Driving Inspiration

On 3rd October we were pleased to welcome Vicky Hope-Walker from Creative Junction talking about the Driving Inspiration Project, a collaboration between disabled and non-disabled young people around the themes of the Arts and sport. This project began six years ago with the aim of raising the profile of the Paralympics, and has grown to include hundreds of children across the world making music, animations, dance and art led by disabled artists and paralympians. Vicky’s projects are designed to fit the individual needs of schools, but typically begin with an assembly, interviews with the artist and follow-up arts workshops.

One amazing example involved a team of disabled animators, musicians, artists and paralympians working with 20 schools in 11 countries to design an animation about the paralympic torch, with the artwork coming from as far afield as Jersualem, the Silicon Valley, Turkey and Shanghai, and varied use being made of Adobe Connect and Skype alongside face-to-face workshops.

At Mandeville School in Buckinghamshire the musician Jack Fletcher worked with rowing paralympian Naomi Riches to produce a collaborative piece of music based on the Olympics theme which inspired contemporary dance work at local primary schools.

It was inspiring to see so many examples of how these positive role models changed attitudes and promoted integration whilst reinforcing the Olympic values of determination, inspiration, courage and equality. Vicky can offer 50 more free sessions in schools with artists. To find out more please email vicky.hope-walker@creativejunction.org.uk.  You can find guidance and materials on how to run a similar project here, including this introductory PowerPoint to get children thinking about diversity:

We followed up Vicky’s presentation with some ideas-sharing around the table. Tina from Slated Row talked about the Oxfordshire company Point2Educate which streams software rental to schools via the internet for a fraction of the cost of a termly licence. You can subscribe to popular schools applications such as 2Publish, Anithings, BBC French and Kar2ouche for as little as £10 per term. Download the Point2Player and try it out for free with 18 educational Open Source software titles including Scratch, Kodu and Google SketchUp. This gives pupils access to the same software at home without any need to download as long as they have the internet. A fantastic resource for easing school budget problems and promoting learning beyond the classroom.

Emma’s pupils at Olney Middle School are using Google Apps for Education, a suite of online hosted services including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email software, all free to schools.  One advantage of this approach is that files are saved in the cloud and so can be accessed from anywhere and on devices such as phones and tablets as well as desktops. Anther advantage is that pupils can work together on documents,  and see their changes in real time:

Emma’s class collaborated on creating play scripts, each taking writing roles such as stage director. We discussed the need to begin by modelling the use of real time collaboration tools and establishing ground rules in order to get the most out of them. We also thought about writing books for devices such as Kindles by saving documents as PDFs.  All wonderful ideas for promoting shared writing.

eTwinning was another hot topic this evening and Sway from Bradwell Village led an exciting discussion about ways of making connections with other school across Europe through ICT via the eTwinning website.  This site acts as a portal for teachers to find partners, set up projects, share ideas and start working together. Once you’ve found a partner and chosen a project you can register it on the Portal and gain access in a private online ‘Twinspace’. Then you can get together in real time using collaborative tools such as Skype and video conferencing, or you can exchange documents over time using familiar tools such as PowerPoint. There have been over 5000 projects so far and a good starting point might be to browse these in the Project Gallery. Or you could get ideas from the ready-made project kits for differing age groups and themes. Here’s a nice idea for sharing PowerPoints around fairlytales in two languages.

Sway’s Year 4 class at are following a ‘Me and My World’ topic from the International Primary Curriculum, and have shared paintings and photographs with schools in Spain and Bolivia. Gareth at Langland Community School also has experience of eTwinning with schools in India and told us about his online exchanges of artwork and postcards. So much potential in these ideas for raising children’s confidence through writing for real audiences.

Moving on, Li from Slated Row described how iPads have increased engagement for her autistic students. Sway has been comparing iPads with Blackberry tablets but was put off by the limitations of the Android app store and chose to use the iPad for her class blogging tool. She also finds it enhances motivation for writing. The Nextbook7 was recommended as a Windows tablet worth considering. Here’s a review.

Another interesting project idea came from Amy Brewer at WhiteSpire, whose Year 9 pupils have been drawing templates for hats on the computer using a grids in 2D Primary software and printing them as a pattern for 3D hat designs. Amy has also been trialling the use of PowerPoint for her Y10 Resistant Materials coursework and finds that her students’ motivation is much higher when writing and editing on the computer.

At the other end of the age range Sarah Ray’s Year1s at Germander Park have been using 2CreateaStory from 2Simple to redraft and editing writing. This software lets you combine words, pictures sounds and animation in a story format and then save as Flash files so that you can share them anywhere. Like Sway, Sarah found that the forgiving computer environment had a positive impact on the quality of her children’s writing.

Once again, this all added up to an evening full of ideas and inspiration. Thanks to everyone for your valuable input and hope to see you all soon!