SWA Radio Soft Launching next Monday

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Hi All,
I am off on a holiday as this is the last day of school for this year. I am having a 'low tech' break which will be back to basics. I am going with my family to Lake Toba in North Sumatra to spend 3 weeks at my husband's village, Balige.

We will live in a traditional house and my plan is to ride a bike to the next village each day where I will learn to weave Ulos - the traditional cloth of the area.

To wish you all seasons greetings, I have embedded the player for our school's Radio Station. Please listen to Priska from Grade 10 sing 'O Holy Night' which I recorded live in the SWA Theater. Her voice reminds me of KD Lang. Incredible to know that she has only been singing on stage for the past year.



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Term 2 is Fast Approaching!

This term I have set myself two big goals.

Goal One - STUDYWIZ

Firstly I want to get Studywiz up and running for all the students in the 1:1 program. I have started sand boxing the use of this LMS with Gr 5 as being that they are a PYP class, there are fewer teachers. I will continue this until the end of October by which I hope all bugs have been ironed out of the system.

There are a few challenges to overcome here as we are the only school in Indonesia to be using Studywiz so we are troubleshooting by remote. I really want to use iPod Touch to access the system as so many of our students have them and we have just made a commitment to purchase 12.

To make it even more interesting, I am testing to see what parts of Studywiz support Pinyin for Chinese. Our Chinese teachers (there are 5) are keen to use technology as a tool - if Pinyin is supported.

Goal Two - SWA RADIO

The second goal is to get SWA Radio up and running. My husband gave me the idea to have an online radio based on his working with a team that set up the online radio for the PDI-P political party. I had done some podcasting in the past with a Grade 3 class but this is a whole different league.

We have moved the recording studio to the Admin building. This is a better location as the radio can now be cabled up to the main server at school to make streaming easier. We are planning to live stream every school day. I have been leading an EX or After School Activity for radio announcers. There are 20 kids in the group and wow do they have talent.

We are hiring Left Hand (IT Consultant Team) to set up our system. I have already acquired an iTunes account for the radio http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=328949773