Ma whero ma pango ka oti ai te mahi - With red and with black the work will be complete

Partnership Education Update

Our thanks to those parents who have attended our last two partnership meetings. We have appreciated the opportunity to talk with you about what happens at our school (Hui #1), and our BYOD programme (Hui #2).

You will find notes from Hui #1 here, and notes from Hui #2 here. These folders include the original advertising for these meetings, a copy of the presentation given, and notes on any discussion from the meetings.

We have two further Partnership Education meetings planned for this term. Our next meeting will be on March 25, and will look at how school has changed over the recent years, and what happens in a typical school day. If you have specific questions for this meeting, please contact Christina.

Finally, we’re interested in your feedback - are these hui useful for whānau? Are we covering what you wanted us to cover when you suggested the meetings? We’ve designed a (very short) survey, and would love your responses. This survey has just six questions, and should take less than five minutes to respond to. All responses are anonymous. 

Digital Technologies Update

We recently sent home our Responsible Use Agreements for all learners. These cover what is acceptable use of our school network, and give some good guidelines as to how to be safe (and kind) digital citizens. At our BYOD Partnership Meeting, we were asked to provide some advice and ideas for parents around Digital Citizenship and safe use of devices in our school newsletter. This is the first of a regular column!

Specific advice about setting up iPads (as well as using various tools to help parents) can be found in this great article. This article covers things like: setting time limits, setting age limits for apps, setting approval to download apps from the app store, restricting access, setting volume limits, and lots more! It’s a great article - easy to read, with very specific instructions.

This link is to Apple’s Parental Controls support area. This easy to navigate page will show you how to restrict the use of Siri in searches, how to restrict explicit content, how to use built in safety features (that are already there, we might just not be aware of them!), and lots more.

As a school, we are proud to announce that we have joined the Netsafe Schools programme and are an official Netsafe School. We are joining nearly 300 schools across New Zealand who have a shared goal to improve online safety, citizenship and wellbeing in their school community. We’ve just been awarded our first award, which will be on display in the school office as recognition of our commitment to developing safer online communities. We’ll be promoting the work of Netsafe in future newsletters.

One useful resource for parents around managing digital technologies is Netsafe’s Family Safe Online Treaty. This useful tool helps to establish clear communication with your child around the use of digital technologies.

We’ve got lots more to share, but this would be a novel instead of a newsletter - watch this space next time for more handy hints and advice.