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Petone Foreshore Teaching and Learning ICT Cluster |
In 2006 Maungaraki School became a lead School for a Ministry of Education ICT Professional Development Clusters,
a privilege for the school and we are excited to be working with over 100 teachers and 2000 students.
With the change of principal in Term 4 of 2006, the lead school role was handed over to Muritai School. Maungaraki School, however, remains an active school within the cluster.
The schools in our cluster are:
As a cluster we are determined to extend our teaching and learning skills. We acknowledge that students learn in different ways and that as teachers we need to provide programmes that meet our students’ needs, focus on Higher Order Thinking Skills, develop in our students the skills of how to think and how to learn and create authentic in-depth and rich learning tasks. We believe this is critical in our ever changing and developing society.
Our schools are committed to enhancing the culture within their schools. We wish to have a culture where both students and teachers are informed and knowledgeable of ICT and have the skills to learn through ICT. We wish to develop schools where teachers provide a seamless learning environment preparing all students for their futures.
All schools have an ICT infrastructure in-place and are ready and committed to implementing the pedagogical practice of linking ICT with teaching and learning to achieve increased authentic academic engagement for our students. There is a mixture of both Apple Mac and PC based schools.
Our schools have many similarities that naturally draw us together. Other than Waterloo, we are all full primary schools and we all contribute to Hutt Valley High School. We have a focus on Information Literacy through the cluster. We are all committed to improving our children’s literacy and numeracy skills. We are also committed to acknowledge the increasingly multicultural society that our children will live in. This proposal includes all State Primary Schools in the Lower Hutt Valley that have not yet been in a cluster. This would essentially cover the Lower Hutt Valley.
We also have a natural diversity within and between our schools. There is a diversity in school make up with a proportion of predominantly monocultural schools and a portion of multicultural schools. This offers us a diversity of backgrounds and experiences to draw from and also offers us the varying approaches necessary to creating cultures of learning that focuses on student learning. We can learn with and from each other.
We are already developing a collaborative link through our schools, drawing on the skills from within our teaching community. We see the potential to expand on the good relations within the cluster and take it to a new level of sharing best practice within and between our learning communities. We are all faced with the same challenge – to get the absolute best out of all our children and are committed to the concept of improving student achievement. We wish to develop this as part of our cluster, while also looking further a-field to find best practice and implement rigorous authentic integrated teaching and learning that motivates and extends both our teachers and students.
We are passionate about the place of ICT in our schools and wish to be given the chance to develop the skills of our teachers to better meet the needs of our students.
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