Blogging from my iPhone

Our new we site is up and running. We are using Sandvox - I say we but mean me. Sandvox is about as iWeb-like as I could find. It offers impressive integration with Twitter and Facebook and you can Like pages and posts as with Facebook.
Part of the reason for going Sandvox was it would make the transition from iWeb easier for staff. But that is not really at all necessary now as all studio web sites are being produced on Blogger.
We'll see how it progresses but there are some very powerful reasons why this seems to be the way to go for now...,
As a daily or weekly reflection tool it's brilliant - parents can log on most days and review their child's day with them. Here endeth the "I don't know" answer to what did you do/learn today?
One studio of 16 children has had 900 plus hits to their blog in just two weeks!
Blogger makes a great digital CV for those wanting to provide a great resource to potential employers without killing trees.
As a celebration of learning and whanau it's a winner.
Finally, I can do it from my iPhone, iPod or iPad as this post proves. How cool is that?

Colgate Challenge

It's getting harder and harder to find the funds we need to survive, let alone let children thrive.
Our roll takes another hit every day with families moving out of Red Zone houses and into new homes out of our zone. In the majority of cases to places far afield.

There are several reasons -
The payout on properties is well below what is required to get into a new home in our community.
There are almost no empty, suitable, available, affordable homes in our zone to purchase.
The new subdivisions opening in Kaiapoi are right on our neighboring school's back doorstep, so they are nowhere near being in zone for us.
Families may have an undamaged home, but may well have lost their business or lost their job. Therefore they have to move anyway.

It is a time of great frustration for us, but there is little we can do beyond that which we do every day - smile, brave face, speak encouraging words, give out hugs and high fives, listen to people as they share their problems, challenges and concerns.

As we head down from a high of 620 children, to around 420 at present, we are faced with some major issues. Our fixed costs remain the same, or are going up. Rates - up. Water, heat, light and power - up. Insurance - doubled. Wage rates for contract staff - up.
We have the same number of rooms to clean, the same number of rooms to heat and equip. We have the same number of hours for Office Staff, Caretakers and Cleaners because they are needed for those hours whether we have 420 or 520 children.

Our costs are going up but our income drops by $150,000 with this fallen roll. Add to that that we have lost $95,000 a year from International Students - this was keeping us financially afloat - and you can see we face huge challenges.

So, we look for alternatives. One is the Colgate Challenge, where the school that collects the most empty Colgate Toothpaste Cartons wins $12,500. This would be a God-Send as they say.

Our children have been incredibly proactive and innovative and have put together a world-wide request for support. The responses are coming in from half a dozen countries and eight different states in the USA.

If you want to help us, please collect as many Colgate boxes as you can, flatten them and post them to...

Studio 21
Kaiapoi Borough School
20 Hilton Street
Kaiapoi 7630
Christchurch
New Zealand.

We will be so grateful if you can help. Blessings to all.

Blogging About Blogging

It seems a little ironic - to quote Alannis Morrisette - to blog about blogging, but...
Today our staff are learning about blogging with Carol from Nat Coll.

We are being hosted by the greatest little school in Christchurch - Te Rito o the Harakeke aka Richmond School.

Carol has shared with us Alannah's collection of top individual blogposts, mainly from New Zealand, but also from around the world...  http://tinyurl.com/blogstofollow

Carol has a layout with two sidebars - this is a step up so will have to look at rejigging this as I go.

Teaching children how to post, how to comment and how to stay cyber-safe are all important pre-requisites.

PhotoPeach for photo posts to blogs... http://photopeach.com/

 

Blogging with Siri?

This is a test to see how effective and efficient it would be for bloggers to use Siri this is text entry tool.
One of the first things I've realised is that I need to spend time learning how to tell Siri to enter punctuation.
So far I have entered each paragraph separately. This perhaps makes it easy to Siri to manage the processing without being overloaded.
Initially Siri translated her own name is sorry but in my last paragraph she got her name correct.
If I can sort out the punctuation this has got to be a quick and effective way to input text. So far her only mistakes have been Siri's name and the lack of punctuation. The speed and accuracy has been fabulous. best of all, this overcomes the issue of fat fingers entering text slowly on the iPhone keyboard.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Blogging from the iPhone

We visited Cameron Lochie at Kaipara Flats this week and Tracey at Pahoia School.
Children in their classes were blogging their learning experiences from at home as well as at school.
One idea behind this was its effectiveness as a record of Home Learning experiences.
Children for example, baked a cake as a Home Learning assignment. They recorded the ingredients, recipe and process and took photos along the way.
Posting these on their blogs from home was a great way to document (and verify) their learning.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Te RITO kids rock

We will
We will
ROCK you