Archives for January 2009

Yesterday I attended the launch of Small Change, a new resource about financial capability for S1-S3 from Learning and Teaching Scotland, with our radio producer Richard Bull. It was a lovely event, held at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow, and starring the pupils of Bannerman High School.

The idea of Small Change is to encourage financial responsibility and make learners aware of the issues around money. There is a DVD featuring familiar domestic scenarios about money, wonderfully acted by the Bannerman High S4s. Their live performances yesterday at the Citz were so professional and engaging - truly a credit to everyone who was involved, especially their teachers and the learning team at the Citz, which includes the TAG Theatre company. I particularly enjoyed the one about the pic-'n'-mix - you'll have to get a copy of the DVD to see it!

Richard and I had gone along to see what was happening in the world of learning about money, having previously met with Frances McGrane and Liz Heron from the Scottish Centre for Financial Education, who had been very helpful in showing us the existing provision. Richard is currently thinking of making some short radio programmes for younger learners about the responsibilities of dealing with money. In the current climate, it seems to me that money is a bigger issue than ever, and educating ourselves as well as our young people surely must be a step in the right direction to averting future problems?

If you've any thoughts about what we might want to include in our financial radio programmes, please do get in touch by the usual means. Listen out for our Schools radio programmes - the schedule can be found online, and they are a valuable addition to any lesson.

Comments

Hi Claire. Thanks so much for coming along yesterday. We had a brilliant time and I thought the young people excelled themselves. We would be keen to contribute in any way you felt was helpful to the making of Richard's radio programmes. We are keen that the Small Change Project is taken into other schools in the future so this may be a way for us to let people know about it! Cheers for now, Louise
Louise Brown (Citizens Learning & TAG)
Fri Jan 30 15:59:51 2009

Hi, any chance of getting an RSS feed for this blog? Thanks.
Katherine
Thu Feb 5 09:17:35 2009

Claire, Thanks for your blog and for all the very positive comments about the launch of Small Change at The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. I have been involved since the day of the filming at Bannerman High School but thought the live performances last Thursday were mature, moving and very professional. We are already taking steps to make Small Change available on our website and have started discussions about filming a Gaelic version !
Kenny Ferguson (Dev't Officer, SCFE at LTScotland)
Mon Feb 9 13:11:25 2009

Hi Katherine, there's a bit of work going on behind the scenes into BBC blogs - we'll hopefully be getting one of the new and improved versions by the end of March, with better functionality, RSS etc. Meanwhile hope you can live with the manual updates - you could try following @clara_og on Twitter to be alerted to new posts. Thanks for the suggestion!
Alistair Mooney (Assistant Producer, BBC Scotland)
Tue Feb 10 15:19:26 2009

A Question of Genius is a brand new daytime quiz show presented by Kirsty Wark - and you can be part of it.

Contestants are being sought for this new quiz show which will be filmed in Glasgow and shown in the Spring. If you're 18 or over, put your knowledge, judgement, strategy and risk-taking abilities to the test. Closing date is February 6th. Or have a look at which other programmes are looking for participants.

With it being the time of year for all things Burns, and with this being the Homecoming year in Scotland - it struck me that a Curriculum for Excellence-inspired project on the bard, or Scotland more widely, would be an excellent challenge for schools. LTS have already cottoned on to this, and have set up pages for both Burns and the Homecoming. I had a bit of a trawl through our own sites, and when I looked at the amount of resources we've made about Scotland, I started thinking of ways they could be used alongside each other to make really interesting class activities.

The obvious starter could be the Burns Supper - which involves poetry recitation, Highland dancing, singing, and cooking the haggis, neeps and tatties. Different groups could be involved in each of these activities, whilst other groups design posters and programmes, sell tickets and invite guests. A similar event, with a more multicultural slant, reflecting modern Scotland, could take place on St Andrew's Day - bookends to a series of Scottish-themed projects in classes.

Our big focus for Homecoming has been A History of Scotland, which is currently being repeated in Scotland as it receives its first transmission in the rest of the UK. There are more episodes to come later in the year, so keep an eye on your television guide. This programme is just one part of the Scotland's History project, which isn't just on television, but online, on radio, and there are events worth attending too. The website expands by the day and now includes era pages and a place for debating historical issues.

However, History isn't the only way to include Scotland in lessons - literature (modern as well as Burns and a' that), geography (who could resist that landscape?) and citizenship or Modern Studies have very obvious strengths in the Scottish aspects of their curricula. Perhaps go one further - set up an enterprise group to organise your Burns celebration, or make a business selling local crafts or produce. You could even pick a part of Scotland that you don't know much about and learn about the differences when compared to your local area. Something really up-to-date, like a look at the Scottish gaming industry (there's a bit on this in our New Lives, New Landscapes films on the 29th Jan) might get learners thinking about what Scotland is today.

There's so many different possibilities for a cross-curricular project on Scotland that it seems mad not to do it. And why not come in to the L.A.B. and film your results with our team? I'd be interested to hear any of your projects for Homecoming, and any ideas on what we could do to help.

Extra links:
Burns currently on the iPlayer
Burns works as a podcast

The recent HMIe report on Improving Scottish Education urges Scots schools to do better.

Read more about the report with our collated links..

Key points from the report

News report by Seonag Mackinnon

Reaction to the report

The report in full (PDF, 2.63 MB)

For four days last week, London's Olympia was home to the BETT Show. An estimated 30,000 people passed through the doors to see the future of education for themselves. It is a real spectacle â€" hands swooping across whiteboards, handheld voting systems for interactive game-show style quizzes in class, digital signs that keep students up to date with the latest school news. It's exciting, frenetic and you get really carried away with all the wonderful things on display.

