Cameras, and videos.

The students and the staff warmed instantly to the interested and interesting visitors. We enjoyed the day enormously and look forward to strengthening our contacts. We learned priceless snippets from talking to these wise and experienced people.

The greenback has already begun its journey!

 
Today we were very honoured to have 5 guests from Singapore visit our school to see what our wonderful students and teachers have been doing in their classrooms.

The ladies and gentleman were from

Ministry of Education:  

Lim Lai Cheng, Chan Lai Peng, Vincent Lim

Infocomm Development Authority:    

YIP Yuen Fong,  Belinda CHNG

Our special guests were escorted to various classrooms around the school by Sam-James, Sharliyah, Yilmaz and Martin.

On their visit our guests saw classes doing: maths activities, blogging, playing games, making Lego worlds, solving lego problems, doing internet searches and writing. Martin and Yilmaz even showed our guests how to make a computer game.

Our guests saw the students working in groups, as individuals and as whole classes. The teachers and students were all interested and highly motivated in what they were doing using a wide variety of technology. They were using interactive whiteboards, computers and the usual pen and paper. It was not so much the technology that was important but the fact that the technology is just a natural part of our students’ and teachers’ daily lives.

In one classroom the children were working in groups and it was observed how noisy they were. When we looked about they were noisy because they were excited about the activities they were doing. Two girls we noticed were arguing but they were arguing passionately about the problem they were solving.  

In our classes it is important that the children feel comfortable to air their opinions appropriately and be heard. We believe for our children to learn most effectively they need to:

DO IT!          TALK IT!      READ IT!        WRITE IT!

We told the Singapore visitors we had given up using textbooks when the Interactive Whiteboards came into our classrooms.  Why do we need textbooks when we have masses of resources at our fingertips from all over the world and we can choose the best and most appropriate for our students needs?

Thank you for visiting we enjoyed sharing our school with you and we would like to learn more about Singapore.

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This week has been a remarkable one for the 07 Allstars. It is remarkable for 2 great reasons and both are related to the work they are doing in class and sharing with the world.

On Tuesday July 31 07 Allstars had visitor number 5000  to their Edublog. Not bad for just 6 months out there in the educational blogging world. Martin says (confidently)”it will be 10 (000) by the end of the year”.

If you haven’t hit on their site yet it is worth a look.

On Thursday we discovered that 07 Allstars were rated at 200 on the list of the world’s best educational blog sites. That makes them one of  the best in Australia.

All our other classes are blogging now and they can’t wait to show the world what they too can do . . . nor can their teachers.

Belmore South Public School is a very exciting place to be for students, teachers and now the parents can share their children’s work.

Watch out world we’re on our way!

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The Stage 3 gamemakers have just about completed the prototypes of the games they are making for Stage 2. There has been a great deal of planning, talking, thinking, creating, playing and evaluating happening.

It is important for this group of 20 students, who have spent at least 30 hours making their games, to have others play them. They will be having a group of other Stage 3 students evaluating their work. The Gamemakers will then be putting finishing touches to their games after getting this important feedback.

If the Stage 3 Gamemakers have their games finished on time and all the requirements fulfilled they will be able to enter the Annual Learning Resources Awards. This is a Competition run by the NSW DET Centre for Learning Innovation.

The gamemakers will also be sharing their games with Stage 2 who will play the games and provide feedback and rank the games according to the negotiated criteria that the group has developed.

The games are mostly about the imminent destruction of Earth and the journey to find and then relocate on another planet.