East Lothian Police want you to be safe over the holidays, and would like to ask you to be sensible! Find out more about their new B-Safe B-Sensible campaign.
Today we’ve entered Edubuzz.org for the BECTA ICT Excellence Awards Support for Schools category.
This category aims to reward those organisations who support school improvement with ICT, encouraging the systematic and innovative use of appropriate technologies to deliver learning and teaching, communicate with the wider school community and improve administrative efficiency.
Luckily it’s accepted that not every project will hit all the targets, so our inability to make any claims for improving admin efficiency shouldn’t be too much of a disadvantage. Last year’s winners were announced in November, so we may have a while to wait before we know how things have gone…
Preston Lodge High School students are helping engage young people in the local Longniddry Gala by creating an attractive, interactive web site based on an edubuzz weblog.
The project started with an approach from Richard Walsh of the Gala Committee, who had noticed Preston Lodge’s lively prestonlodge.net site, and approached the school to see if they could help him do something like it for the Gala.
Calum Stewart at the school agreed to help, and developing the site is now part of the Duke of Edinburgh Award activities for some students at the school. Educational benefits of this project include:
- It’s providing a source of locally relevant, real tasks which provide a context for literacy, technological and social studies learning outcomes
- It’s providing a model of how an activity that interests students can be used to provide a context for Curriculum for Excellence outcomes
- It’s showing how web sites can help engage a school with its community at low cost without any time or money being lost to travel
East Lothian is starting to find out what it’s possible to do with Glow.
Mentors met after-school again today for an informal session where Dave Rawson , ELC’s Glow Implementation officer, showed some of the things that he’s been doing, and some things going on in other authorities. This screenshot, for example, shows the way the East Lothian page of the Glow portal is currently looking. (Click the image to enlarge.)
Tranent’s Sanderson’s Wynd Primary P7 have just published the podcasts created for their “What’s New” project.
This set of video enhanced podcasts, produced with the assistance of professional podcast and theatre staff, take podcasting in East Lothian schools to a new level. The end result is a high quality piece of work which is a real asset to the town.
Throughout January and February 2008 the pupils of P7W and P7T worked with podcast artist John Harris, their teachers Lynne Welsh and Karen Thomson, and theatre practitioners Clare Stewart and Ashley Taylor, to create a new series of podcast episodes called “What’s New?”. These take a look at the industrial history of Tranent and its surrounding area, in particular its mining heritage.
Yesterday blog number 1000 was created for a P7 student at the small rural Innerwick Primary School.
It was part of a set of 7 for the P7 members of Lindy Lynn’s composite P4/5/6/7 class, reflecting the increasing use of blogs to provide web publishing tools to individual students. The blogs will be used by the P7s for a project to reflect on their time at Innerwick, and the group are full of ideas!
Staff are also talking about the possibility offered to get some collaborative work going with other feeder primaries in the Dunbar Grammar School cluster, with the aim of helping the children to get to know some other students who’ll be joining them at the much larger secondary after the summer.
In another sign of the times, due to staff pressures, the P7 group were trained in a 3-hour session yesterday morning, without their class teacher, in how to use the blogs, and - not surprisingly - picked it up very quickly. They’ll now be training their teacher, and supporting one another, to get started in the classroom.
Total visits to edubuzz.org for March 08 - including everything from authors posting to search engines crawling - were up over 100% on Mar 07. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to that!
| December 3, 2007 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| January 21, 2008 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| March 10, 2008 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| April 14, 2008 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| May 12, 2008 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| June 9, 2008 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
| December 17, 2013 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
TODAY 14th April, 4pm, John Muir House
EduBuzz Open Meetings are open to anyone with an interest in improving East Lothian education by building a networked learning community. To date we’ve welcomed staff, parents and students.
The purpose of the meetings is to provide an informal forum where participants can discuss what we’ve learned over the past month or so, and help shape next steps.
Location is: Large conference room, Education & Children’s Services (2nd Floor), John Muir House, Brewery Park, Haddington
If you’re planning to attend, please let Susan McNaught (01620 827595) know so that we have an idea of numbers. Thanks!
The edubuzz blog system has now moved home, and the service is back. Basic tests have been successful, but if you notice anything wrong, please get in touch or leave a comment.
The changeover meant taking the system down from last thing yesterday until earlier today. Apologies if that caused you any inconvenience.
The new place has much more storage capacity, and more memory. The move was necessary for two reasons. First, performance: the server was becoming overloaded during morning and afternoon peak periods. That was down to lack of memory. Secondly, free storage capacity for uploaded files was becoming low. Continue reading ‘Edubuzz blogs move home’
Law Primary’s P7 students have been blogging from Loch Insh Watersports and Outdoor Centre this week.
They’ve made good use of digital photos, audio and video to tell the story. Again this has proved very popular with those back home, with plenty of comments from Mums, Dads, brothers, sisters and even dogs. Experience is showing this works well not just for keeping those at home in touch with what the group are learning, but is also a good way to let those in earlier years get a good idea of what the excursion is all about, as we see in this comment from P6C.
P6C were having a look at all your photos, videos and podcasts yesterday and they are mightily impressed - they’re already looking forward to their visit next year.
