Monday 7th May - Curriculum Day - No students at school

This day will be spent with teachers looking at and learning more about our Respectful relationships Curriculum. We will also have a consultant coming in to help us explore student data to make our teaching more targeted. We will be looking at what we can do to make sure that all of our students experience success and continue to achieve growth in their learning.

Out of Hours School Care

We will run our first OSHC Curriculum Day Program on Monday. Please contact the office if you would like your child to attend.

Google Suite

Recently, we decided to move students (Years 3-6) and staff to Google Apps for Education or GAFE to enhance the way we use technology and share information within and beyond our school community. Google Apps for Education is a cloud based learning platform allowing teachers and students to create a range of documents online, email, share calendars and 30 gigabytes of data to be accessed at home and school on any device.

The Department has an agreement with both Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365 in regards to their privacy and security. Before entering into an agreement with Google and deciding to use the service, the Department undertook a privacy and security risk assessment and has an arrangement with Google that sets out how information will be protected.

Google Apps for Education allows us to collaborate and learn more effectively through the use of technology, and offer a range of new learning opportunities for teachers and students. We will be working with students to educate them around using Google Apps For Education in a productive and responsible manner. This will be a great support around the student collaborative and student led learning that we already do in years 3-6. Our teachers already use Google to collaborate for their planning and have found it to be very successful.

● Google Apps for Education is used by many of the world’s leading educational institutions, including universities, secondary and primary schools. Many public, Catholic and independent schools within Australia are using Google Apps for Education right now.

● Google Apps for Education is completely free for schools and does not contain advertising anywhere within it.

● Google Apps For Education allows up to 100 teachers and students the ability to collaborate on documents simultaneously. This type of collaboration has not been possible in the past.

● Google Apps For Education works on any device. This allows our students to continue learning beyond the classroom and the ability to access their content at any time.

● Students and teachers can work in teams, sharing calendars, documents and collaborating ideas to learn more effectively.

● Google Apps For Education allows students to communicate and store information in both public and private spaces online.

● Unlike many other web services, Google Apps For Education acknowledges it’s users as the owners of content they produce and store.

● Google Apps For Education does not share any data or user information with any other party unlike other Google products such as Gmail.

● Your child will be provided an email address as part of the Google Apps For Education package. This email service is monitored by staff.

At Upper Gully we pride ourselves on the fact that we ensure there is a balance of learning in regards to technology and experiences of hands on learning. We offer many different types of learning and see the importance of technology being used as one of the many tools we use.

We want to help students develop a wide range of skills and understandings so that when they are ready they can make choices about which areas they would like to pursue in the future.

Education Week

Education week is coming up and the focus is on the arts. We think this is great timing as we are having our production this term. We would like to invite families along for pizza and a big screen viewing of The Greatest Showman. We are planning on having this night on Tuesday 22nd May, there is no cost involved.

Keep an eye out for more information on COMPASS. It could be a great whole school sing a long night!

Have a great week everyone.

Tabitha

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