Community Update – February 2018

[Rob Clarke]

Kia ora everyone,

Happy new year! Or is it too late to still be saying this I wonder…? I hope not 😉

We had a great holiday and visited Angela’s family in the US, then went camping at Kaiteriteri.

Unfortunately both the snow was bad in the US, and the weather in Kaiteriteri conspired against us, forcing us to pack up our tent early!

We did, however, have lots of well-earnt family time to relax and enjoy time together.

I decided to leave this update until mid-way through term one so that schools can focus on starting the year.

I hope the new term is going really well for you and your team.

In this edition:

This year sees our business changing in some exciting ways:

1. We are focussing on delivering centrally-funded PLD to schools and CoLs. We will still be offering public workshops during Term 2 and 3.
2. Your school or CoL could potentially get our expert support for an in-depth, long-term project for FREE! If your principal wants to learn more about centrally-funded PLD please read this page on our website.
3. We have taken on our first new team member! Tabitha Leonard is based in Auckland and has specialist skills at helping teachers and leaders inquire into practice, as well as expertise in STEM-based subjects. Tabitha works with Rob to support schools and CoLs who partner with us for centrally-funded PLD.
4. We are helping Kahui Ako/CoLs set up their digital systems. This is a specialist service utilises our IT and leadership skills, so we are the only provider who offers this.

Welcome new members

Welcome to Steve and Judy-Anne from Tasman Bay Christian School, as well as Kirsten from Mountainview High in Timaru! We look forward to supporting your professional learning.

New Discussion Forums

We have a range of useful tutorials, posts, and forums that we’ve put up due to members’ requests during the start of the year.

1. Website Management – learn how to manage your website with our personalised support. Those web hosting clients that join our members’ community can get unlimited support at learning to use and maintain their website – so can you!
2. G Suite Admin Console – save time/money and do simple tasks yourself, the right way. This was requested by a number of members.
3. Hapara Suite – for teachers and ICT Leaders/principals.
4. Using Calendars – Google Calendar has had a big revamp of the interface.
5. Using Google Drive Effectively – best practices for using Drive and Team Drives.

New area in the Resource Library > Great Tutorials

This area is a place where we store useful tutorials that may not reside in an online course. For example:

• How to update a user’s details in the Admin Console
• Streamline end of year procedures – this includes free resources and suggestions
• How to sort Google Drive files/folders

New in the forums

We have a number of new posts for members to benefit from, these include:

1. Hapara Suite – 3 posts for teachers/leaders using this suite
2. How to enable read receipts in Gmail
3. Using Google Drive – including saving to Team Drives
4. Google Calendar – 3 posts

Members’ Meetup – a FREE Opportunity for Members

We know that some problems you face require discussion and so have decided to offer a free virtual meeting each term for members.

We are calling this our ‘Members’ Meetup’ which is a Google Hangout once a term for any member who wishes to spend time solving problems, or discussing solutions.

Our first meetup is scheduled for week 10 on Friday 6th April 1.30-2.30pm. Diary this now and we hope to see you there.

What would you like to learn this year?

Finally, I have a request of all members – please let us know what you’d like to learn this year.

This might be related to a goal, something you are interested in, or just something that is bugging you!

Please reply to this email to let us know and we will build this into our plan for the year.

Have a great week,

Rob and the team

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[Claire Howison]

I’m keen to learn how to navigate my way through the Google admin console with a little more ease and be assured I am establishing robust systems that will grow with our new school.

[Rob Clarke]

Hi Claire,

So good to have you join us in here. We have a discussion forum just for this purpose which already has a couple of videos in it for you to watch.

The best ones to start you off would be the post: ‘Overview of the G Suite Admin Console‘ and ‘How to update a user’s details in the G Suite Admin Console‘.

Then once that is done, we can look at specifics, such as managing users, setting up permissions for different apps and so on.

Rob

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