Finally.....posted this!

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

I've been reading about a growning number of schools, especially in the States who regularly use blogs, wikis and other online sites with their pupils.
So one of the things I'm proposing is that after half term we set up a Kenuke's Kingdom blog section of the new site, and encourage the kids to comment on different areas of the book.

Any other ideas of ways we can roll some of this stuff out?

http://www.worldatlas.com/ has a great range of maps, flags and facts about pretty much every country in the world. Might be useful when we come on to Spirit of Adventure

We did setting goals today with me-smart and I was amazed by how many of the girls had the aim to 'lose weight'.

So when I saw this video earlier I decided that in the coming weeks and months we're going to keep revisiting these ideas, and I want the kids (especially the girls) to try and understand the difference between health living, and 'looking good'. I did have a link to a promotional website for a company that did photoshopping of photos of models and there was a 'before' and 'after' section. That part of their site is down at the moment, and some of the images are one's I'm not completely comfortable abut showing to a room full of 12 year olds, but the Dove campaign for real beauty site (where the video clip originated) has some great resources (and other pretty scary videos clips) on it.

Right......well if Dave can have his own geeky section, I think I should start one too!!!!!!!!!

Yoda Quotes

Just to let everyone know - I have added a new section for DRW - entitled 'Daves' geeky links' on the right hand side.......The Muppets website with some geeky games is the only member of the list at the mo!!!!

Blufr is another website that insists on dropping it's E's, but more than this, it generates a series of yes / no questions from the answers.com database and allows you keep a score of how you're doing.

Might make a good starter / plenery. Or just a source of weird and wonderful facts for Dave!

You can also put a random question on a website, so I might use on the Smart site. Which I really ought to get round to finishing...

Don't know if DS has already thought/mentioned this, but I plan to do Music Smart next week........by not only getting pupils to make an instrument for themselves, but getting them to compose a sort of tune and record the different parts using the Mac in my room.......could be a mad experiment.....but worth a try I thought......!!!!!


Regards

Nick

A bridge between Nature and Music?

and heres' the paint image to go with it!!!!

Great Fun!!!!

Going to present photos and pictures with details on A2 paper next!!!!

This worked really well today!

Illusions

Regards

Nick

What's my leaf? May not be up to cloud appreciation standards, but here's the website that will halp you identify your leaf! http://www-saps.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/trees/index2.htm

The following is a personal, slightly rambling, piece of blue-skies thinking about where we could take smart in the future. I’d be interested in your thoughts. If you think I’m living in cloud cuckoo land, please tell me. Just make sure you do it nicely! ;0)

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The current discussion in certain quarters seems to be about how to take Smart forward into year 8 and beyond. I guess the easiest way would be to try and ‘integrate’ the ideas across the curriculum. I’m all in favour of this, and it’s clearly something we should be doing anyway, but I can’t help wondering if our smart lessons at the moment offer something more that can be achieved within lessons.

Certainly the 8 lessons a fortnight model isn’t viable beyond year 7, but I think two things we have in smart probably can’t be duplicated within the subject-based curriculum.

The first is the emphasis on motivation. A lot of evidence seems to suggest that pupils with high self-esteem go on to do well at school. I have heard it argued that this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, after all it’s the bright kids who get good self esteem by doing well in school. And they’re the ones who’ll do well in their exams. But what about those kids who’s natural abilities don’t lie within the traditional confides of school, and so spend the five years up to their GCSEs being given the message that they’re not very bright. Sure, it happens a lot less with us than at some other schools. But it still happens. What might happen to those pupils self esteem if there was a place in school where they COULD do well, because they got to set the parameters of what doing well meant?

The second is the focus on the process rather than the outcomes. These ideas are becoming embedded in subject areas (I know in history at the moment there is an emphasis on ‘meta-cognition’ following the subject review), but subjects can only take it so far. We may learn best by failure, but how many departments are willing to provide opportunities for pupils to fail?

So how can we move forward? How can we provide a space in which we can focus on the process, provide self-esteem and motivation (and study skills, and places to fail and learn from it) but in a realistic and sustainable way? I would suggest two lessons a fortnight could be found from somewhere in which the smart program could be carried on. As for what to include in that time, well I’ve got an easy option or a hard option. The easy one is to carry on with the thematic approach. It would obviously be different with only 1/4 of the time, but I believe the approach is still valid. Especially if that time could be arranged into a double lesson, and the focus of the work could be increasingly passed over to the pupils. Which brings me on to the harder option.

