Archives for February 2009

It's four weeks until the culmination of this year's School Report. Registered schools have recently been having practice days, gearing up for News Day on 26th March.

Pupils from Lenzie Academy and Jordanhill Primary School visited BBC Scotland at Pacific Quay last week to get a taster of real-life in newsrooms and studios.

Read the Lenzie Academy pupils' experiences of interviewing Sally Magnusson.

And have a look at a video of the Jordanhill pupils with 'Heather the Weather' as well as photos of their tour with presenter Mhairi Stuart.

BBC News School Report is a project giving 11-14 year-old students the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience. Find out more at the website and register your interest in next year's project.

If you're aged 12-18 and you write your own original music, kick-start your career as a young composer. Whether you've been composing for years or you're just starting out, or wondering if it's the thing for you, check out the annual Inspire scheme brought to you by the BBC Proms.

There's a Composer Lab being held in Glasgow on 15th March. This is a chance to join musicians and composers in a day of music making, exploration and discovery. Bring your instrument, your latest idea, a rhythm, a melody, a finished work or just a friend. Try things out, question the experts, get feedback and develop your own musical creativity.

And if this boosts your confidence, enter the Young Composers' Competition 2009. Winning compositions will be performed during the BBC Proms season and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. There are no restrictions on the type of music you can enter - it can be classical, jazz, pop, instrumental, vocal, anything you like.

The National Trust for Scotland has produced an online learning resource about the slave trade.

Intended to introduce teachers and youth workers to the use of drama, Scotland and the Slave Trade will help ten year olds and over learn about the topic while exploring sensitive issues arising from Scotland's history.

Have a look through the National Trust for Scotland's education site for more resources and information about Scotland's historic houses.

And find out more about Scotland's role in the slave trade in our site British Slave Trade and its abolition 1770-1807.

Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth with the BBC's Darwin season on tv, radio and online.

There are links to Darwin content from all around the BBC, including an interactive map and daily blog, and links with the Open University's Darwin 200 features and the Wellcome Trust's interactive version of the Tree of Life.

Our very own Learning Zone has clips about natural selection, evolution, and various aspects of animal and plantlife.

And take a look at the Darwin tv and radio programmes on the iPlayer right now, including David Attenborough's Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. Also from David Attenborough is the first part of the brand new Nature's Great Events series.

I visited Liberton High School in Edinburgh on Monday, as part of our Democracy in Action programmes, due to broadcast in March. The idea is that there will be an hour's worth of programmes about UK politics, and another hour with 20 minutes each devoted to the particular situations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Our 20 minutes are being directed by Julie Peacock, a senior broadcast journalist here at BBC Scotland. What you'll see are four films, each five minutes long, focussing on a different aspect of how democracy affects young people in Scotland.

The young people that we interviewed today were full of articulate views about how they believed politicians perceived them, the issues that would engage them, and what they thought of our current crop of MPs and MSPs! Thanks to Miss Arnold and Mr McDonald at Liberton for arranging the visit and allowing us to film with their students.

We're returning to Shawlands Academy in Glasgow to film this week for the same programmes. We did a bit of the groundwork for the films at Shawlands few weeks back, and we're sure that they will give us as much enthusiasm and strong opinions as they did on their first visit. It was the input of the pupils at Shawlands that shaped the way the production of the programmes has developed, so a big thanks to Mr Donnelly and Mrs Grant for both our visits there.

The programmes are aimed at Senior level students (post S4), but we hope that they are interesting and flexible enough that other groups of learners can use them too â€" because they are only five minutes long they can be use to provoke debate or to illustrate an issue in a lesson without stopping active learning. They'll live in our Learning Zone after broadcast too. I'll blog with details when we have a confirmed slot for their transmission; I know they'll be really useful to teachers and learners alike.

Image: "There shall be a Scottish Parliament" by DavidDMuir.

Comments

I really hope you enjoyed your visit to Liberton High School. It is a fantastically vibrant school with a committed staff and great students. The headteacher, Donald McDonald is a great friend and has been a real mentor to me on my own leadership journey.
OllieBray
Sat Feb 14 19:08:20 2009

Catch two BBC Four programmes about the importance of reading on the iPlayer just now..

In Just Read with Michael Rosen the children's laureate and poet Michael Rosen, worried that children don't seem to read as much as they used to, takes on an ordinary primary school in Cardiff to see if he can start a reading revolution in just ten weeks.

He gives the staff permission to break into a packed curriculum simply to introduce good books and stories, after discovering that a lot of the children don't have many books at home and have never visited a library.

And in Why Reading Matters science writer Rita Carter tells the story of how modern neuroscience has revealed that reading, something most of us take for granted, unlocks remarkable powers. Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the new digital revolution could threaten the values of classic reading.