School Up and Running!!

Addington School children were back at school today, catching up with friends, sharing stories and practicing their "Drop, Cover and Hold" moves.
Room 7 produced some great art work for their cloakroom about their experiences during the past week.

We are all pleased to be back and returning to our normal routines.

School Closure

School will not be open until Monday the 13 Sept. See you all then.

School Closure until 13 Sept

Because of the Earthquake to our area on Saturday 4 September Schools and early childhood services within the boundaries of Christchurch City Council, Waimakariri (including Rangiora) District Council and Selwyn District Council will be closed to students and children until Monday 13 September.

Reading Discovery Graduation and Celebration!

Today two students, Mackenzie Wallace and Andrew Sparks celebrated their graduation from Reading Discovery with a special morning tea. At the celebration were Reading Discovery Teacher Pat Watson , class teacher Mrs Douglas, Mrs Barr and invited guests Andrew and McKenzie's Mums, Grandparent reader Mrs Rainey, Ms Heath and Ms Meachen.

Both Andrew and McKenzie entered the programme reading at level 2-3 and have finished off on level 19-20!! Fantastic, and a great example of how successful the partnership between home and school can be.

Extending the Associated Press as Hosted News partner

Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

We’ve extended our existing licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. We look forward to future collaborations, including on ways Google and AP can work together to create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities. You can read more about our hosted news agreements in this post and this one.

Learning Conversations

Thank you to all parents/caregivers who made it along to your child’s Learning Conversation this week. We hope you were given lots of clear information about how your child is achieving and some next steps to work on. For those of you who found the two days we set aside to be inconvenient please note that the teachers will be in touch to set up an alternative time as we aim to meet with every parent each term.

Google News changes reflect your feedback

Posted by Chris Beckmann, Product Manager

Two weeks ago we gave the Google News homepage a new look and feel with enhanced customization, discovery and sharing. This redesign was our biggest since Google News launched in beta in 2002.

Some of you told us that you really liked it, especially how the "News for you" section lets you see a stream of articles tailored to the interests you specify. The positive usage data we saw during our months-long tests of the redesign has continued since we introduced it to all users of the U.S. English edition, and hundreds of thousands of you have already customized your Google News homepages. But some of you wrote in to say you missed certain aspects of the previous design, such as the ability to see results grouped by section (U.S., Business, etc.) in two columns.

At Google, we’re all about launching and iterating, so we've been making improvements to the design in response to your feedback. For example, we're now showing the entire cluster of articles for each story, rather than expanding the cluster when you hover your mouse over it. We've given you the ability to hide the weather forecast from your local news section. We made the option to switch between List view and Section view more obvious. And today we’re adding a third option in "News for you": Two-column view, which shows the three top stories from each section and looks like this:



A key goal of the redesign was to give you more ways to personalize your Google News, and these changes add even more choices. A heartfelt thanks to all of you who have shared your thoughts with us. Please keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make Google News even better.