Welcome To Volcanics Video Conferencing

Dear Students and Families,

The Volcanics Cluster offers students at cluster schools the opportunity to take courses which are not currently available at their local school by accessing courses from other schools and tertiary institutions. The tertiary institutions include Otago Polytechnic, Telford rural Polytechnic, Wintec and Waiariki Institute of Technology. A list of courses is available on the Virtual Learning Netwrokwebsite, under video conferencing, www.virtuallearning.school.nz. While courses are still available through the correspondence school, video conferencing has the added benefit of weekly, timetabled, video conference sessions where students meet with their teacher and other students in their VC class. This regular meeting, supplemented by two face to face meetings during the year and supported by the school's VC coordinator and year Dean, improves the students' chances of achieving in their chosen subject. As a result, if a student decides to do a course via distance learning, we strongly recommend that they go the video conferencing route.

Each course has one or more of the following learning components:

• paper based resources,
• email
• online ("myclasses" or another on-line learning management system) and
• video conferencing (VC).

All courses offer Achievement Standards and/or Unit Standards. Communication is maintained through fax, text, email and an online, learning management system, such as Moodle, UltraNet, KnowledgeNet and Myclasses.

Acceptance into video conference courses is determined by a recommendation that the student is sufficiently self-motivated and has the ability to work with less direct teacher supervision than would normally be the case.

Our students are invited to take up the opportunity that Volcanics provides to support their quest for learning beyond the local community.