Here, Principal Nicola Jacobsen shares her thoughts.

Kia Ora,

Congratulations to the students and staff involved in the Wanaka Challenge last week. It was also great to have a number of students volunteering at the event. The last couple of weeks have been busy on the sporting front with cricket starting for the season, the MAC Enduro, and students competing in rowing and athletics events for the school and community-based clubs. The Festival of Colour is an upcoming event which will showcase the hard work of our students and staff. The performance ‘Elephant Talk’ has been the learning focus of our performance students (past and present), and the music for the show is also student-led.

Our student representative on the School Board, Tane Haines, has been busy preparing a survey to go to all students to get their feedback on what they like about the College and where improvements could be made. Students will receive an email from Tane over the coming days with a link to the survey. He has presented at both our junior and senior assemblies on this initiative. I have no doubt that we will get some great ideas from the students on what could be done to improve their learning and experience at the College.

Dawn Bosley, is the SENCO for Mount Aspiring College, and she can be contacted at bosleyd@mtaspiring.school.nz if you have any questions about special assessment conditions for students. This year we have Google Read&Write available for all students to use, and this can be added as an extension to their google chrome. Our staff have had some professional learning on this software and can help students get the programme running. The programme can be used for a number of things:

• Text-to-speech let’s you hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual colour highlighting

• Text and picture dictionaries, gives easy word definitions and sentence examples

• With speech-to-text, dictate words to assist with writing, proofreading & studying

• Collect highlights from text in documents or the web to summarise lengthy content in seconds

• Turn documents into audio files, for easy listening offline

• Convert PDF's to Word, and have them read aloud

• Simplify online text, remove ads and other visual distractions.

Toitū te whenua, toitū te tangata

The land is strong, the people are fulfilled.

Ngā mihi,

Nicola Jacobsen