
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