Addington Netball Shoot Off

Congratulations to the winners of the ANZ Tactix Shoot out last Tuesday.

The winner of the Tactix Netball and goodies was Zania from Room 9.

The Team at the ANZ Sydenham and Addington Branch were on hand to support

us. Plus a special guest Victoria Smith from the Tactix.

If you wish to discuss any of your Banking needs please contact Jenny or

Sandra @ ANZ Sydenham Branch. In particular join your family to Kiwi Saver

and take advantage of the $1000 Government kick start:

jenny.higginson@anz.com ph 3682158

sandra.tait@anz.com ph 3682155

Duffy Theatre

On Tuesday, three actors came to our school to show us why reading is awesome.
They did a show called the Duffy Show. Duffy was on a show called the big OE (Occupation Exploration). They got one person to spin the wheel. Whatever number it landed on Duffy had to learn about that occupation. First Duffy had to use his skills from reading to help understand what doctors do. Then the doctors got someone from the audience to have a brain surgery. Then someone else spun the wheel and Duffy had to do the same with learning things about Chefs. The last one was Sport Stars. The game was ping pong. Ting fon, the best ping pong player in the world vs Ding dong the second best, had one game of ping pong. Then we sung the Duffy Song.
The show was finished and then we got to say hello to the actors.

Summary: On Tuesday 3 actors came to our school and told us why reading is awesome. They played a game called the O.E. Duffy used his 9 skills to help him through the Occupations.

(Reporter Yazmin Miles-Watson)

Making your video news more discoverable: best practices for news publishers

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist Google News, and Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager

Video has always been a unique storytelling tool, especially useful when reporting the news. From raw, citizen-reported videos from the streets of Tehran, to student documentaries highlighting under-reported issues in local communities, or investigative reporting done by professional news outlets, just about every type of news video can now be found on YouTube. Video is also tightly integrated into the Google News experience, providing users different ways to consume and enjoy news, while giving news publishers the opportunity to reach a greater and more diverse audience.

We are working to make it easier to get your video content indexed in Google News, but ensuring it’s found in a timely fashion is another matter. So we thought we’d share six best practices for how news publishers can increase the discoverability of their news videos.

1. Timely uploads
Videos should be uploaded as quickly as possible -- this will help them reach the news homepage faster and be grouped with the most recent articles.

2. One story per video
Instead of having one video that contains multiple segments covering several different stories of the day, it's a better user experience (and easier for us to index), when there is one story per video, and the video title is specific (not something generic like “Breaking News”). At the very least, the description of the video should match the first story in the video.

3. Categorization
If you are providing general news coverage, select YouTube category “News & Politics” (which is youtube_category_id 25) when uploading your video. If you have multiple channels, clearly identify each category (politics, business, entertainment, sports, etc.).

4. More detailed descriptions
Similar to the first paragraph of a news article, descriptions of the news video should convey the who, what, when, where, and why of the story in a few sentences -- the more detail you can supply, the better.

5. Rich tags
Another way to convey the content of the video is using the keyword tags. Providing keywords that might not be in the description gives us more knowledge of what the video is about. Especially helpful are proper nouns: the names of the people, places, companies, etc. mentioned in the video.

6. Make it Embeddable
Be sure your video is embeddable on other sites since this is currently a technical requirement for being displayed in Google News. Additionally, if your videos are geo-blocked in certain regions, they will not appear in Google News.

If your news organization isn’t already making its video content available on YouTube and Google News, we encourage you to get started. More information on how to submit your news videos to Google News can also be found in the News Publishers Help Center, and you can watch this video for additional tips on news search engine optimization.

Caught Being a Good Mum

Congratulations to ….Kalesita Afemui

who was the lucky winner drawn out of the box for the Duffy “Caught Being a Good Mum” promotion.

The comments on the form that Caroline Afemui (Room 9) dropped in the box were

“mum is there for me and always helps me”.

The prize was presented to Caroline’s mum at the Full School Assembly today .

Bringing Living Stories to WordPress

Posted by Eric Zhang, Software Engineer

For the last few months we’ve been talking with publishers about ways to make it easier for them to use Living Stories, our experimental format for displaying news coverage, on their own websites. Today we’re releasing a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress. Now anyone who publishes through WordPress can use the plugin to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page.

We first showcased Living Stories in December through a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times and Washington Post. We got great feedback from both readers and publishers. Our next step was to open-source the Living Stories format, allowing publishers to build on it using Google’s AppEngine infrastructure. We then released a version of the code that runs independent of our infrastructure. Since then, a number of publications have shared their ideas for ways we can offer additional tools to help them create Living Stories.

The WordPress plugin is a direct result of those conversations. We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all. Head to our documentation page for detailed instructions. If you have questions or feedback, feel free to leave us a note in our help forum. We’re looking forward to reading your stories and seeing how the Living Stories format evolves on WordPress.

Inspirational Girls Breakfast

On Wednesday last week, 30 girls and a member from each of their families, enjoyed a special breakfast in the school hall. The breakfast was put on by friends and members of the Addington school community, who provided a delicious menu for the girls.
Ali Palmer (our wonderful music and choir teacher) spoke to the group about everyone having a “gift”, and the need to find out what your gift is. It was important to grow your gift, like a seed and to persist and not give up. She talked about her own experiences in rock bands like Atlas, and how they were given so much but she felt something was missing. Ali explained she would much rather be here at Addington helping us with our music. Sharing her gift.
Ali gave each girl a spring bulb, which was later planted out into part of the Rose garden and will provide an amazing colourful display in the spring.

A huge thank you to our community, and to Ali for the wonderful and inspiring start to the day.

Two more weeks to update your Google News Sitemap

Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer

Almost five months ago, we announced a redesign for our Google News Sitemap. We wanted to give publishers plenty of advance notice so they could make a smooth transition to the new format.

This transition period will end on May 4, when we'll discontinue supporting all old-style Google News Sitemaps. If you are a publisher and haven't already shifted your Google News sitemap to the new format, we urge you to do so by following these instructions as soon as possible. This update is key to avoid interruption in crawling your content and allow our crawler to capture all necessary information about your articles.

If you've already made the changes to your sitemap, we thank you. There is no need to worry about this update. If you're interested in learning more about Google News sitemaps, we encourage you to read this section of our Help Center and submit a sitemap for your articles in Google News. You may also be interested in checking out our Help Forum where other publishers have shared useful tips and discussed other Sitemaps-related questions.

Don't forget to update your Google News Sitemaps. There are only two more weeks to go!