what's in a name?

Tragedy

Norwegian Sky

Mermaid's Gown

This website has the most amazing collection of colours, each with its own story. It's great fun to simply click through to each and decide whether or not the name represents your own idea of the colour of the pencil.

Imagine what fun you could have with learners making up names for colours. Could be a useful starting point!

I have no idea what an Amaranth is (will have to google!) but it's a glorious colour.

TLP film competition

Rob Randall has brought this competition to my attention. Do any of you have learners who might like to create a film? We could loan you one of our Flips to record it. The closing date is the end of November so no time to be wasted.

Using Video in Spanish class

Using the Cybershot camera and the gorilla pod, I made a short video of myself having a conversation with a Spanish friend, perched on my kitchen table! I showed it in class using the laptop and projector.
The great advantage of making our own materials is that it can be tailored exactly to the learners - I have found it a very effective method of checking and consolidating what they've learnt.
It suits most of my learners that the classes are held in small, friendly and familiar settings - one of the disadvantages is that we don't have whiteboards suitable to project video clips and photos onto. The canteen blind worked fine! I chose this rather than a white sheet which I'd tried before. I wondered if AdEd could look into providing small, portable screens which we could use?

Go, see, now!

Just reading Sara's post below about her work prompts me to remind readers to visit the AdEd Interest Flickr Group which has got more than 600 photographs of the most amazing work done by learners over the last couple of years.

The work seems to get more inspiring by the day and is such a valuable record of what is happening in Gloucestershire.

If you visit, do leave a comment, won't you?

I am working with learners in Littledean to create a Community Textile for the village. As far as we know this has not been done before in the village. Learners felt it would be good to record the village landmarks as they are in 2010. The textile will be completed by the end of the year and will feature the local school, church, chapel, pub, our millennium field, the local meat and veg shop (including the owner Pete the Meat) and even the local bus! We have walked around the village and taken lots of photographs. The village is surrounded by glorious countryside and so this will feature prominently as well. The project has caused a lot of interest and most weeks we have visits by local folk to see how we are getting on. Sometimes visitors are from further afield as you can see by this photo. It also dispels the myth that men don't sew - this gang of four had a great time and the Arch Bishop stayed much longer than he intended. No - none of this was in the session plan, but learners loved sharing what they had achieved and explaining the plans for the textiles. There are photos of our progress on the AdEd 'flickr' site and on my own 'flickr' site.

Art and Craft tutors, please read

I had an email today from Mark Hewlett (AdEd Head of Quality Improvement and Contracting) which shared a link to an incident report which made me shudder.

As the original email, forwarded by Mark, said:

"I’ve not sent this out to you all to shock or upset but more to highlight the fact that this case proves that even when the task/activity appears to be straight forward, the lack of awareness and Risk Assessment has resulted in horrific injuries.

This was a simple classroom activity which should have been fun and enjoyable but the outcome so avoidable!

It may be worth sharing with those in your organisations (in particular large organisations like colleges where classroom activities are so varied) who doubt the need for health and safety, the appreciation of the importance of Risk Assessments, the need to communicate these risks to those who need to know and the potential consequences of failing to tell Learners! It may be an eye opener to them?"

Read the report yourself here

Thoughts and comments would be welcome.

I have recently bought my own dongle after trying out one on loan from AdEd kit. I could immediately see great benefits in this neat bit of equipment - not just for teaching but also for fun. However, so far I have not been able to get it working. I must admit I have not had time recently to spend long on this latest challenge. I wondered if anyone has any tips that I can pick up before I try again.