Virtual Learning Network

Kia ora Justin

If you would like to email me on carolyn.bennett@farnet.schoolzone.net.nz I am sure that one of my wharekura would jump at the opportunity of their tamariki teaching other tamariki, especially with students on the West Coast as they could learn so much about your area at the same time.

Carolyn

Hi Darren, I think that this would not be a great idea, but is a necessity.  So often we have discussions with new groups of people and it would just be great to direct them to a page specifically about us as a unique community and then from that site, the other links can accessed.

When I have spoken with people about the work we do, they are certainly becoming more aware of the VLN through the use with the ICTPD clusters and Core, but the specific of what we do and who we are is not clear, so I guess the rebranding will be a delicate matter to deal with, but I also think that we do need our own identity.

I know that I will not have the time to assist, but happy to provide any input through the journey.  I had got an art teacher from Kings College, Dunedin to draft some logos out earlier last year when I was thinking about the need for us to have a new logo developed to identify us, including a cultural awareness.  That was when I was looking at a brochure about the VLN Community that we could all use.

That would be fantastic Michael.  At our planning meeting for 2013 yesterday, this is one of the things we discussed around "teacher appraisal" and monitoring quality of teaching.  For me it has been the difficulty of the questions to use, so with Michael's experience, this would be great and of course very reliable.  In terms of using the data, I have no problem with this and makes what we are doing transparent and having the ability to make any changes to improve practice.

Like Lynda, I have been offering one module which equated to the internal for Level 3 accounting where two students joined the class just for this module and used the credits for NCEA Level 3, however they were past students of mine who had the foundation so found it fine.  Wouldn't work with someone with no background in accounting.

I have been thinking about the modular approach being more of a shared teaching situation where two or three teachers would share the content for a programme, so not having to commit for a whole year, but that would take some organisation and currently, we are only able to meet the needs as we have them.