Some of the most notable displays came from the big hitters, of course. Microsoft provided demonstrations of their interactive desk, Surface, as did their competitor, SMART, with the SmartTable. They were engaging, easy to use, but didn't seem to add anything to the learning experience. I think, though, that devices like these do signal a new kind of technology in schools - they may just have some way to go yet.

I was really impressed with the 2Simple and StudyWiz stands - the first I imagine would be great for primary children, and involves making your own flash games and puzzles. Given that game design is now included in the Scottish curriculum, this introduces that concept to the youngest learners. StudyWiz is a set of resources which encourage participation in a virtual learning environment (although as Ofsted has told us last week, they're not proving as popular as previously thought!) and integrates with handheld devices like games consoles and mobile phones. I could see how well this might work in classroom, and give the learner an active role to play.

There were also engaging policy discussions set up by Becta and DCSF about how these technologies might affect the curriculum and examinations - particularly pertinent given the ongoing reviews of the current systems on both sides of the border. This provided an important link between the technology and the teachers, which felt more and more crucial with each stall I visited - sometimes the sheer excitement of handling the gadgets can take you away from the learning rather than closer to it, and I thought these panels provided a decent sense of balance.

One of my biggest disappointments was that I couldn't make it to the TeachMeet09 event - which is growing in number every year, and seems to be the place at BETT where a lot of the real innovation is taking place. Short and snappy presentations are the order of the day, and the focus is on sharing practice rather than hypothetical discussion about technology. The Scottish contingent is very well represented too, and it seems to me that TeachMeet is one of the few chances that teachers get to have these discussions with people outside of their local authority. I will certainly be signing up for next year's event.

For those teachers who weren't lucky enough to brave the stampede at BETT, though, there is so much technology available at your fingertips to be used and exploited for fun lessons. Mobile capability is growing all the time - so instead of getting your class to switch them off, get them to use them for learning, by taking pictures, or recording video and audio. Similarly, there are so many cheap handheld cameras on the market now that you can make your own documentaries in school as part of a project. Computer games consoles, the kind of technology that I was told to switch off when I was supposed to be doing my homework, are now used educationally - the Nintendo DS experiment carried out by Derek Robertson at LTS has proven very successful so far and hopefully will encourage teachers to unlock the technologies all around them. And don't forget technologies like telly and radio - we haven't, and if you must be hi-tech, you can catch it on the iPlayer...

Extra links:
The best of the tech that teaches by Rory Cellan-Jones (along with his lesson from tech hell)
Ollie Bray's BETT 09 posts
Technorati search of tag bett09
Flickr photos tagged with bett09
Twitter BETT updates tagged #bett09
Twitter TeachMeet updates tagged #tmbett09
Flashmeeting of TeachMeet at BETT09

Read Brian Taylor's take on the news report of the sharp fall in numbers of young people suspended or expelled from schools in Glasgow.

Listen to the report from Seonag Mackinnon about the introduction of learning centres for tackling disruptive behaviour and have your say on Brian's blog.

With 25th January 2009 being the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, BBC Scotland is recording all of his poetic works, performed by some of Scotland's best-loved actors.

You can listen to the works published so far, read by Brian Cox, Hannah Gordon and John Gordon Sinclair. Related radio and tv programmes are being shown this month which you can catch on the iPlayer, currently including the second part of Andrew O'Hagan's The World According to Robert Burns, John Cavanagh exploring A Man's a Man For A' That on Songlines and Eddi Reader joining Robbie Shepherd on Reel Blend.

On the BBC's Robert Burns website you can find out more about the man and how to hold your own Burns Supper. As well as links on the website, have a look at Learning and Teaching Scotland's Burns resources, a blog of Robert Burns' letters, posted on the days they were written, and follow the National Trust's ayrshirebard on Twitter to receive lines from Burns' poetry sent on a daily basis.

Happy new year, or bliadhna mhath ùr!

2009 is set to be a really exciting year here in Learning, and for education in Scotland more widely. 2008 was a great year, with big launches for us including the L.A.B., China Stories (continually developing, and still with the MyChina site to launch fully), the Scotland's History website (including Lost Penny, in which I seem to have become a fixture) and Learning Zone Scotland. We've got some great stuff up our sleeves for 2009, though - I'll be writing new developments on our resources as they happen on this blog, so watch this space.

The end of January will see the transmission of two new programmes called New Lives, New Landscapes. These are aimed at Social Studies in the first instance, but we think that in true Curriculum for Excellence fashion that they will have a life in other subject areas too. The target level is equally flexible, and as with so many of our new resources, the intention is that sparky and innovative teachers will use them in all kinds of ways - ways that we haven't even thought of yet! The films will focus on four distinct topics: Dundee; cottage industries; Grangemouth and business parks. There's potential in there for sustained use in geography, history and modern studies, but there are also sections on business that would be useful in teaching enterprise.

The Dundee film is a great example - in ten minutes we go from the jute industry to the computer games boom, covering the changing landscape and work of a city. The programmes are narrated by Ashley Jensen, of Extras and Ugly Betty fame, and we think that they could be used for years to come. And if you miss their network transmission, never fear! The content will be stored in our Learning Zone for posterity.

I'm going to be out and about over the coming weeks, visiting schools and I'll be attending the BETT technology in education conference on the 15th and 16th of January, so maybe I will have a chance to meet some of you who are using the homepage and the resources. I'll be blogging on what I've been up to, so if you see me, stop me and tell me what you think.

Image: Tay Bridge by Brian Carr from BBC Scotland's Tayside and Central Scotland pages.