Why did the Chickenman cross the road?

This weekend I was extremely privileged and fortunate to be at the National Teaching Awards 2009 for a long weekend of celebrations. I wasn’t just hanging around for no reason but was up for an award because I had won the Silver Plato for the South West. So as a matter of fact I am actually already a teaching award winner but was hoping to pick up the Gold Plato which was the national winner for the new category of Next generation learning (I have a little badge too). First thing I want to say is that I don’t agree with the term next generation learning because as far as I can see it is actually happening now in the classroom. I see this walking round school every day so really it should be now generation learning or just maybe 21^st century learning. (Can you tell I didn’t win the award then ha ha No seriously this is what I have said all along and would have said even if I had won it live on television so probably just as well that I didn’t then as I am not sure Becta would have been happy.)

So as you can guess let’s get it out the way I didn’t win, if I am being honest of course I am a little disappointed but I am still made up I won a regional one and got that far not for myself but for the students and staff at my school because it really does put what we do at Saltash.net Community School up there with the rest of them. This whole process though has made me really reflect on these accolades etc. Are they important? What does it actually mean? Should we be striving for this type of recognition? I would be interested in what you think?

From the very beginning of this journey from being initially nominated I have felt a whole range of emotions and have thought of different opinions to those questions. At the beginning when some of my students nominated me I felt a little embarrassed, why was this? Is this just a ‘British’ cultural thing where we don’t like to blow our own trumpet? Or were there other reasons maybe this was an educational thing – I know that I had found this to be true when collaborating with other international teachers they spoke about being like poppies growing in a field and that they were constantly frightened of being cut down by others within their own schools for making themselves stand out from the crowd. I do feel like this sometimes in my own school that when you get nominated for something like this I can already hear the staff room behind a closed door saying huh teaching award don’t make me laugh. This of course is not what everyone says as some teachers are genuinely happy for you and think it is a great thing where others perhaps out of jealousy or just because it gives them something to moan about use this as the next bit of ammunition to fire at you.

So my embarrassment lasted about 3 days when I came across a couple of students who endorsed my nomination, when I told them I was a little embarrassed I was very quickly and firmly put in my place ‘get over yourself will you and grow up’, ‘kids in this school think that your great and if you act like this then that means that you don’t care what we think’, and finally if that wasn’t enough ‘we are proud of our school and what we do why aren’t you?’ Needless to say I quickly had a change of heart and decided to be proud and thankful for the nomination. So after this and after the first judge’s visit I began to feel very nervous about the regional awards, what if I don’t win? What will that mean? Will I have let the kids, teachers, and the school down? Now I had made the shortlist I really wanted to win because otherwise what was the point? So we went to the regional awards and I won which was amazing, the students and staff had a great day and it was lovely – we got a good write up in the Guardian newspaper and the prospect of a weekend in London in October.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/16/teaching-awards

So anyway back to now (the flashback is over…) We had a fantastic weekend – The teaching awards really know how to spoil you, lots of drinks receptions and nice food, a couple of nights free accommodation at the Tower Hotel with a room overlooking tower bridge all very nice. We had an excellent workshop on the Sunday before the ceremony at Drury Lane theatre broadcast on BBC 2 at 6pm. The workshop was comparing inspirational leadership to Henry V and Shakespeare and it was fantastic it really inspired me. The experience of the ceremony which you may have seen on TV was also an awesome experience and as we were waiting outside I bumped into the host Jeremy Vine as he was doing a publicity shot holding a golden plato (I did get to hold one in the end anyway although not through winning!) Then afterwards we were whisked off for a champagne reception and a lovely dinner and lots of free drinks to help lubricate myself to dance away the night with a live band.

The whole teaching awards experience was amazing, although I didn’t win one of the awards, I did have a fantastic time and I am so pleased I was originally nominated by the students. I would like to congratulate all the winners but more importantly all those nominated across the UK who didn’t get that far and also anyone who has not been nominated but deserves to be nominated which I am sure there are thousands. I would also like to thank the teaching awards staff for looking after us so well over the weekend.

As I return home now, blogging on the train I was thinking about this time last year when I was in Hong Kong at the Worldwide Innovative Teachers Awards sponsored by Microsoft. Yes yet another awards ceremony and you know what I think about awards ha ha! This one I actually did win an award at. This year’s Worldwide awards are actually in Brazil and start next week, some friends of mine are up for awards Ollie Bray and Mandeep Atwal.

