OllieBray.com

Last Day of Term and MGS Staff & S6 Rock Star Video

As always the last week of term has been really hectic. The two real highlights for me were the Staff and S6 Pantomime and the S6 show on the last day of term. Both of these events are a real collaboration between pupils and staff at the school. You can see some blurry photo’s of the pantomime over on the Musselburgh Grammar School Website and I have embedded the Staff and S6 Rock Star Video below – I’m still laughing about it!

Student 2.0 - A great resource

If you subscribe to one new blog this week can I suggest Student 2.0. This is a group of school students (under 18) who have got together and globally collaborated to produce a blog on what they think of the education system.

Already the quality of writing and level of debate is fantastic. I think this is going to be a rich course of information that has the potential to influence policy makers.

See their YouTube Introduction here:

Although we have one Scottish Contributor (The Infamous Bass Player from Perth) it would be great to get some more Scottish Students collaborating and contributing to this project.

Campie Primary School gets some new toys! - PSP's in Education

I have mentioned previously as an education authority we are about to start work on a pilot Play Station Portable (PSP) Project. We are a partner in this project with Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium. We recently found out that the school that would be taking part in the pilot would be Campie Primary School, Musselburgh.

Today we were testing some of the equipment in Campie and received some training from ConnectED. The PSP’s will be part of a package for this project that will also include some other software for standard PC’s.

This software will include:

• Crazy Talk – Picture animation software (great for digital story telling)
• Lecturnity – Quickly podcast your lessons (huge potential with this one!)
• Podium – Quick and easy podcasting

Each PSP will also be supplied with a 2GB Memory Stick, PSP Digital Camera and a copy of Hot Brain (Brain Training Software for the PSP). Each of the PSPS will also have access to the wireless network in the school so they will be able to browse the internet and uses web based applications. I was able to access a number of websites today including GLOW and I was able to up-load a photograph taken with the PSP Camera (then edited into a sketch) to Flickr.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project develops between now and the summer holidays.

ACE Mathematics Draft Outcomes Published

In case you missed it? The ACE draft experiences and outcomes for Mathematics are now available over on the Curriculum for Excellence website. I think this will come as a big surprise to a lot of Scottish teachers who are assuming that the outcomes for Numeracy were the outcomes for Mathematics.

As I mentioned recently in my Geography: Back to Basics Talk it is important that every Scottish teacher reads, thinks about and reflects on every set of draft outcomes that are published regardless if it is your subject area or not.

Other draft outcomes also available on-line from today are Classical languages and Gaelic (Learners).

Cascades 2008 Expedition Website

I’ve been using Wordpress.com to put together a website for next summers Youth Expedition to the Cascade Mountains, USA and Bowron Lakes, Canada.

I hope that the site will develop in time to provide more informatio0n about the expedition, its objectives and its members.

If your interested you can fide the site at: http://cascades2008.wordpress.com/

Real Snow Inside!

I’m just back from an excellent day out with my school at the Xcape complex in Glasgow. The highlight of the day was the indoor skiiing in the snow zone. I couldn’t believe the size of the place and the quality of the snow.

I think we will definitely be taking the school back here in the future and I’ll be going back myself to work on my parallel turns! The climbing wall also looks like it would good fun to use with groups.

I remain convinced that outdoor education is one of the most powerful tools that we have to educate young people. With the Curriculum for Excellence on our doorstep the question still remains how do we embed outdoor learning into our new emerging curriculum rather than just having it as a bolt on?

Internet Safety Leaflets now on display in Haddington

The work on Internet Safety from our S3 Graphic Communication classes is now on display at John Muir House. It’s in the display case up on the third second floor. If you’re in John Muir House, please pop up and have a look. The work is excellent.

Great Web 2.0 Business Education Lesson Starter

I love this satirical look at web 2.0 and some of the venture capital hype that surrounds it from the Richer Scales group. Could be a great starter for a Business Education lesson.

Thanks for the link Jim!

ACE in Action at MGS

Respect me is Scotland’s Anti-Bullying Service and it has recently launching a nationwide campaign to raise awareness of cyberbullying. The campaign aims to educate adults about the issues surrounding cyberbullying, and encourages them to connect with children and young people to promote the safe and responsible use of mobile technologies. Much like the philosophy of our own strategy to engage with parents over Internet Safety Issues.

respectme recently also joined forces with the Scottish Government to launch a competition for schools and youth groups across Scotland. Groups of individuals were being asked to design a cyberbullying leaflet, outlining the type of information they thought it would be useful to know. The respectme website has some really useful information on it.

Musselburgh Grammar School submitted nearly 50 high-quality entries for the competition. All of the entries were researched, designed and printed by our S3 Graphic Communication classes. Part of the assessment for Standard Grade Graphics is to design a leaflet for others, so the classes work for the competition also contributed towards their course work.

 

For me this is a good example of the Curriculum for Excellence in action.

Teachmeet Musselburgh: Introduction Slides and Video

I’ve had a couple of emails asking me about more information on my Teachmeet Musselburgh introduction.

I started off with the monk helpdesk call video, to try and illustrate the point that we live in a world of change and that change has existed for 1000’s of years.

Below are the rest of the slides that I used, basically I was just setting the scene in terms of our ICT strategy.

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The points that I made with the slides were as follows:

• Creativity is a cross cutting theme of the Curriculum for Excellence.
• The HMIe have said they are looking for Creativity and Innovation in Scottish Schools.
• Our ICT Strategy is linked to our aim of Building a Learning Community.
• Our Strategy includes – Whole school input (such as the Consistency in Using ICT across the Curriculum and Internet Safety), Optional Input (such as the after school Teachmeet Musselburgh Workshops), Departmental Input (The purpose of today’s session) and on-going training and support (through a variety of mediums).
• We want subject departments to specialise in  either animation, digital video, digital photography, on-line publishing or on-line broadcasting.
• Individual teachers may choose to have more than one specialist area.
• The next point is about why ICT strategies fail, in my opinion this is because of a lack of joined up thinking and lack of resourcing.
• Video cameras are a good example of this. Many secondary schools have video cameras dotted around in departments. They hardly get used and one of the reasons for this is that it is impossible to teach between 20 – 30 students with one video camera. A far more sensible approach is to pool resources or to develop banks of resources as we have at Musselburgh Grammar School.

Finally, and I honestly believe this, small ideas change things.