Ms Heath in Sydney Australia

On Monday morning very early, 4.30am I arrived at Christchurch Airport ready to fly to Sydney for a tour of schools. We arrived to very warm weather and boarded a bus that took us to our hotel.

We were very fortunate to be able to go to the Hilton Hotel for a presentation by Apple. They gave a yummy lunch and talked to us for a while and then we got into groups. My group put together a Podcast, it was fun and I learned lots of new things.

On Tuesday we went to visit a school that goes from Yr 1 - Yr 12 called John XX111 and St Marks. It was a very new school with lots of lovely new classrooms. You will see some of the photos below. Later that day I went on a harbour cruise and saw the Opera house and had lots of fun.

Today is Wednesday and we visited a wonderful school called Methodist Ladies College and it had students from Yr 1 - 12 as well. Their junior school was only a year old and had an underground carpark for parents to drop their children off. The classrooms are called learning Studios and each space has two rooms working together. Their classrooms have no walls and are referred to as agile spaces. Check the photos below.

Harvest Feast

Recently, on a Friday, the Green Team held a harvest lunch. At morning tea time, the team picked beans, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, courgettes, and dug some of their purple heart potatoes and new carrots. At lunch time they set to work preparing the vegetables for the huge “Green Team Flan”, with side dishes of boiled potatoes, lovely carrots and cherry tomatoes. This was cooked in the hall oven and then eaten outside, picnic style, in the shade next to the vegetable garden. Delicious yummy and very colourful!! The flan was a big success and ‘seconds’ were in hot demand. The carrots were sweet and tasty.

The potatoes were interesting as they were dark purple when dug, but faded to a very light mauve when cooked. “Not as nice as our other potatoes”, (Jersy Bennes) was the verdict, “but still yummy”. Slivers of our garden strawberries followed.

On the following Monday morning there were several reports of variations of the G.T. flan being made in the Addington community. Great fun, gardening and cooking!

The team are planning another feast later in the term.

On a sadder note……

Vandals have smashed the pumpkin crop during a recent weekend. Other produce has also been stolen. This is very disappointing for the children, as they were planning several soup lunches for the whole school later in the autumn. The culprits have been identified and are being dealt with by the police.

Regardless of these events, the children at Addington school continue to put a lot of heart and soul into these gardens, and are hugely enthusiastic and positive about its potential. We will keep planting and sowing, learning and sharing with our school community. Roll on the next harvest feast!!!

Open-sourcing the Living Stories format

Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the New York Times and Washington Post have been experimenting with Living Stories, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the Times enlighten readers on such subjects as global warming, the Afghanistan war, the N.F.L. playoffs and executive compensation. The Post has used it to report on health care reform, the Redskins' season and the overhaul of the D.C. school system.

Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.

In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're open-sourcing the code so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the open-source documentation for technical details; read our Google News Help Forum to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the Times and the Post are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.

In coming months, we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.

Walk the Walk Day

The focus of 'Walk the Walk"  was on getting the children to understand what our Addington Attitude and our school qualities were all about. 

We had a fun afternoon involving orienteering, cooperative games and team work. The activities were based around our nine school qualities. Children were in groups of 3-4 and had to hold on to a length of string as they went around each activity. At the completion of each activity the children were given a piece of puzzle. These, once put together, spelt out our 9 qualities,Integrity, caring, risk taking, acceptance responsibility, respect, resilience, personal best and passion.

Starring stories in Google News

Posted by Jude Britto, Software Engineer, Google News

A couple of months back, we launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.

Today, we are giving users even more options for following stories. Users can mark a story cluster by clicking on the star next to it, like they can with messages in Gmail and items in Google Reader. When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information. You can also follow your 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News.


We hope you enjoy the new feature and welcome your feedback.

Google News Comes Back For More

Posted by Andy Golding and Kiran Gunda, Software Engineers

If you read news online, you've probably noticed that articles aren't static. They often change over time, to reflect things like typo fixes, shifts in emphasis, new information or corrections of previous mistakes. Sometimes they even switch URLs, or become unavailable after a certain period of time. As a human being, reading at most a few dozen articles a day, this is no big deal.

But if you happen to be, say, a news search engine that crawls hundreds of articles at thousands of sites every minute, this presents a unique set of challenges. How do you balance looking for new content against the need to update older content? How can you make sure the content is fresh, doesn't link to dead pages or display headlines that have been changed by the publisher?

To deal with these issues, Google News has implemented a recrawl feature that allows us to focus on getting the newest articles around while still ensuring that we're displaying the most up-to-date information. From the moment we discover a new article, we'll keep revisiting it looking for changes. Since we've noticed that most changes to articles occur just after they're published, we revisit articles most frequently in the first day after we've found them. In some cases, we'll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around. After that, we visit them less often. Either way, we try hard to present users with the freshest news. (We bet whoever wrote "Dewey Defeats Truman" wishes they had recrawl!)

For readers, this feature is intended to reduce the number of outdated headlines and dead links you might find. And for publishers, rest assured that we'll be back to find your latest stories and updates as soon as we can.

Fast Flip now available on Google News homepage

Posted by Jack Hebert, Matthew Watson and Corrie Scalisi, Software Engineers

Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, we're now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service we launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites.

In December we added more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets news wires and TV and radio broadcasters, bringing the total number of news sources discoverable in Fast Flip to more than 90. Encouraged by the positive feedback we've received from users and partners, we decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the U.S. English version of Google News. As always, we welcome your thoughts.