Wendy+Roberts

Kia ora koutou

This is so exciting! Thank you Jacqui and my new e learning friends for welcoming Upokongaro School to your community. We're so looking forward to learning and sharing and growing with you.

I'm the teaching Principal/Tumuaki of Te Kura o Upokongaro. Our school is in the village of Upokongaro, 10 kilometres from Whanganui alongside the Whanganui Awa on State Highway 4 the route to and from Whanganui to Mount Ruapehu and Northern NZ. Currently we have 20 tamariki who all either live in the area or attend through whanau links.

Warren Brown is our part-time teacher and we team teach in the mornings of the two days Warren is in the school each week, and so it's "w__//e//__-learning"!.

We began the journey to a dream of e-learning in 2009. We became excited about the potential of e learning in the lives of our rurally situated students and decided that Upokongaro really could be the center of the universe! So we changed two unused classrooms into a beautiful double sized open space and set up for fixed and wireless internet access. Our learning center is named Te Ao Marama.

We've been building up our resources through purchasing off -lease laptops and through the generosity of Powerco we now have a new server and 9 All in One Desktops. We have 18 computers in the space fully available for use. We have one Smart Board, that is an older model fixed to the wall and a ceiling mounted projector.

We've just been offered a network up-grade and hope to use this to change the now unused classroom to a new library/information center close to Te Ao Marama that the children can use freely as part of their day. Currently,the library is not networked and located away from us in what was the school house.

Fantastic stuff!

We have some challenges though to realising the dream 1. Lack of high speed internet-we're on satellite and unfortunately we are one of the" very isolated/remote " schools who will not be getting fibre optics. Well, we'll see about that!! We are only 10ks and on a State Highway.....! On cloudy days we're slower than dial up which is a tad frustrating. 2. We've a brand new charter and have adopted "Fostering Fabulous Futures" through "Empowering Creative Achievers"- we've set a big challenge, it's what we really want for our children 3. Isolation. up until now we haven't been part of an e learning community, our teachers and children have the potential to learn and do some brilliant interesting things through e learning

We have a school website which is a continually developing wiki. []

Let the fun begin!

warm regards Wendy