With the holidays fast approaching, and most of your children owning an ipad, I thought it might be a good time to let you know about an app that I recently became aware of, thanks Chris!

Its called Our Pact. It allows parents to manage their child’s screen time at any time and from anywhere!

In conversation with a parent who uses it I discovered that you can set a bed time, disable access when your cherub is supposed to be doing something else (like taking a shower or tidying their room.) You can block apps that you don’t approve of, and even create recurring schedules. As your children come to an age where they might also own a phone, you can block access to wifi and cellular connections too. All from your own device!

Find out more information about it here.

Firstly, thank you to all of the families who have returned all of their notes. I know its a busy time of year, and some of the notes seem to be duplicated, so I really appreciate it.

Reminder: swimming needs to be paid for during week 3 (next week) as we begin swimming lessons in week 4.

We are hosting sharing assembly next week, Friday 19th February at 12.15ish in the hall.

We are gradually getting organised with our devices. We have had some hiccups with the set up, but are getting closer to resolving them so that we can get on with it!

Regarding BYOD, if you have more than one child  sharing your apple account (and most of them would be,) its a really good idea to talk to them about their responsibility – especially if they are older and not students at CVPS.

Our class has enough devices to go 1:1 this year. This is  great news for the students in terms of their learning!

If you are interested in seeing a preview of the kinds of things they’ll be using them for, or have any questions, come along to our BYOD information evening next Tuesday at 6pm in the gym.

Students are becoming more and more able to complete work on their devices. Since we have set up email accounts, they are also able to send me their work electronically. I have noticed that students are much keener to act on feedback and have been editing and resubmitting their work. True formative assessment. How good is that?
Consequently, I am reading narratives and expositions of a quality that I have not seen before in my teaching career. Sure, there has always been the odd one or two students who have written work of this quality – but now, the majority of the class are striving to do their very best and fulfill their potential.
The current system fills up my inbox and entails me opening work in another app to annotate and export ready to email back, (it also takes up a lot of space on my ipad.) While this is ok, it is a bit cumbersome.

I have been exploring other options and came across an app called Showbie.  I’d love to try it out this week. According to this website :

Showbie is a cloud storage solution designed specifically for K-12 schools that allows students to hand in homework electronically.

Through the website or app, students can
• Share files quickly and easily
• Express their creativity through various forms of media
• Hand in their homework using a computer or mobile device

Showbie also allows teachers to
• Assign schoolwork digitally
• Collect student work without printing any paper
• Review assignments anytime, anywhere

For more information, or to sign up for your FREE account, visit us at http://www.showbie.com

It would be really helpful if students could download this free app ready for tomorrow. Download the app here.

I believe that the Showbie app is not available on android, but it seems that work can be submitted through the showbie website too.