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
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.
Preston Lodge High School’s daily news blog, Today@PrestonLodge.net, has toppled Don’s Learning Log from the eduBuzz No. 1 spot over the past month.
The site is one of a portfolio of 15 blogs developed by Preston Lodge, centred on PrestonLodge.net, which displays a “river of news” stream of latest headlines from all the individual blogs. (Thanks, FeedBlendr!) The blogs currently include: Continue reading ‘Today@PrestonLodge.net reaches No. 1 spot’
