Long time between drinks...

My last post was near the end of May - nearly five months ago! Well time to break the habit that broke the initial habit! Over the last five months it's not like I've had nothing to reflect on - at the end of Term 2 we completed our mid year student report through our Assembly student management system.

The team at Assembly did a great job of replicating the visual look of our report while giving us a streamlined online input system that allowed our teachers to concentrate on our students progress and achievement making process and not have the worry about formatting word tables and spacing! We were also concentrating on utitlising the space we have around the school to best meet the teaching and learning needs of our students. This gave us the opportunity to move our office area to a more central part of our school and the 'old' office space, back storerooms and the Principals office (it was too big anyway) made space for some badly needed teaching space. It was great to move things around for the core purpose of school - that is giving the best possible space and learning resource to our students and their teachers! It was slightly ironic that at the time the government was talking about raising the student teacher ratio we were doing everything we could to lower it! Maybe they heard what we were doing (along with what the rest of the country was saying) and they did a complete u-turn on that one! I have also recently had the chance to attend the Principals Conference in Melbourne and, just this week, the ulearn teaching conference in Auckland along with our whole staff. Watch this space for a few more reflections as the term starts - along with an ERO review!