OllieBray.com

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.

Puppets, toys and tales

I’ve been working with Mercy Corps in Edinburgh today on the World Citizenship Project. One of the things that we have been working on is a document that splits citizenship resources into specific subject areas. We have also been working on a set of guidelines that encourages cross-curricular project work. When finished this will link in with some of the ideas of a Curriculum for Excellence.

One of the resources that I was reviewing today was particularly good.  I am going to order myself a copy as I think it will be a really nice thing to have in my book collection. The books are from Tara Publishing and are basically about using art as a medium to teach global citizenship. All of the books are made in India by a local company. The book is made up of heavy duty brown recycled paper and illustrations (all children’s work) are stuck in by hand, rather than being printed into the text.

There are a number of book in the range including:

• Puppets unlimited with everyday materials (link)
• Child art with everyday materials (link)
• Toys and tales with everyday materials (link)

The other great thing that I like about these books is that they are all written by Indian authors, and then if necessary translated into English. It is one of the first resources that I have seen in the UK that is from an in country specialists explaining how they think social, economic and cultural beliefs about their country should be taught in the UK. The most common model that we normally see is an author from the UK telling us how we should learn about another county. Our we really the experts?

Anyway, these books are definitely worth checking out.

My first day with Mercy Corps

My work experience placement went well today and it was great to be working back within Citizenship and Development Education. As a team of four we developed a S1 / S2 Subject Citizenship audit that we will use as the basis of our research. The audit is loosely based on the original LTS audit material which can be found on their web site.

We will soon go into the data collection phase and then be looking more closely at the development of learning teaching resources that will be used to link young people in Scotland and East Timor. We are going through the process of establishing an internet connection in East Timor which will hopefully allow students to communicate across the globe.

Over the next few weeks I am going to be keen to find out as much about East Timor as possible. I have to admit to knowing very little about this small country prior to the start of this project and I am finding the whole experience fascinating.

If anyone can direct me towards any information, websites or photographs to help me with my study I would be most grateful. I have done the normal CIA Fact Book, wikipedia and Flickr searches.

I’ll post more as the project progresses over the coming months.

World Citizenship Project

A couple of weeks ago I was emailed by Shona Fisher from Mercycorps to see if I would be interested in taking part in the World Citizenship Project in conjunction with Scotdec.

I have worked with Scotdec a couple of times before and have always enjoyed their projects (both school work and educational research). I also know a little bit about MeryCorps and included them as a case study for a presentation that I did on the Tsunami Relief after the Asian Tsunami in 1994.

I had a more detailed meeting with Shona yesterday and have provisionally agreed to take part in the project. I’ll post more about the exact aims of the project at a later date, but fundamentally it looks like an exciting opportunity. If all goes well the aims and objectives it will develop into a collaborative exercise between school students in Scotland and East Timor. It looks like it will include a bit of digital video production and also (if I get my way?) a bit of blogging. Sounds right up my street!

However, the problem with all these sort of initiatives is ‘sustainability’. But with the extra time on my hands over the next few months I will be giving this some creative thought. More on this after the next steering group meeting in February. Exciting times.

During my meeting with Shona, I also talked about the possibility of getting International Aid Agencies like MeryCorps involved in delivering some workshops in International Volunteering. I am keen to imbed volunteering into any schools social education programme and I see international volunteering as one of the final stages of this progression.