Yr8 Animate

A whole day of animation, where teams battled it out to make the best advertisement using their skills in Stop-Motion animation. To get it right, teams had to consider the story, lighting, frame rates, props, characterisation, editing, sound effects, music, titles and much much more. 

This team chose to make a box of Lego come to life. 

Game Building

Intense concentration, advanced problem solving and tough personal challenges - that's what's going on in this Yr8 class. 

They're busy designing, coding and creating their own computer games using the Scratch programming platform. I had a go with several of them, and even though they were 'work in progress' they were still very playable. 

Digital Art

All students throughout secondary school experience the use of digital tools for creating artwork. I'm regularly amazed at speed which they learn new techniques and skills. Under the expert guidance of our Art teacher, Mr Daniel, students create quality work, often high levels of creativity.

The piece below is the work of Alyssa (Yr9) and is a lovely example of what can be produced with the aid of a computer.

Peer Support

This photo was taken in an IGCSE ICT lesson where we were building tables on a webpage using HTML code. What does it look like to you ... the boys helping the girls out?

Actually, the boys came over to find out how the girls had done it! Haha. 

IGCSE ICT

Learning with technology is very often great fun and highly satisfying. Learning about technology isn't necessarily exciting for everyone - especially when you have to do it as part of an IGCSE course that has seen little change since 2007. 

This week we were learning about the components inside a computer and what they do. My two friendly students in the picture were demonstrating what happens when the computer is switched on. In this 'scene' the OS (Operating system) is being loaded into the RAM, so it can be accessed and used much more efficiently. 

We figured that, as Operating Systems become more complex, computers will need more RAM to allow it to be used. Similarly, applications are becoming more powerful too, so they will need more RAM in order to function. 

Maybe it's time to boost your Main Memory by a few Gigabites!

iPads for tracking performance.

There are many ways technology can be (and is) used in PE lessons. This is a great example. At the start of the lesson these students in Yr7 are doing a quick 'self-assessment' on their iPads. The information they give is instantly available on the teachers iPad and will be used to guide this and future lessons. 

Data can be added over the coming weeks, and at the end of the unit students will complete a similar task, providing feedback and evaluation. They will then be able to track their own performance and improvements. A powerful and easy way of using their technology to improve learning. 

Techno Haiku

Students across KS3 have been writing Haiku Poetry today. We wrote a few about some of the content of our IGCSE course. Here are some examples...

Mainframe computers
Extremely large devices
Never stop working

Ergonomics is
Lower back support, wrists straight
Eyes looking forward

The World Wide Web speaks
Hypertext Markup Language
Or HTML

Laptops & notebooks
They are light and portable
My favourite things

VLOOKUP, COUNTIF
$B, SUM, MIN, MAX, IF
Excel spreadsheet - ugh!

Building a network.
Fibre, hubs, switches, routers
WAN, LAN? Confusing!