Welcome back to 'Virtual' School!

Kia ora koutou katoa

Naumai, haere mai ki te Kura Tuatahi - Akonga Aka Mariko. Welcome to the VLN Primary School for 2016! 

It is going to be a full on year for us all - in our own schools and in our collaborative, virtual school, the VLN Primary. 

Our goal is to:

Connect Schools for Enhanced Learning Outcomes.

In this newsletter: 

We share our submission to the Education Act that advocates for changes to the Act that enables learning that is flexible, open and accessible for all our learners across a networked schools system. We welcome any feedback from our schools on this submission.

We start the year off with something that is an integral part of how we learn together online - internet safety. We are proud to support Safer Internet Day on February 9th. Find out more on how to participate and keep following us to share our digital citizenship resources #sid2016

Don't forget to get in early with your registrations to participate. This enables Ginette to work out the incredibly complex job of developing a timetable that works the best it can for all of us; and gives us time to prepare you and your students to be successful online learners.    Geoff from Rosmini College, is still welcoming participation in Over the Back Fence, Environment Health Project - this closes soon so get in quick.

Our Asian Language (ALLiS) Project is well underway. We are looking forward to the arrival of our new Mandarin Language Assistant & have a range of programmes ready to run - Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Asia Inquiry; short tasters, small groups, whole classes. There is no cost to schools to join these programmes, but these are limited to our Project schools in the first instance, then first come after that (note there is still a modest VLN Primary administration fee). We are very interested to hear from anyone who can teach our Bahasan Indonesian class; and we would love to hear from children who want to learn Tagalog. Please offer this to your Filipino community. 

The VLN Primary School doesn't have a monopoly on learning online,  there are some very exciting & effective projects being developed by teachers around NZ. We plan to profile these over the coming weeks with our first two articles in this newsletter. Check out NZ Read Aloud led by Kerri Thompson from Tamatea Intermediate, and Re-imaging Sports Education by Tim Morgan from Bishopdale Primary. Get in touch with them to participate in their projects. If you have a project you want profiled here contact Rachel. If you have ideas from projects or programmes you want to run, contact us for support.

Finally a heads up for 14th Annual Sole Charge and Rural Teaching Principals′ Conference. A favourite conference for the VLN Primary - some great speakers & workshops; and a time to connect and have fun!

Coming up:

• Safer Internet Day - 9th February
  
• Governance Group Meet - 16th February
  
• ALLiS Teachers PLD - 18th February
  
• Online classes scheduled to start - 7th March
• AGM - April - date TBC