Dear Dr Strange
We were very pleased to have you visit one of our class blogs yesterday and leave our students such warm feedback. They (and of course their young teacher, Priscilla) were thrilled to hear from you.
We are not sure how you came across our blog, but incase you know nothing about us, we are a primary school in Auckland New Zealand. In NZ schools are ranked by the socio-econimic status of their parents (true) so we are 1a which is the poorest you can get. 66% or our students are Pasifika (parents from the Pacific islands and 33% are NZ Maori.
Our students are amazingly clever kids and love learning, but because of lack of funds their homes do not have a lot of technology. So it is not easy for them to get comments from family and friends on their blogs. This makes the possibility of visits from people such as yourself and your students especially important to us.
We actually blog as part of our approach to Schooling Improvement via 21st century literacy, and we have a researcher working along side us to see how our literacy improves as we blog. Our research shows so far that access to technology AND the response from an authentic audience are the two biggest motivators to our students to write. And the classes/students who blog have had some amazing improvements in their test scores.
We have lots of blogs at our school. They can mostly be accessed form here.
http://www.ptengland.school.nz/index.php?family=1,451
And I blog about the pedagogy behind our student blogging here....
http://manaiakalani.blogspot.com/2009/02/literacy-cycle.html
Thanks once again for your interest
Dorothy
A Tweet from Susan Carter Morgan in Virginia (@scmorgan)
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