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Home » About Us » Planet Protection Programme

Planet Protection Programme

What do we want to do?

We want to unleash our potential to help save our planet.

Our Vision

Our vision is to use make innovative use of ICT and to use our school website to positively engage with all the children in our school and throughout the world. We want to use the world wide web to help us to make a positive contribution to local and global issues.

Our History

We were set up in September 2011. Mrs Tandy's class worked with Mr Kernan on ideas to improve the website. Mr Kernan then wanted to set up a smaller group of children to work on the development of our ideas. Anyone who was keen on participating had to complete an online application and Mr Kernan then selected a group of 9 children. Mrs Monaghan has also been really good at helping us. We met every Friday initially and, more recently, we have been meeting at break, lunch and sometimes after school. We also do a lot of work at home using learning NI and e-mail to communicate with each other.

At a meeting on Friday the 21st of October we agreed on our name. The WWW stands for the Wize Web Wonders. We also outlined our 3 part strategy.

Our Strategy

Stage 1 (began September 2011) In School

Improve all aspects of the website so that it is modern and relevant to all the children in our school as well as parents and the wider school community. To do this we will try to get children to access the website and we will try and involve them through competitions and interesting material (Kidz Page)

Stage 2; (began October 2011) In our community

We want to use our school website to tackle real life issues in our school and local community (linking up with the Parents' Association)

Stage 3; (began November 2011) Linking with businesses and the wider community

We would like to work with our local businesses and the wider school community in order to tackle important environmental issues.

Stage 4; (5th-9th December 2011)

We want to run a planet protection programme within our school initially (5th - 9th December 2011)

Stage 5; GO GLOBAL (to take place in February 2012)

Extend this to local, regional, cross-border and international schools and educational establishments.

Check out our list of partner schools already. Anyone interesting in joining up or finding our more information. Fill in your details here and Mr Kernan will get back to you straight away.

Successes to date

1. Improved traffic to our website - A 500% improvement!

Over the last few weeks (28th November 2011 to present) we have been averaging 950 visits and 7000 page impressions. People are spending an average of 7 minutes 30 seconds on our site and accessing it from all over the world. Last week we had people from India, South Africa and China look at our website - which is amazing. In September we were averaging 200 visits (120 unique) and people spent only 2 minutes on our site. Eadaoin keeps a keen check on our targets and we are continually revising our targets.

How did we do it?

-We updated all the existing pages by writing articles and taking potographs and then uploading them on to our website. Once we felt our website had improved enough we ran a poster competition to advertise the website. We also announced Pupil of the week on a Thursday evening - and we had over 2000 page hits. We spoke to children at assembly each week, we spoke to parents at the bazaar, we sent out notes to parents and we spoke to prospective parents at the open night.

We had 'think tank' sessions and came up with new ideas like our Kool Kids page and we got the Lisburn Omniplex to sponsor us for competitions. We have also linked up with Little Oaks playgroup and our Parents' Association. We have tried to get new prospective parents to look at our website by running a free school uniform competition and by talking to them at our open night.

2. We have tackled environmental Issues

We have teamed up with tesco to try a range of initiatives to save paper and energy. We sent a letter to parents and we are putting information on our website. Initiatives include;

-Planet Protectors
- Signing up to receive the Friday note by e-mail
- 6 at 6 the vampire challenge
- Plastic Fantastic - Reuse and recycle your plastic bottles
- Paper Recycling - we put recycle bins in all the clasrooms
- Switch Off Campaign - we have worked with teachers to appoint two monitors in each class to help switch off lights and electrical items that are not in use.

Emer Robinson also wrote to Graham (our school management company) expressing our concern at a lack of recycling facilities in our school which is one of the reasons we decided to take matters in our own hands. We also wanted to look after our whole school site and we got in contact with Michael O'Halloran and Nichola Lynagh in the Regional Training Unit that adjoins our school. We made them aware that while they were recycling their materials everything was going to landfill. We put up posters in the RTU and we organised our own recycling collections for them.

What's next?

We will review how this week goes and mabe continue it or try a something similar in February.
We are establishing links with other schools in Lisburn, Downpatrick, Newry, Portadown, Wexford and the Netherlands. We will try and develop these further to try and send our message out globally. Click here to see our full list of partner schools.

Who is in our Group? Everyone.

This week we are adding 32 other children - 2 from each class. This project has taken a lot of hard work from a group of children to set it up but it is for every one and it is hoped to involve all children in the school directly and indirectly.

Nine children have been working very hard behind the scenes in editorial and planning roles relating to our website. Below is their original jobs although they all have additional roles as planet protectors now.

• Niamh Murphy - Website Editor
• Caoimhe Gillen- Secretary (She takes the minutes aswell)
• Paula McStravick (Vice- Secretary and helping with interviews)
• Emer Robinson (Editor of Sports Section)
• Erin (Editor of staff section)
• Andrew Johnston (Editor In charge of interviews)
• Eadaoin McAlea and Sophie Brennan (In charge of statistics and Development)
• John Johnston (Editor for the weekly News)

We want to represent all the children in the school and we are always open to new ideas. Look out for our weekly kids page and our competitions.