I met them both at the European Innovative Awards this March in Vienna were they were both award winners and so get to go through to the worldwide awards. I was there doing a keynote on some of the projects I had taken part in recently. You can see pictures of Ollie and Mandeep below winning their awards in Vienna and you can read more about them both below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/teachers/archive/2009/03/04/award-winning-innovative-teacher-mandeep-atwal.aspx

 http://blogs.msdn.com/teachers/archive/2009/03/02/award-winning-innovative-teacher-ollie-bray.aspx

I am tipping both Ollie and Mandeep to get awards in Brazil as both their projects are absolutely fantastic and I know they stand a good chance of winning although the competition is always high because of the quality of their projects and the quality of their characters.

They will be escorted their by Stuart Ball and Kristen Weatherby from Microsoft UK who run and coordinate the Innovative teachers network http://www.partnersinlearningnetwork.com/Pages/default.aspx In fact you can sign up very easily today and start collaborating and take advantage of everything the communities have to offer with over a million teachers there from over 50 countries. In fact on the home page at the moment you can read about when I went to Washington this year and even see my award winning VCT Recharge the Battery.

Read Kristen’s latest blog on Brazil here: http://blogs.msdn.com/teachers/archive/2009/10/29/microsoft-worldwide-education-forum-brazil-this-could-be-you-next-year.aspx

If you are interested in maybe getting to next years’ Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum then you first need to register at the innovative teacher’s network and submit a Virtual Classroom Tour (VCT) before mid November to see if your project has a chance of being selected for the UK Innovative teacher’s forum. When I first submitted my VCT a year or two ago I never thought it would have taken me to Zagreb then to Hong Kong and then as a result to Vienna and even Washington but it did. The whole process of the Innovative teacher’s network is one of the best professional development experiences I have ever had. I can’t recommend it enough so if you are interested read some of my earlier blogs on the opportunities with Microsoft or Innovative teachers forums or get in contact with me to chat about it more.

So are these accolades important? Well it depends on you really, I like to think they have had a positive effect on me, my students and the teachers I work with but they don’t compare to the daily accolades I get in the classroom from my students which are normally smiles, thumbs up, the occasional thank you I really enjoyed that sir but the best are the shinning eyes when you know you have them captivated. I am sure we all see these on a daily basis and that has to be why we do the job.

We don’t need no education… Every time I heard someone mention Wallwisher without using it myself I seemed to have pink Floyd singing in my head. Wallwisher www.wallwisher.com is a great little web 2.0 tool principally for collaboration. You have a virtual wall where you can post little post it notes on to it although these are not like the normal yellow sticky notes you get as because they are online instead of just writing text you can add links to websites, images, music, audio podcasts and even videos.

How I used it was to basically get students at the beginning of the lesson as the starter to find out information on James Hutton & the rock cycle. Within a matter of ten minutes you had this awesome wall of information that contained video clips, text and all sorts of things. Students quickly began looking at what each other had posted and watching their videos. There then became a more competitive element where without any instruction they would begin to peer review each other’s information telling other students that looking at the source of their information then they had little confidence in the reliability of their post. This was fantastic to see and hear these conversations happening and all students were extremely engaged in the activity.

You can visit the example of the wallwisher we used last lesson below: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/jameshutton  It was really easy to use and set up. I created my own account which is free in a matter of a minute or two and then you go to ‘create a wall’ and follow the instructions. Here you give your wall a name and set the privacy level – I created my wall just before the lesson and so made it public so that anyone could comment on the wall this I felt would make it easier for students to access as I just gave them the website link and they could all add comments to it. After the lesson I then made the wall no longer public and so that no one else could comment on it.

I also recently observed another Science teacher at my school using it with a Separate Science year 11 set in the topic of Parasitism. When I asked Ollie Lee Head of Science about using it he said “The on-line page updates in real time this is great so that information can be shared in a lesson. Its useful for students researching new topics and also for group revision. I thought it is good that the access to the page can be restricted after the info has been put on so no one else can change it.”  I know other people have recently blogged about wallwisher too.

Ollie Bray spoke about a guy called Kenny O Donnell who has been doing some fantastic things with it in his grography lessons have a look at: http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/2009/09/wall-wisher-as-a-home-learning-activity.html  I now know why the song was going round and round, some of the lyrics have a relevance within the classroom today especially if you use Wallwisher as students can effectively collaborate in a creative way and the teacher can ‘leave those kids alone’ by acting just as a moderator or facilitator of the learning. Better still challenged your more able students by making them the moderator/facilitator whilst using it. So in some ways yes it is just another brick in the wall another tool for students to use to increase their own skills and help their own learning.

