Totara Newsletter - Term 2 - Week 6

Kia ora koutou!

Firstly we want to warmly welcome Meg to the team. Meg joins us from Miro! We also welcome Nathan from Miro - Nathan is joining us on Thursdays. It's great having you both with us!

Last week’s debate was a great success. Thank you and well done to everyone involved. We will be spending some time on Wednesday to re-watch the debate and analyse how it went. This week is also Peace Game week! We are all really excited to be involved. The sessions will run for three weeks 9:30am - 12:30pm Monday and Thursday. If you have any questions or comments about the Peace Game please let us know and/or refer to this link: www.worldpeacegame.org

In maths this week we are moving from investigating triangles and getting more into angles and properties of other polygons. Students are making some rather complicated 3D polygons as a fun activity - these will be on display as they get finished.

The school recently implemented a new system called Google Apps for Education. This includes an email address for every student in Totara (we are starting with the secondary first), plus an online area for storing and collaborating on documents. You can email your child on his/her address which is in the format: annac@sevenoaks.school.nz. We’d love you to ask your child to show you what they’ve done so far as this will reinforce their learning. This is linked to the Totara Ultranet site, but can also be accessed from any web browser by typing in one of: docs.sevenoaks.school.nz, mail.sevenoaks.school.nz, calendar.sevenoaks.school.nz.

A couple of expectations we have for use of this system include:

1. Parents are able to log in to the student email, documents and other areas of it at any time. Students may change their password as long as their parent(s) and educators are informed what this is.
2. Any aspect of the system - emails, chat, Google Plus, documents can be monitored at any time. We do however work in a high trust environment where we expect all online work/communication to be appropriate to learning and respectful at all times.
3. As more of our work and learning moves online, we will be exploring various cyber citizenship issues such as plagiarism, safety, managing our online identity/digital footprint, passwords and sharing information and so on.

If you have any questions please email us.

Nga mihi,

Kerry, Rob and Ella