I was recently watching (during another bought of insomnia) an RSA lecture by Professor Stephen Heppell, entitled ‘Learning 2016’. (You can watch it online at Teachers TV - http://www.teachers.tv/oneOffProgramme.do?transmissionProgrammeId=415051 - I might stick it on the patch as well once we’ve got some more room!).

His view was that in the next ten years, a new model of teaching and leaning will develop from what he called the ‘20th Century model’. Fundamentally, this sees education changing from subject based, one-to-many system that focuses on delivered wisdom, to one that is project based, peer-to-peer and focuses on user-generated content. That isn’t to say there will no longer be teachers. But our role will be changing. In a world where information is no longer scarce, the purpose of education may no longer to be deliver ‘the facts’ to pupils, but rather to equip them with the skills to work out what information they need, know where to find it, and evaluate and critique what they find.

He gave examples of international projects that are starting to do this, and I started to think that this sounded like a path along which smart could develop. What if those two hours were based around whatever the pupils wanted? Developing the round the world journal idea, why couldn’t pupils who were interested in making a video about the progress of the sports team be able to get together and do it. While those who were inspired by a comic relief documentary get involved in some fund-raising while another group build a web-site about what they’re up to. Why restrict ourselves to form groups? If the smart afternoon for the year group fell on the same day, why not allow pupils to where interested in similar topics to work together. 12 months down the line, lets have year 8 and 9 working together on projects.

Sound like a logistical nightmare? Well, there would have to be a system. Each project would maybe take a half term. Plans would have to be approved; journals of progress could be kept online for us to check. Some ideas would have to be turned down. But think of the positives. How much self-esteem could pupils get from doing this? (I suspect the answer is ‘loads’) Some of them wouldn’t achieve what they wanted. But they’d achieve something and we’d be giving them a safe space to fail, pick themselves up, reflect on their mistakes and go and succeed the next time.

Sound heavy on the technology? It would be. But technology gives us the opportunity to achieve these things. Not just to create things, but to work collaboratively on ideas, and to publicly display them afterwards. And public displays and celebration of what was being achieved should play a key part in this.

And I can’t be sure, because I have no idea where I filed the bit of paper, but I’m pretty certain this ticks many of the ‘personalized learning’ boxes that were on Hugh’s second sheet at the start of the year.

I know these ideas are sketchy, but go and watch the lecture, it’s a fascinating and inspirational insight into the path our jobs may be headed down. These are initial thoughts, of a blue sky variety. But I’m convinced we have the expertise and the dedication to make something like this happen. The question really is, do we have the courage?

So comments please! Easy route? Or the one that moves us further out of our comfort zones but offers our pupils so much more, in so many more ways?

What???......It turns out I'm Lisa????????????

Ok. We've sorted the geeks from the non-geeks. But which Simpson are you???

(It would appear I'm Marge!!!)

Can we have a show of hands.....how are we all doing - how many smarts have we covered......3.......4........5.......6.....just interested to know. Myself I'm finishing off Body Smart this week which is only my 3rd......What about you guys?

Nick

Finally got around to typing this up......finished Word Smart last week with the News reporter activity which I taped. Very Interesting - some pupils really came unstuck when they were speaking to the group, some took on board the demo I gave of Newsreaders and it does prove for interesting viewing. I do plan to do this again, in some shape or form at the end of the year and see how they compare.........will they be more Word Smart??????

Regards

Nick

New Website

We've been investing in some web hosting and a domain name, and we're now the proud owners of www.olchfa-smart.org.uk. There's not much there at the moment, but you can have a look at the layout and the lists of things I still need to fic by doing the following:
1. Go to www.olchfa-smart.org.uk
2. Click on 'Administration' in the botttom right corner
3. Log in using the username: guests and password: guest
4. Click 'view the site' at the top of the page
5. Click and enjoy!

All comments welcome. I'll be on the scrounge for some content before long. I thought maybe having a competition for the kids to design the image for the top of the page - maybe we could talk about it on Wednesday.