I am of course talking about the magic web 2.0 tool Photopeach – you can visit it and set up your own free account at http://www.photopeach.com/ I first heard about photopeach by looking at @raff31’s Year 4 blog. Mr Rafferty is a Year 4 teacher at Green Park school in Liverpool check out their blog http://year4.greenparkschool.org.uk/ I watched a couple of their photopeach shows and thought it had great potential. If you are not following him on twitter then please do but be warned he is a diehard Liverpool fan and also the mighty Maghull but don’t let that bother you. I also then spoke to the most recently award winning @Dawnhallybone (Congratulations on your award again at the Hand Held Learning Awards) who also said she uses it frequently with her students. So Photopeach is basically a really easy, free to use tool to produce slide shows a bit like photostory apart from you can chose music from the library that is has so in some ways also like animoto but less fancy transitions. The best bit that I love about photopeach is the two added little extras that they have at the end.

The first is that at the end of your show you can add a quiz section where you write questions and then the audience get to select multiple choice answers and see if they are right. I think that this is a great way to get students to test other students knowledge which could also be really useful for revision not only for the student creating the show who has to come up with suitable questions but also for the ones watching it making them think of the answers.

The second is that at the end of watching you then have the option of leaving a comment like you can on most of the video/show type sites however this is different as when you leave a comment it stays on the video itself as if you were watching the credits. I think this has great potential for peer assessment and peer feedback and think it is just awesome.

I used this with my Year 11 class last week and they thought it was a really good tool and they enjoyed using it. You can see a couple of their videos by clicking on the links below: The students actually embedded the files to their class collaborative space on ning so that is where we have been watching them and peer assessing them.

http://photopeach.com/album/blo8nv - By Lauren

http://photopeach.com/album/mc3qfy - By Super Alex Man

Have you used Photopeach? Have you got any examples of student’s videos? Please let us know

It is quite a strange experience to meet people after you have been stalking them on twitter for months but on Friday it was really nice when @marthawright from Futurelabs came to visit our school as part of a case study on innovative use of technology as part of the new curriculum this was on behalf of the QCDA. As I spoke to Martha we both realised that we both new quite a lot about each other already and lots of personal things to due to our links on twitter. In fact I knew what Martha looked like but obviously she wasn’t sure what I looked like as I wasn’t wearing my chicken suit when I met her. Although it was the first time we had met it had felt we had met several times before which made things comfortable and I can’t help think that this was due to the conversations we had already had over 140 characters at a time.

So Martha to write up her case study needed to see me teach and look at some of the different ways our students were learning. We were learning about water balance and the kidney and students were asked to create their own photopeach shows with a quiz question at the end. The students then watched each others and tested their own knowledge with the quiz question and were then asked to peer assess each others shows. This is the first time I have used photopeach www.photopeach.com but I think it has awesome potential for in the classroom as a learning tool. I am going to write it up as a blog post soon. Martha enjoyed the lesson and I even gave her a notebook to look at the students videos and to post a comment about them as they completed them and posted them on their shared ning. You can see one of the shows by clicking on the link below:

The Kidneyz

Next Martha chatted to some of our students about the experiences of using technology, followed by an interview with Dave Garland our Deputy Headteacher with responsibility for ICT among other things about the challenges that schools face in using it in innovative ways. Finally Martha’s visit was completed with a ‘real’ not virtual trip to our livestock area. Martha and everyone else at Futurelabs have been known to watch a little bit of pigcam and eggcam every now and then – you can all watch our piggies or free range battery rescue hens on one of our webcams at www.saltash.net/livestock   Martha loved meeting them in the flesh or feathers and returned home very happy with some free range eggs. We are hoping that we get to see more of our friends at Futurelab in the future.

Well all the women in my life have finally had enough of me and I have been sent to Coventry this week, quite literally. I am with BECTA for the next two days looking at E-Maturity. So what is that I hear you ask? Good question I am still getting my head round it! Today we listened to presentations on the purpose for the E-Learner Journey by Andy Tyerman and then Explaining ‘The Model’ for digital literacy with Janice Staines both from BECTA.  I think in a nut shell e-maturity is basically the journey a learner makes to develop their knowledge, skills and attributes to be an effective 21^st century learner. (I think!)

