On Thursday 25 October Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II visited BFI Southbank to celebrate 60 years of the BFI’s first permanent cinema on London’s South Bank. The event was also a celebration of British Film in this special Jubilee year.
As part of its on-going ‘Cultural Campus’ partnership with BFI Southbank Lambeth CLC was involved in supporting an animation session for Year 6 pupils from Telferscot Primary School that Her Majesty The Queen, observed as part of her visit.
It’s been a great start to the academic year for the CLC team. Having spent the summer weeks auditing kit, running a Summer University Programming club and trying to schedule the many and varied requests from our partner schools, we began the new term with the news that we had been awarded Learning Technologists Team of the Year by the Association of Learning Technologists (ALT). This title is presented annually by ALT for exemplary practice and outstanding achievement in the learning technology field. ALT were particularly impressed with our team’s ‘vibrant imagination in the use of technology’ and our ‘ deep understanding of teachers and learners’ needs’. As this comes close on the heels of making the shortlist for a NAACE Impact Award in May 2012 for the quality of our CPD, we are feeling particularly proud of the Centre’s achievements.
ALT Learning Technologist Team of the Year 2012
Lambeth CLC Team Winner of ALT Learning Technologist Award 2012
So, if you haven’t yet signed up for our award winning training or if you’d like to make use of our ‘vibrant imagination’, it’s not too late. The CLC is running a huge range of courses and conferences in the Autumn including sessions on setting up a class blog, using google apps as your VLE, support for programming at KS2 and E-Safety training. Contact Julia Lawrence for dates and details jlawrence@lambethclc.org.uk
October is upon us, it’s Black History Month, teachers across the country will be focusing on and highlighting achievements of great people in history and today, an example, in 43AD the first record of an African auxiliary unit taking it’s position on Hadrian’s Wall as part of the Roman Army to guard the empire, or Mahatma Ghandi in the 1930s, Martin Luther King in the 60s, Nelson Mandela in the 90s, and 2008 with Barrack Obama, the timeline is vast and inexhaustible! They is a huge amount of information on countless individuals, search engines will inundate with facts and figures, telling the stories of migration, struggle, travel and endurance in the search of a better life for all.
Yet more recognition for the quality of our teaching; Lambeth CLC has been awarded a Learning Outside the Classroom Quality Badge!
Awarded by the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom, the LOtC Quality Badge combines for the first time learning and safety into one easily recognisable badge for all organisations providing learning outside the classroom experiences. The LOtC Quality Badge is designed to make it easier for teachers to identify providers of quality educational visits.
In the first week of the summer holidays we ran the first Lambeth Coding Academy with pupils from Crown Lane, Woodmansterne and Granton Primary Schools. We spent our time learning to program with Lego NXT robots and building computer games with Scratch and Microsoft Kodu. Pupils were then challenged to build their own game to show friends on family in our final day exhibition.
After 20+ years we’ve changed the focus, format, and name of the Media Studies Conference. A small change – to the BFI Media Conference: Creativity, Industry, Learning – but one which we hope signals a broader address to media teaching and education, beyond a narrow address to A level specifications.
This year we ‘stranded’ the conference as New Media, TV, and Film, each on a different day. Alongside plenaries and keynote speakers, we divided our days into ‘Create’, ‘Reach’, and ‘Learn’, to mirror the processes that media go through from conception to classroom.
Our New Media day was co-produced with Lambeth City Learning Centre, and brought a new set of speakers and ideas to an audience of media teachers: Ian Livingstone, President of Eidos Games, and co-author of the influential NextGen Report; Alan O’Donohoe, the teacher behind Raspberry Jam and Hack to the Future; Emma Mulqueeny, the brains and energy behind Young Rewired State – and many others.
Day two, on TV, opened with Pat Younge, Creative Director of BBC Vision, and carried on with writer Ronan Bennett, documentary maker Jez Lewis, Music Video maker Emil Nava and his agent Chris Abitbol, and a raft of teachers and researchers making more sense of the industry for the classroom.
Friday was film day: a debate on two film cultures with Briony Hanson of the British Council and Simon Ward from the Independent Cinema, Office, then distributor Soda Films, the BBFC, the Script Factory, and Empire journalist Ian Freer. We finished with a clarion call from Patrick Phillips, Chief Examiner of A level Film Studies, to revivify and re-boot film study.
At Lambeth CLC we often wonder how much can be achieved in one day. This is partly out of practical concerns; we usually only have one day to work with a group, and we want pupils to get the most out of their visit to the CLC. Plus, as our interest is in ICT, we are intrigued by the power of computers to help pupils achieve more, in terms of what they learn and the work they produce. After all, what is the value of a computer (or any piece of technology) if it’s not a labour saving device?
Things move so fast in technology and education. We run two ICT subject leaders’ conferences a year at Lambeth CLC and that just doesn’t seem often enough.
Since last summer we’ve had Eric Schmidt’s Mctaggart speech, the Ofsted Report on ICT 2008-2011, the Royal Society’s Shut Down or Restart, Michael Gove’s BETT speech, the new Computer Science GCSE, new curriculum frameworks from Computing at School, NAACE and last week’s announcements confirming the disapplication of ICT Programmes of Study and the unveiling of the New draft Programmes of Study for primary English, mathematics and science.
In the last week of term 5 we had a visit from Christchurch Brixton Year 4, who had been reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches. They spent the day using ICT to bring this tale of a gruesome, supernatural, infanticide conspiracy to life. We asked the pupils to rotate between 3 activities: Using Green Screen to re-enact the story, creating book reviews on Comic Life, and creating news report podcasts.
We think USB Microscopes are a fantastic way to investigate the world and support Scientific Enquiry. We loan USB Microscopes to schools and found them to be extremely popular in the EYFS.
Its important for us to share good practice with our loans, so we were delighted and extremely grateful when Matt Wright from Ethelred Nursery shared a home learning worksheet he prepared.