OllieBray.com

World on Fire

I thought this was a really interesting and well put together video. I think it will probably feature in one of my assemblies in the new year.

Great Lesson Starter for any subject using Flickr

I mentioned this excellent lesson starter in my recent TESS Article and have shown it to loads of teachers around the country over the past few months. It is non-subject specific, its quick, has huge impact and provides and excellent context for discussion.

In order for it to work you need reasonable Internet access, a data projector, access to flickr and a willingness to take a risk. The risk, in my opinion, is not that great – you just have to be prepared not to pre-moderate the flickr images. If anything inappropriate comes I just make this part of the learning.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to flickr – www.flickr.com

2. In the search box type in what your lesson is about or what you want to generate discussion about (eg: triangles, Roald Dahl, cakes, glaciers, hockey, world war two, chemicals, Vincent  VanGogh etc…). Click on search.

3. Flickr returns hundreds of user generated photos / content. You can have a quick scan through to see if you think it is appropriate content or not.

4. Then click on slideshow.

5. Flickr turns all the photographs into a slide show that you can show as the class is coming in, to introduce a topic or to generate discussion.

6. There are no copyright issues as all you are doing is technically browsing the flickr website – the users of the site want you to see their photos!

The below video shows me generating a lesson starter for a lesson on glaciers. As you will see from the video it hardly takes any time at all.

Assembly: Can You Change the World?

Can You Change The World?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: school assembly olliebray)

Once a week I get to do a short assembly with my house group. I think assemblies are important and I like doing them. It’s a good time to come together with the students in my care, talk to them and praise them.

I try to spend a bit of time preparing for each assembly and having the new audio visual equipment in the school hall has made a massive difference in the last 12 months.

Today I was picking up on the theme of change and asking students if they thought it was possible to change the world? One of the biggest challenges that we currently face in education is changing attitudes.

In terms of changing attitudes I think in education this can broadly be split into two categories:

• The attitudes of students to help them understand that the world will be a very different place in ten years time and that we must work collectively to help improve our society and prepare for the future.

• The attitudes of teachers to help them understand that the world will be a very different place in ten years time and we must start preparing children for this change now, rather than delivering a curriculum that prepares for the present (or more commonly the past).

There is, of course, an obvious third category if you include parents.

In Scotland, assemblies in East Lothian tend to be short (we only have ten minutes to make a real impact). I’ve shared a few of my ideas before including Bill Gates Life’s Not Fair. The reason I’m writing about today’s assembly is that I’ve had some really encouraging and positive feedback from the children at Musselburgh Grammar School.

I’ve embedded the slides I used as a slideshare presentation above. Which means you can download and add to the presentation if you want to.

To give you an idea of the conversation that I had with the audience, it went something like:

Slide 1 (the earth) – this is the earth, where we live and where we need to protect. It’s also called the world. It’s a beautiful and unique place.

Slide 2 (Question One) – can you change the world? (asked audience to put hands up)

Slide 3 – 5 (BBC News Screen Shots) – the world is changing and we need to change with it. Brief description of articles.

Slide 6 – (small ideas change things) – We can all make a difference to improve the world, to save money, reduce poverty and improve society. We must work collectively (together) to make the biggest impact. It is important to remember that little changes make a big difference.

Slide 7 – 10 (Boiling a kettle) – Talk about energy wasted by continually boiling too much water in the kettle and only using a mug full. Talk about how much energy the UK we would save by only boiling the required amount. Link to the environment.

Slide 11 – 13 (Mobile phone chargers) – Talk about the energy wasted in your house by leaving mobile phone chargers turned on constantly. Talk about the money you could save by turning them off. Link to the environment.

Slide 14 – 17 (Chewing gum) – Talk about the cost of clearing up chewing gum and if we didn’t have to do it how much money the tax payer would save. Explain that most parents are tax payers.

Slide 18 (The Earth) – re-cap that we can all help change the world.

Thirst - A Great Presentation for Whole School Use

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Slideshare is a great little website that allows you to share and download presentations from other people on-line. I’ve got a few presentations hosted on there including my recent presentation for SCSSA on the 21^st Century Connected School.

Every year slideshare have a competition to and award prizes to the best presentations. Last Year a re-worked version of the Did You Know Presentation won the award (this has recently been adapted again with some Scottish Statistics in it).

This year the winning presentation, is again along the Did You Know theme but is titled ‘THIRST’ It is an educational presentation exploring humanity's water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage. I’m going to be using bits of it in assembly but it would also be great for teaching geography, development and citizenship. Its very inspiring, so take time to have a look.

The lost generation: a great resource for assembly

Jim’s spending a lot of time on YouTube at the moment and he’s uncovering some really fantastic movies. Here’s a clever little video to get you thinking. I think I’ll use it in assembly before the end of term. You Tube Video embedded below.

Think You Know Training for all S3 Students at Musselburgh Grammar School

 

At Musselburgh we are committed to building a learning community. We are using Internet Safety as stimulus to test our model. In October we engaged with parents of students at the school for an informative parents training event that was widely covered in the media. Later that month we put all of our staff through the same training programme and in early February we will open this training up to the wider Musselburgh community (more on that later).

Today we ran our first formal year group training event for all S3 students. Internet Safety is already covered in various sections of the PSHE, ICT and computing courses at the school. But out philosophy is one of compulsory learning for the basics. We don’t want the young people in our care to miss out on an aspect of responsible ICT use because they haven’t taken computing or business education at Standard Grade.

This was a real mass training event and spoke to the assembled group (about 240 pupils) for just over an hour. Considering the length of the presentation the group were incredibly attentive. I used a combination of the CEOP Think U Know Secondary Student Training Material and some of my own resources. I like to cover more detail on mobile phones and law as well as emphasising responsible use of Internet and mobile technologies.

Coincidently there was also a BBC Panorama Programme on the television last night – that talks about the dangers of the Internet. I actually thought the programme was quite good and has a couple of interesting case studies that we will build into our PSHE programme for next session. My one criticism of the programme was that it didn’t really emphasise the responsible use aspect of on-line activity and also the benefits of technology.

All of the students at the school will receive our adapted version of the Think U Know Training by the Easter break.

If you have not visited the Think U Know website it is worth a look and there is lots of information about online and mobile phone safety for students, parents and teachers.

YouTube - Think to the Future

Great You Tube Starter for a Geography Lesson. Can't wait to use this in assembly next year.

Thanks SLN.

Assembly: Bill’s 11 Rules of Life

I have always thought that morning assembly is a key part of school. A good assembly can be a fantastic experience for the students but a bad assembly can be a complete disaster.

I have changed the way I tackle assemblies at Musselburgh over the last year and I now go to a lot more effort to making assemblies more exciting and relevant for pupils. I think in the past I fell into the trap of using assemblies to have a moan at pupils about things that weren’t going that well – in reality this has very little impact. I now try and capture the good things going on in the school and talk about things that I think students will be interested in. Feedback from the new approach has been good from both pupils and staff (although I still try to cram too much into a very short space of time).

This week I was telling my house group (SETON) about the recent meeting between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 Conference. I then went on to talk about Bill’s 11 rules of life and tried to relate the first five of these into a school context. I’ve embed the presentation below for anyone who might want to use it. You can now download slideshare presentations as PowerPoint slideshows (although you still can’t edit them).

Finally, at the start of each assembly I’ve started showing a picture that I like. It’s on the screen as the pupils walk into the assembly hall. I try to pick a picture that encourage wonder and imagination – there’s just not enough of this in Scottish Education at the moment.