The rest of the day we discussed and shared ideas of examples of enquiry based learning, I wanted to share just some of them:

1)      Superclubs – http://www.superclubsplus.com/i/tour01 Primary social networking that you can get your won prizes and awards as in level of ICT ability/skills then take it to Secondary school and show what you can do. Can create your own webpages etc. Teacher subscriptions are free and you can set up a 6 week FREE TRIAL for your class to assess the potential. Subscriptions are £4.50 plus VAT per child per year.

2)      Every child has a PSP to use the video capture function on the psp students sign in their first language e.g. for doing their homework and teachers then watch them back. It has also a big impact in motivating fathers to get involved in their children’s learning. This is happening with Alison Carter at Longwill School for Deaf in Birmingham http://www.longwill.bham.sch.uk/school.htm

3)      Pupil voice explored through the tragic story of Bradley and Stacy in Eastenders delivered in the early year’s curriculum – http://www.pleasurereaders.blogspot.com/ using a blog to influence and inspire students in reading. This is by Dan Lea from Gearies Infants school in Redbridge – http://www.gearies-inf.redbridge.sch.uk/

4)      Digital blooms taxonomy – I have spoken about this before but have a look at the great picture below from the following website: http://digigogy.blogspot.com/2009/02/digital-blooms-visual.html  

5)      Using wiki’s to teach poetry, getting students to defend their own poems – you can see this as a case study on Teachers TV as a hard to teach English topic. You can watch the video here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/34475

(Sorry some of these links I can’t seem to get to work maybe not enough daylight or perhaps I ate after midnight! You may just need to copy and paste the url)

6)      Uses of enquiry based learning – Chris Mason from Salendine Nook High School in Huddersfield - www.snhs.kirklees.sch.uk/ You can see an example of this type of work by watching the video on Teachers TV  http://www.teachers.tv/video/34483

2)      Using ICT to promote creativity and focus on success criteria – you can see a video case study of an enquiry based learning project based on success criteria in a French lesson: http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/action/video_studies/truro.htm

3)      Have you got a backup plan for swine flu? If the school is closed due to something like swine flu – do you have some back up extended projects? John Cabot Academy in Bristol have set some up such as individual ones for each subject – this can be stored on the VLE for any emergencies or when students are say in isolation. What work will you set if the school is closed due to snow?

Tabetha Newman then spoke about the Digital Literacy guidance framework and document.

Digital Literacy = technology competence + critical thinking and social awareness. The main findings in the review found that students were taught with high guidance until say A level and then expected to become true independent learners; society assumes students are ‘digital natives’ because they are ICT confident although often can’t use this critically and often questions are asked that are based around recounting which just promotes plagiarism.

More to come tomorrow!

This blog is for Blog Action Day 2009 Climate Change: www.blogactionday.org 

You may have read my earlier post on how you can save the world in one minute? Students basically made their own one minute videos communicating how they can save the world in one minute. The student’s message was that it is extremely important to protect rainforests as they are the single biggest factor that could help tackle climate change and thus saving the world. The students were also trying to highlight the excellent work that the charity Cool Earth does:

Cool Earth is a global charity launched in June 2007 that funds community led protection of endangered rainforest. With the support of over 50,000 individual sponsors and companies in 14 different countries, Cool Earth works with rainforest people to ensure rainforest is worth more standing than it is cut.

How it works: 1. Cool Earth operates in six counties in South America to identify rainforest that is at greatest risk of destruction in the coming 18 months. 2. Once the risks are identified, Cool Earth works with regional governments and partner NGOs to forge relations with communities whose livelihoods, health and sustainability will be damaged by the deforestation. 3. With their agreement, Cool Earth works to secure the at-risk rainforest by funding the community to purchase or protect it. 4. All Cool Earth asks is that the forest canopy, its biodiversity and carbon storage are kept intact.

Sponsors can secure half an acre of forest (storing 130 tonnes of CO2) for as little £60 and keep an eye on it with Google Maps. As well as regular updates about their role in protecting the forest, its biodiversity and the communities that depend on it. You can do this by visiting the website www.coolearth.org  or sign up your school to become a cool school.

Our school Saltash.net Community School in Cornwall is the first one to sign up. www.saltash.net  I want to show you some of the best videos that have been produced. Please have a look at them below and post comments to our students to let them know what you think.

