Junior School hit by “Earthquake Disaster”

The junior school was hit pretty hard by a very localized Earthquake on Tuesday with desks and chairs tipping over and injured staff and students everywhere. Luckily for us the senior children were safe and sent to assist where they could in the junior school. All this activity was filmed by staff and used as an amazing discussion tool about disasters. All we can say is that it was a good thing that our whole school topic for this term is set around answering the big question of how to survive a disaster. The students all agreed that we are not prepared and we need to do a whole lot of work to find out how we can be. This should be a very interesting topic, one that will generate much discussion at home.

Member of Parliament visits Conductive Education

Clayton Cosgrove MP for Waimakariri visited Addington today to look at the Conductive Education Unit and talk with Teachers and parents of students attending. Mr Cosgrove was contacted by a concerned parent who lives in his electorate.

Our principal Trudy Heath, Dave Ching, NZ Conductive Education Foundation member, and Teachers and Conductors from the Unit spoke with Mr Cosgrove about the history of the Unit, its funding, and the impact of funding cuts on our families. 

Brittany and her Mum, Julie Baker, spent some time, outlining to Mr Cosgrove and the Christchurch Press reporters with him, the consequences for their family in particular. 

At the end of his visit Mr Cosgrove thanked Trudy and her team and said he was now very aware of where our students would be without Conductive Education and was committed to assisting the school raise the profile of our funding issue.

Working with News Publishers

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We're constantly talking with web publishers, including those in the news industry, about how their content is indexed by search engines. Last week in Europe, a group of newspaper and magazine publishers signed a declaration stating that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost," and that they "no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission." We agree, and that's how things stand today.

More than 25,000 news organizations across the globe choose to make their content available in Google News and other web search engines. They do so because they want their work to be found and read -- Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month. If at any point a web publisher feels as though we're not delivering value to them and wants us to stop indexing their content, they're able to do so quickly and effectively. To read more on this issue, see our post on the European Public Policy blog.

Conductive Education Farewells

At our full school assembly today, we said goodbye to two teachers from Conductive Education. Mrs Wycherley and Mrs Pilgram are leaving us after many years. We are very sad to see them go. We asked them what they would miss most and they said they would miss the wonderful children, teachers and staff, and how everyone gets on and treats each other so well. This was the best thing about Addington and they would miss everybody heaps.

Mrs Pilgram was going to spend more time with her family and maybe do a bit of study at university. Mrs Wycherley will be spending more time with her family. Both hope to do some relieving at school so we will see them again. YAH!

Reporters: Jyr and Jack

Looking Backward: Happy anniversary, Walkman!

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

Thirty years ago this week, Sony introduced the first Walkman to consumers in Japan. Released on July 1, 1979, the model TPS-L2 was the first in a long history of portable stereo devices. The shape, size, and data format of portable music players continues to evolve, but for many people my age the Sony Walkman was their first music device.

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, my Sony Walkman cassette player was my most prized possession, and an important part of my identity. My first tapes were Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em. While my little iPod shuffle can easily hold dozens of cassettes' worth of songs, it's hard to imagine developing the same degree of affection that I held for my first Walkman.

On this 30th anniversary of it's release, I took a look back using News archive search's Timeline view for the term [walkman], focusing on articles from the United States in the 1980s. These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.



Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:


The Milwaukee Sentinel - Jun 24, 1983


The Spokesman-Review - Aug 15, 1982


Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Jul 16, 1982


The Age - Dec 3, 1981


Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Aug 1, 2004

For folks looking for more information from the early days of the Walkman, I found some the following magazine articles in Google Books, including a review in the September 1981 issue of Popular Science and this ad in the February 1984 issue.

Earth Science in Room 2

Today Room 8 went to Room 2 our Year 1 ‘Buddy  Class’ to find out what they had learnt about the earth. They had three groups: one learnt about the earth inside and out, another about rocks and the last group learnt about volcanoes.

The Earth Group made a KidPix presentation telling us all about the earth. Mrs Craib said it was because they didn’t want to talk too much. We found out lots of interesting things - like sand is made from broken down bits of rocks. 

The Rock Group told us all about what rocks are made of. If crystals cool fast they look like glass, but if they cool slowly they look like ice crystals. They made some yummy rocks by melting butter and marshmallows to make the magma and adding rice-bubbles for the minerals and chocolate bits for the crystals. At the end we got to taste some and it tasted  delicious. 

The Volcano Group knew heaps about volcanoes. They made a volcano and showed us how it erupted. It was all very interesting and amazing.

Reporters for Room 8- Caroline, Sheena and Skylah