How could you make a bedtime story into a must-see event for parents? Ormiston Primary School found that one way was to have it read live from Australia - using a web videoconference.

The event was attended by a horde of pyjama-clad children, who enjoyed hot chocolate while they listened to the story and watched pictures from the book appear on screen. Large numbers of parents wanted to make sure they didn’t miss out, and also squeezed into the classroom. The story was read by a teacher from Ormiston State School in Queensland Australia, which has linked with Ormiston Primary to develop reading by use of a web site where book reviews and recommendations can be shared by pupils. You can read more, and see some more photos, over on the Ormiston school site.

The video has also been embedded on their school web site, where it can be easily found by parents. Since YouTube was recently made available in East Lothian schools, it has proved to be a valuable learning resource.

If you’re an edubuzz blogger and you’d like to embed a YouTube video on your site, just use the toolbar button that’s a yellow circle with a letter “A” on it to paste in the video’s web address and publish as normal.

In June 2008, Common Ground Mediation consulted with parents and carers about how well we are doing in meeting the educational needs of children and young people with additional support needs in East Lothian.

The views of parents and carers informed the report ‘Evaluation of implementation of the Additional Support for Learning (Scotland) Act’.

You can read the full report of the audit at: http://edubuzz.org/blogs/supportforall/a… or contact Lisa Shine on 01 620 827167 to arrange for a copy of the report to be sent out to you. 2004′

The next stage of this consultation process is to invite parents and carers to tell us what you think are the main areas that we need to improve on and what actions need to be prioritised.

So if you are a parent or carer of a child or young person who receives or needs extra help with learning, we want to hear your views. Please come along to one of these consultation sessions:

Thursday 5th Feb, 6.00 - 7.30pm in Conference Room 1,
John Muir House, Haddington
OR
Weds 18th Feb, 6.00 - 7.30pm in Lounge Room,
Brunton Hall, Musselburgh

If you would like to attend, please contact Morag Steven, Common Ground Mediation on 0131 664 9324 or 07760 486 465 or email: morag@commongroundmediation.co.uk

It would also be helpful to give us any other information you feel we should know including any access, dietary or other requirements prior to the event. If you can’t manage to attend but would still like to have your views included please contact Morag Steven on the number above.

Download “What you think matters” flyer for parents and carers (4.4MB, MS Word)

Download booking forms for interpretation and translation

It was so successful it is now being rolled out across almost all primary and secondary schools in the county.

Pupils used the themes in the game as the basis for art, music, PE and English projects. They then shared their work with children who had come from other primary schools.

They introduced the project to help ease the transition for primary seven pupils moving up to Musselburgh Grammar School. (Link)

You’ll find more on the use of Guitar Hero to provide a context for learning on the Learning & Teaching Scotland ICT in Education site.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

It’s used by a wide range of people and organisations, from 10 Downing Street to Stephen Fry to quite a few of the online education community. How might schools use it? Here are some possibilities:

• Use text message Twitter updates to post on-the-spot updates from school trips or visits
• Display the Twitter updates in the sidebar of the school or class blog
• Follow a topical Twitterer - such as Barack Obama - to get news stories faster than radio or TV

Now you can display your latest Twitter updates (or anyone else’s) using a widget on your edubuzz WordPress blog using Rick’s Twitter for WordPress plugin.  Just activate the plugin and configure your Twitter widget(s).

If you’d like to get started, please contact David Gilmour

This big improvement is a built-in feature of the current WordPress MU software. It offers great potential for school use:

• It provides really good support for commenting on individual images, not just one the post.
• It allows photos to be displayed with captions.

Go and take a look at the original post on the King’s Meadow site to see it in action.

It’s also the ideal way to show off collections of photos of paintings or other activities where your audience might still want to have a good look at an individual photo, and not watch it quickly change into another one as part of a slideshow!

To use it, just upload a set of images in the usual way. Just don’t hit “Insert in Post” while you’re working with the individual images, use Insert Gallery instead. You’ll just see the word Gallery in square brackets, but the image gallery will displayed when the post or page is visited.

To keep an eye on that we’ve added the Blog Activity plugin from WPMU DEV Premium. It hasn’t been running for a full month yet, but a random check today showed that in the last week there were over 1000 contributions: 504 posts and 499 comments.

This balance between posts and comments is a good indication - if any were needed - of the changing times for education web sites.

If you’d like to add them to your eduBuzz site, you’ll find instructions below.