This first video is completed by some Year 11 students and involves a little bit of dressing up:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzVYE6CYLrY 

This next video is a little bit different and approaches it in a different way by some Year 11 students:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWyk9BjT_pg

The next video is by some Year 8 students and shows a new approach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqQVMGM2wWI

The next video is by one of our partner schools in Spain and yes it is in Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWtauqDEPgI

So did we save the world in just one minute? Well I think in our own little way we did!

Last week was our first tri-nation get together as we began our journey of learning together. As part of a Commenius project called Knowing me knowing you (A-HA just for all you fans of Alan Partridge or Abba, if you ever meet me I can show you how I can combine my handshake with giving you my card, I actually gave a man from Cadburys a paper cut by doing this!) Over the next two years many of our teachers and students will take part in many different projects that they will collaborate with students and teachers from Spain and Germany.

Last week we had different teachers and students visit Saltash.net in Cornwall to get to know us a little better and to work on the first two projects and to complete the planning of the future projects. One of the projects the students were involved in was setting up a website to host all the work we do. You can click on the link below: Also immediately below you can see the logo of our community which the students created themselves. The students were given one day to do all this from scratch completely independently, we as the teachers just gave them an initial brief.

http://commenius.weebly.com/index.html

You can see some of the work we have produced already on the website. Over the week students and teachers observed lessons, carried out presentations, took part in team building such as learning to surf and eating a pasty in the rain in Padstow. Teachers also spent time together planning the other projects that will take place over the two years which was fantastic to see the collaboration between teachers from different countries.

The students learnt an awful lot from the experience and found it amazing to spend this amount of time with students their own age but from other countries. You can read more from their blog on the website which is written in English, German and Spanish. By the end of the week we were all very tired (especially the hosts who were running around making sure it all run smoothly) but we were all very sad to be saying goodbye.

I will be posting more information and stories on here at a later date, but keep checking the students websites for updates on projects over the next two years.

We are also looking to link up with one other school in Europe for us to visit in a year’s time so if you are interested then please get in contact. If you run any similar projects also get in touch we would love to hear about your projects.

This week in school we launched our 1st assessment task for the term for our Year 7 students who are following our Learning to Learn course which is an hour a week for the next three years. It is taught as a discreet subject and in this first term students are completing the module called I learner which explores how students learn best, what motivates them to learn, how to use thinking maps, thinking hats and lots of other things. This first assessment task is called People who dare to make a difference, what students have to do is pick someone who has dared to make a difference and explore what is it that makes someone successful, a sort of hero to them.

Why are the students doing this?

We want the students to be able to identify the characteristics or personality traits which help a person to be successful because if they can learn what helps other people to be successful then they will know how to be equally successful. Students will create a biography (factual story about a person) to tell everybody about a person who you think has made a difference. They can produce this in whatever format they prefer such as anything from a song, poem, story, cartoon, video, podcast, poster, scrapbook or any other way they can think of as long as it meets all of the success criteria then it is fine.

We launched this assessment task in assembly with their learning to learn teachers, we had a very funny assembly where the teachers shared their person who dared to make a difference and what attributes they admired in them and have tried to have themselves. It was really interesting as each teacher had a different ‘hero’ and presented these in many different ways showing the students that they could also do it any way they wanted. We had a very creative story about Luke Sykwalker, Video clips of George Best and a PowerPoint of a famous French expolorer! Finally I have really had my arm twisted to put this on here but I created a photostory with my own music, beat and song created by myself in Audacity about Nelson Mandela. I have to say it is one of the worst things you will ever see or hear but if you really want cheering up it is worth watching for the 1 minute it lasts for. At least it shows the students how creative they can be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPI7D664Ubw

Who is your personal hero? Who do you admire? Do you think this is a worthwhile learning experience for our students today?

Have you tried Doink? If not then why? Last Friday I was planning for lessons the following week and wanted to try and let my students create their own animations. The reason for this is that my Year 11 students were learning about enzyme theory and one of the things that students always seem difficult to grasp is to visualise concepts like the ‘lock and key’ and how the active site changes shape when the enzyme denatures. For this reason I thought that if students could create their own animations then this would help them visualise and learn these concepts. So anyway I have never done any animations previously and didn’t know where to start so I used the power of my PLN – I tweeted ‘anyone know any good free animation tools where students can create their own animations?’

