Philosophy of house events

There have been a number of issues that have come up with our school house system where points are being removed from students when they do not turn up to events, I think this is wrong and am looking at the Philosophy behind the house events at school. This was given to me three years ago when I was first updating the house website.

The Philosophy of the PHS House Events

• Students participation!
• Fun-friendly-informal competition.
• Fostering students’ pride in themselves and the school.
• Opportunities for students to be involved with and contribute to the planning, organisation, leadership and ‘ownership’ of a school based activity.

House Events
The house events held throughout the year during form teacher sessions and lunch times (including sporting, performance, community and intellect based activities) have an important role within the school.

They are not ‘extra-curricular’ activities. House activities are an essential part of the curriculum. They are a part of the pastoral care system within the school.
House events provide students with a variety of opportunities to develop skills in planning, organisation, communication, management of themselves and peers, competition, team-work, cultural awareness and appropriate attitudes and values.

Editors Notes:

I look at the bullet points and wonder how the swimming and athletics have now become competitive to the point of out of 1800 students at the school only 48 students went down and participated. This breaks the first bullet point.

I would like to see what the trend is for students competing in the last seven years at the school because it just seems like this is something that needs to be looked at. Are we doing it too early in the year, is it that the majority of our students cannot swim.

I remember the days of my schooling where the whole school went down to Surrey park (500 students) and competed in events, this also happened at Ashburton domain (1100 students). I wonder how many students will be competing at this years athletics events.

Is this due to some form of we don't want to do it, or it takes to much work to run. or is our school too big to handle this type of "organised" event.

House websites

I thought I would put down some details on the house website this year.

it is running on one of my servers that I brought a couple of years ago. It has at least 1 gig of ram in the thing, however it only has a 4.3Gig hard drive.
I am running windows xp sp2, I know that it should be a linux system, but I am at least running my favourite three, apache, mysql and php. It is running an application called wampserver. A nice windows application that links in all the necessary applications. It has a shared folder in which wamp is installed to be able to copy across those important files across the network.
For the management of the 5 house websites, I am using wordpress. An individual installation for each house with its own database running in the background. Now for the fun stuff I have been playing around with today. I am running gallery2 on it to provide the photo albums of each event. this provides teh best of both words, no matter what computer I am on I can update the latest photos, it creates the thumbnails, resizes the images and can provide a slideshow of the day. One of the things I am most fearful of is that it will not be able to handle the load, I have looked at performance and modified the gallery2 control panel not to update the pages and counters every time, it will only do this every 6 hours, so at least I won't have the database crash. I am thinking that the server might be punished, so I will look at the load throughout the day Just worried about the network down to the server as it is coming off a 100meg connection that is shared off a classroom switch.It might need to be moved to another area where it has direct access off the frame itself. Now to get the video files working off it. And to free up more space as it only have 600 meg free space on the server. How to remove windows hotfixes?

House websites

I have been running the house websites for a year as a proof of concept on how important they are to promote the house spirit within our school. They are used to inform students of upcoming events, sports rules, who won what, and how the points are going for the year. Many students have come up and said they have enjoyed jumping online after an event and seeing how wining or losing an event has had on the points.

One of the things has been having the time to develop these sites. Looking after four very individual sites has been a busy task. I did not use any Content Management System or online system either. All was developed and designed in Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks and Macromedia Flash (for those .flv files we all love)

Next year the house leaders will be looking after the content for there own houses. This poses a few technical problems, access to the web server, access in general, how can they post information online simply enough without having to know CSS or HTML.

I have looked at changing one of my five servers over to windows XP and installing WAMP on it as demonstrated at the TUANZ conference this year, built into it apache, mySQL, PHP, all up to date and integrated fine. For the house websites they will be running wordpress with customised themes for each house. This allows for house captains and leaders to put up there own content through online forms as well as I will look at putting gallery plugins on so they can upload photos to make things more interesting for the students.

I have now started on getting these up and running, and one of the problems I am now faced with is actually trying to find themes that are good. There are many themes out there but most of them are too simplistic, to be able to keep students attention, they have to be graphical and have colour. We are trying to promote house participation and house spirit, not "the monkey made me do it".

House Name Change

More grief over the name changes today, the reason for this is that they have been released to staff. Anything that is released to staff is almost instantly said to students by form teachers.
The feedback from the staff is that the Pohutakawa House name is too long, why are there two K's (Kauri and Kowhai) and that if we are to continue to use the Red, Green, Gold, and Blue that the name change is just a farce.

It needs some more thinking.

If we are to use the trees as the identify of the houses then we need need to change the systems in the school to the new system. Instead of R10, G10, B10, and O10, it gets changes to R10, P10, K10 and T10. the T could be changed to Totara House instead of Kauri House.
Identity of the houses and providing values to the students was what pushed the changes in the first place, it has been killed with the current solution.

House name changes

This has been going on for a while now, and this week the new house names are announced at our school.

Blue House becomes Kauri House










Green House becomes Rimu House













Red House becomes Pohutakawa House









Gold House becomes Kowhai House









This will still cause some of the headaches for us in the ICT department, we have had problems with Green and Gold house because these are included in a students login, now we have the same with Kauri and Kowhai.

Why could one of these not have been named Totara!!!

Open Source Authoring Software

http://exelearning.org

The eXe project is developing a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe can export content as self-contained web pages or as SCORM 1.2 or IMS Content Packages.

This project has been funded by a grant from the New Zealand Government and led by the University of Auckland, The Auckland University of Technology, and Tairawhiti Polytechnic. It has also been greatly assisted by a global group of participants and contributors.

This could be my new addition to an old project that I found I just could not have the time to keep updating. If it can be run off a flash drive then I don't need dreamweaver on the machine to run it. Mind you one of the things that I am looking at is more online development tools, rather than using dreamweaver all the time. The exe learning environment is simple to use and it can incorporate quiz and other learning tools that knowledgeNET does not have in it.
The old project was to have as much education content on a website to get students used to using it for educational needs, not just play. It just becomes a mess with so many sites in dreamweaver, especially when your profile gets reset. 5 years ago I created a website called h2, only available internally, but it has a hell of a lot of information on it, though it does need some updating and to run on a faster server, its only a Pentium 120 with 32 meg of RAM.

Also looking at installing winXP on one of my servers, the reason for this is to install WAMP5 and then wordpress, why not install it on one of my linux boxes, because it needs PHP 4.2 or greater. Why wordpress you may be asking, the reason for this is so that the house leaders can run the whole house website next year. It was only a proof of concept this year and it worked like a charm, although updating four house websites does take up to 50 minutes each time I make changes, have been using dreamweaver. Though I do need to look at using some extra plugin's on the site to be able to host a gallery, as well as get some site stats.