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!

Suggest on Google News

Posted by Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers

Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.

As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:



We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!

Fantastic Performance at Cultural Festival

Last night 80 children from throughout the school, put on a most amazing performance at the Christchurch Town Hall, as part of the Christchurch Primary Schools Cultural Festival. The children were in two groups, the Junior Nga Matikao, and the Seniors as part of Te Tipuranga.  

Te Tipuranga had brought with them their kete of knowledge handed down to them by their treasured Tipuna. The children had photos of their special family members and ancestors in the kete.

During the performance two children used sign language to communicate  the  words of the waiata. 

 Nga Matikao celebrated the different cultures of our school in a colourful and lively performance. 

" I was really nervous, but when we got on stage everybody knew what to do and it was awesome! It made me real proud to be supporting my own school and I saw lots of my old friends from last year. "       Steve

"I got to wear my great, great, great Aunties piupiu, I felt very proud. And our girl's pukana at the end was 'funtastic' "      Brooke

"It felt good. I knew all the people liked us because they clapped and clapped"    Ben

Parents and Addington staff were very proud of all the children.

Conductive Education - One Small Victory but the Battle Continues

We have just been notified that our Therapy Funding has been reinstated. While this is great news unfortunately it is only for children who are presently on our school roll. We will not receive funding for any new students enrolling at our school. There is a review of Special Education to take place next year.

Check out this article in the Press Newspaper Saturday 15 August 2009. 

New Planter Box Arrives

Last Friday the Green Team was also busy assembling a planter box. This was kindly donated by Reg Platt of Fresh Harvest Planters. Reg delivered and then helped the Team to assemble the box. This planter is high sided so that our Conductive Ed children can access them from their wheelchairs. A big thank you to Harvest Planters for this. The school will be purchasing two more raised beds for our planned vegetable gardens, and the children are busy planning what they would like to grow.