Within an hour I had been given about ten different potential tools which I had a quick look at. Straight away Doink seemed to catch my eye.

So I thought let’s have a go of Doink so I signed up and began to create my own animation – being a typical boy and a very keen kinaesthetic learner I didn’t bother to read the instructions or watch the video ha ha! So I began creating my animation on enzymes to work out what how long it would take my students to replicate this and whether the actual product would meet the objectives that I wanted it to. After less than 5 minutes I had created a very short and a little bit rubbish enzyme animation. You can watch it here and let me know what you think after 5 mins work:

http://www.doink.com/clips/chickensaltash/550326

So I decided to try this out in lessons with my Yr11 Science class in a lesson titled Why did Mr Roberts smell at University? Now I can already here you shouting the answer to this question and many of them are quite insulting and some a little rude so please don’t jump to conclusions, you are worse than my students! Now the actual reason is completely scientific and relevant to what the students were working on. The answer is actually connected to doing my laundry. Anyone who goes to University will possibly be able to relate to this, especially if you work in or around universities by the next few weeks the freshers begin to start smelling. When you are at University you probably have never really used a washing machine, you wear all your clothes, perhaps even wear them more than once depending on how bad they add up on the sniff test, however there comes the day where you really have to do some washing and it will be a huge event and will take all day. So you go to the laundrette and chuck all of your clothes in – no need to separate colours etc then chuck in lots of washing powder, biological is best and then what about temperature? Well surely the hotter the better so you put it on a boil wash. What you don’t necessarily realise is that as this is a biological washing powder it needs to be on a 40 degree wash so the enzymes can work! I have to say I didn’t really smell I just used the title of the lesson as a hook to engage students and the story to add a bit of humour. (in fact if you went to uni do you remember idiots who used to put all their clothes in dryers for hours and then got out their jeans only to see that they now fitted a 2 year old!)

So the students created their animations on Doink which they found fairly easy and managed to do this in a very short time. It is really easy to use and when you have finished the animation you can then publish it to youtube. Or embed on your social networking site or blog or email people your animation movie. I think this is a brilliant tool, the students loved using it and a few of them have said they will be using it at home to create their own animations to help with revision in many different subjects. You really need to check out the animations that the students created by clicking on the links below – please encourage the students by leaving a short comment if you watch any of them and leave a comment here on the blog if you have any ideas on how to use doink? Or you already use doink and would like to share some of the animations you or your students have created.

http://www.doink.com/clips/chloeemily/562254

http://www.doink.com/clips/05atjs/562253

http://www.doink.com/clips/MUNROPOLZ/562261

http://www.doink.com/clips/LaurenS/562260

http://www.doink.com/clips/martinandsophie/562255

http://www.doink.com/clips/breeadam/562256

http://www.doink.com/clips/mogandlaurr/562259

http://www.doink.com/clips/ALEXGIDDY/562258

http://www.doink.com/clips/KerrieandBeth/562257

Last week we were fortunate to have a visit from some of our friends from Microsoft. Over the last couple of years we have been involved in several collaborations and some of it I have talked about here on previous blogs. Last week David Walddon who is Microsoft’s worldwide leader of the Partners in Learning programme from the USA and Stuart Ball who is based at Microsoft UK in Reading came by to visit taking time out for many important global meetings in London. David has wanted to visit our school for a while now following what he has heard about the school from the times we have spent together at Innovative Teachers Forums.

During the day David was shown round the school and visited our livestock area which I have mentioned before where we at the moment keep pigs and rescued battery chickens. You can see our livestock area and also the animals on pigcam & eggcam at www.saltash.net/livestock We also tried to do a live broadcast using twitcam while we were down there and we did until the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate, fortunately it was a false alarm yet David and Stuart got to experience our fire drill.

Next David and Stuart dropped into several lessons and watched the learning that was taking place and saw lots of teachers and students using technology in innovative ways in the classroom. Later in the day over 20 of our students sat down with David and Stuart for an hour, David spoke to the students about his role and how he got there and then ran a session where students brainstormed on how they could improve how they learn within the school. You can see some of the pictures below: Among many amusing things that they suggested the main thing that came out was that they all thought the one single thing that would really make a difference would be for all of them to be given a laptop/netbook or some other digital device for them to use.

We will be following this up by working with our students on a project called Next Generation Kernow where we will attempt to put action plans in place for all their requests to happen for the future of our school.