Auroa Primary School

Auroa Primary School is located in South Taranaki.  The school is located between Hawera, which is generally regarded as the largest (10,000) local town and Opunake (1,500).   It is approximately twenty minutes drive from both.

Despite this relative isolation in location the school has 200 students and is a 1:1 iPad School with over 70% of the students being involved in the School BYOD program.   The school has also in recent years taken over its own technology program (including building a woodwork room and kitchen on site).  The school have three Ultimaker 2 3D Printers for their classroom programs.   All planning is completed on Google Sites by staff.  Example of students blogging with a farming theme - Caro's Farming Lifestyle,  Ashton's How we Milk the Cows,  Jorja's student blog is located here.  As part of the School Room Three's class page has been number one in terms of traffic/visitors in New Zealand in 2014/5

The School dates back to 1881.   It is in a dairy farming area of New Zealand where 90% of the students in each classroom are involved directly in dairy farming either as owners of dairy farms or workers on dairy farms.  The biggest of these farms have 1,000 dairy cows on them and students are involved frequently in working on farms in some capacity after school.   If you Google Earth Auroa Primary School you will see a cluster of buildings around the school 160 of the school roll attend school by catching the rural school bus to school each day.

Our school is very fortunate to have a number of staff who excel in several areas.  We also have support staff including a AV specialist who produces commercial grade videos of school events for the school.   You can view his Youtube channel here.  Selected highlights this year include the 125th Auroa Jubilee Celebrations, School Swimming Sports, School Athletics Field Day

Auroa Primary School is part of the MOA Kluster.  The MOA Kluster consists of four local schools that are co-operating in pool their resources and information and learning.

The Schools are Auroa, Opunake, Kaponga and Matapu.

We started as an IT cluster in 2014/5 and in 2015 became a STEM cluster with a focus on Science.   The cluster shares ideas and resources to better enable and equip the students in the group.  The group each year holds an awards ceremony to celebrate excellence in IT (the MOA Awards to highlight the work of particular students.  Some examples of these awards include the 2015 Grand Final Winner (Bum Race 2) or Best Intermediate Video (Minecraft to model Hawera Water Tower).  Sample of students work Room Four, 2015.

The cluster has taken the opportunity to send staff to Auckland to visit a number of Schools in relation to IT.   In 2014 we took the entire staff of the three Schools (Auroa, Matapu and Opunake) and visited Point England, Hauraki, Hobsonville Point and Taupaki Schools.  In 2015 the Schools were joined by Kaponga School and included members from each Schools BOT visited Stonefields, St Cuthberts, Newmarket, Tamaki and Pakuranga Heights Schools.  In addition to this we were involved in 2015 with a teacher exchange where we sent staff to Point England School for two days to develop

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