Town Versus Country

Early on in Term 3 most of Addington's senior school went to Southbridge school to play some sport. It was a great day out there, and Southbridge wanted to return the favour by coming to our school for another day of sport. So on Tuesday morning, 60 children (4 sports teams) were welcomed at our full school assembly by Nga Matiko, Te Tipuranga, and Ms Heath. After a delicious morning tea (put on by the Addington PTA), we went out to play our sports.

First was soccer, which our team won 9 :1. It was a tough but fun game. Then it was the Netball B teams turn. Again we won 9:5.  After this the A Netball team played and they lost 26:9. This was a very tough game.

Last game was the Rugby which we won 24:14. This felt really good because the teams had tied at Southbridge.

All the teams played really well and worked together to the end. They all showed resilience, persistance, passion and personal best. Fantastic Addington attitude.

After the games we all gathered together in the hall, to eat ice blocks and chat with our new Southbridge friends. Then we said our goodbyes and they hopped on the bus and set off to Southbridge.

It was a fun and spectacular day that we all enjoyed and hope to do again sometime soon.

Green Team Digs In

Early Friday morning our soil arrived in a big truck and after lunch members of the Green Team enthusiastically filled the beds and spread the soil. Now we are set to go.

P.S. Our potatoes are up through the soil in our planter box bed!!!!!

Garden Beds Up and Ready For Planting

Yesterday, members of our Green Team were very excited to see the arrival of the new raised beds for the vegetable garden. Together with Reg Platt of Fresh Harvest Planters, and Graeme Wood, (friend of the school and great supporter of the Green Team), the children assembled the two new beds. There was much hammering of nails and sawing of pegs and the beds are now all ready to go! Thank you again to Reg for making the beds, and to Graeme for his continued help and advise. 

Four cubic metres of soil will be put in them today along with some donated compost from the Strictland St Gardens. The team is all ready to get planting!!!

Loud Shirts Brighten Assembly

At today's assembly, children and staff wore their brightest, loudest shirts in support of children with a hearing impairment. With a gold coin donation per shirt, the school raised over $145 for the cause.

Room 1 have been studying the letter 'U ' and entertained the whole school with their UKELELE performance. Fantastic!! 

Participants in the Literacy Quiz were acknowledged, and Alison Holland and Dorinda Hampton were thanked by students for all their hard work getting the two teams ready for the big night.

Shirley McDonnell and Mitch Luke were presented with flowers and thanked for all their hard work in getting Te Tipuranga ready for the Cultural Festival. (Photos from this will be put on the blog in the near future.)

Jamie McAllister's Dad, Andrew, was our Duffy "Caught Being A Great Dad", and received his certificate and prize book at the assembly. Jamie nominated his Dad because he "bought him cares and shared his money with him!!"

Highlighting the diversity of content in Google News

Posted by Rawan Hakeem, Google News Online Team

As you may know, we've always included some blogs from news organizations in Google News. However, we've heard from some of our users that the way we displayed these blogs in Google News was not very clear. To address this, we're now visibly marking articles published on a news blog with a "(blog)" label attached to the publication's name.

The same sources that were there before will still be available, and nothing will change in our rankings to impact where or how often they appear in Google News. We're making this change to ensure a high quality experience for our users and help them find these types of articles.

Here's an example to illustrate our change: this article from the blog section of the New York Times is now displayed under the name [New York Times (blog)].

If we crawl a blog-formatted site, all of the blog's articles should be assigned the "(blog)" tag. If you notice sites that are labeled incorrectly, please let us know.

Read news fast with Google Fast Flip

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Engineer, Google News
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Today we're adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

To build Google Fast Flip, we partnered with three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content. It also tests our theory that being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we're looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

We've also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for Android-powered devices and the iPhone, so you can browse on the go. This is accessible at the same address.

Go to Google Labs and give Fast Flip a spin. If you have suggestions to make the service better, please let us know. We'll keep working on new ways to improve your news-reading experience. Happy flipping!

Erin Simpson Show comes to Addington

On Wednesday, Dan Costello and Will Alexander, presenters with the Erin Simpson show, visited School for  our Duffy Role Model Assembly. Dan and Will were welcomed by Te Tipuranga, and handed out Duffy books to selected children. 

They shared their favourite books with the children, the 'Complete Works of William Shakespeare', and Dr Seus 'Oh the Places You'll Go'. Dan read his Dr Seus book to the assembly and encouraged the children to keep following their dreams. 

After lots of questions about the Erin Simpson show, and a "few" autographs, Dan and Will were finally able to leave.  

Surprise For the Seniors

On Tuesday morning an enormous truck drove into the playground and parked up outside Rooms 9, 10, and 11.  The truck contained a long awaited surprise for the senior students....... Fantastic new desks and chairs to go in the recently renovated classrooms!!!! It was all hands on deck to help unload and then unwrap each desk, and stack of chairs. Very exciting!!! This new classroom furniture is all in place and our old worn tables stacked up ready for disposal later next term.(More about that later)

Google News is fluent in Arabic!

Posted by William Kanaan, Middle East and North Africa Product Manager

We're delighted to announce the launch of four new Arabic editions of Google News for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Users in these countries can now access their country-specific news editions and get the latest headlines in topics such as Business, Sports, Entertainment and more.

With more than 40 million Arabic-speaking internet users across multiple countries, we understand the need to provide our users with the most relevant news for their region. Like all Google News editions, our computer-generated Arabic editions aggregate headlines from thousands of news outlets around the world, group similar stories together and link directly to the original sources that publish these stories. This enables users to search for topics they're interested in, and read a wide variety of perspectives from different sources. It also enables publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience, thus increasing traffic to their site.

If you'd like to see a site included in Google News, or would like to send feedback our way, please contact us.

We're very excited to offer this service to our Arabic users in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and we look forward to covering the rest of the Arab countries in the near future!

Google News Tips for Publishers

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
[cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog]

During my stint on the "How Google Works Tour: Seattle", I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News:



Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from "The Times" to "The San Francisco Bay Area Times"—help me target my local audience in News Search?

No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.

What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?

We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl.

To get the full scoop, check out the video (filmed by Michael Wyszomierski of our Search Quality Team) or the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ!