Dear St John the Apostle Primary School Community,

What an amazing term!

Over many years, I have been asked what I love the most about teaching and education. What I have come to realise is that I love 'growth'. I love helping staff grow, I love helping and seeing children grow, I love increasing the potential for our school to have a positive impact on every child and family that walks through the door.

This week has been a fantastic celebration of learning and growth...and of course, I love it! Students have received their reports. Parent-Teacher Interviews were opportunities to celebrate their successes and achievements. Congratulations also to our students who received End of Term Awards for having achieved excellent academic results, or consistently worked hard or were true examples of discipleship in our community. Today was also a celebration of 100 days of school for Kindergarten (see the pictures later in the Newsletter).

Yesterday we held our End of Term Brag Tag Celebration where every student who received 20 or more Brag Tag stickers this term came together to play board games with staff and each other. I thanked them for their wonderful contributions to the school and their learning and we told stories about the ways we had each respected others, respected ourselves or respected the environment. It was positive, affirming and fun.

More technology to support learning

Yesterday afternoon Year 6 presented their learning about the history of migration to Australia. They used the coding program Scratch to bring together Makey-Makey devices and their Chromebook computers to create interactive posters. These posters shared recordings of their understandings accompanied by beautiful artistic representations that told a story.

This was possible because of the new school owned Chromebooks that Year 6 were provided with this year and devices on loan from CSER (Adelaide University). We are also trialling other devices from CSER at present before purchasing our own, including Spheros and Ozobots. Our K-2 children will begin using our own WeDo.2 Lego robotics kits next term.

Earlier this year we had informed parents of Year 4 that we would begin a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program at this year level. After visiting a number of other schools who have undertaken this program, examining the benefits and limits of a variety of options, and after consultation with our Community Council we have decided to not pursue a BYOD program at this time. We would like to retain the capacity to determine, build and maintain a larger and accessable bank of digital technologies for use by every child in every classroom over time and at present this is best done through an ongoing school purchase and update program.

Instead, we have purchased another set of school owned Chromebooks that will enable the students in Year 4 to experience one between two. The advice from other Catholic schools leading in this area is that this is easily sufficient to achieve the learning outcomes for these students.

This increases the capacity of Year 3 to use a larger group of ipads. Year 5 continue to use the bank of school laptops and Year 6 use new Chromebooks. Years K-2 share a large bank of ipads that are used on a daily basis in each classroom to support learning in literacy and other curriculum areas.

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I hope everyone has a lovely holiday break and is able to find some warm rest together in the cold.

Kind regards,

Matthew Garton (Principal)