Category: involver blog

Categories
involver blog

Democra-citizen-educata-participata-ball!

Democra-ball! flyer

We’re starting up a friendly, monthly five-aside game in Old Street for anyone working in the youth and citizenship fields:

bit of fun, bit of sweat, bit of networking

It’s going to be on the second Thursday of every month at 5.50 at Old Street Power Leage. The first one is on the 11th of March. The first 8 people to reply to our email each month get to play so if you want us to email you again next month, let us know even if you don’t want to play this time.

This really is just a fun game, Asher and Greg are both rubbish at football and out of shape, so anyone who fancies it should drop us an email and come. We’ll mix teams up every month.

Please pass this on to everyone else in your office (there’s a flyer attached you could stick up on your noticeboard/in your toilet), or other related orgs who might be up for it.

Email us if you want to play this month or in the future: info@involver.org.uk

Update: We’ve now created a Facebook Group for Democraball! We’ll be doing sign-ups through this from now on, so join: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=897#!/group.php?gid=127543770612104

Categories
involver blog

Creative citizenship through Youth Producing Change 2010

Aisha Forbes, a good friend of involver, is involved with Youth Producing Change this year.

It’s an innovative program of youth-produced short films from across the globe showcasing young people’s perspectives on human rights crises. Ten films will be shown from teen film makers from London, Mozambique and New York, and they will be present to participate in discussion following the screenings.

Screening takes place the Ritzy in Brixton (details on the facebook invite here) so get along if you want to learn more!

Categories
involver blog

Speaker’s School Council Awards launched – get involved!

Big week for us last week – the Speaker’s School Council Awards was launched. This is the project that Parliament asked Asher and I to help with. The event was a real success, and the young people from Brecknock Primary School and Little Heath Secondary presented their projects brilliantly. It was also great to hear how passionate and driven the Speaker is to support education.

A good few MPs attended, as well as lots of important people in the active citizenship field. Jo Swinson MP (a passionate supporter of school councils and active citizenship) made a great video about the event – well done Jo!

And here’s the promo video for the Award:

After only a few days, over 500 schools have registered. Your school should too: visit http://speakersschoolcouncil.org to sign up, and please forward on to any teachers that you know!

Categories
involver blog

Exciting partnership with Changemakers!

This week we’ve moved in with Changemakers, an exciting and well-established charity who are based just up the road from our old office. They aim to create a world in which young people have the confidence to lead and everyone understands we need them to.

We’ve had several meetings with their Chief Exec Adam Nichols over the last few months, and he’s been really supportive of what we’re up to with involver (thanks Adam!). Having identified areas of common interest, they were kind enough to invite us in for a few months!

Anyway, it’s a cool office, everyone here has been really welcoming, and it’s a great and exciting opportunity for us to work together. We’re looking into how we might provide a joint service to schools, and also working on a new social enterprise project (more to come).

It’s also interesting to see how different organisations work in different ways – having worked in small offices (for charities), and big offices (for Government) it’s useful to see how an established and successful charity operates/moves forward. And get some tips! I have a theory that you can tell a lot about an organisation by who makes the tea and coffee – and here everyone makes it for everyone else (a good sign).

There’s a lot of crossover in our thinking, and we’re really pleased to be linking up.

Greg

Categories
involver blog

Schools: don’t block blogs

Over the last few weeks we’ve been into a number of schools for different reasons, and each time we’ve needed to get online and go to our website.  In every case it has been blocked: the schools’ filtering systems saying this is either because it is a blog or ‘webchat’.

As you can see from looking around our site there is nothing here to concern anyone, and (we hope) much that would be useful to students, teachers and other school staff.  The same is true of most of the blogs I ever visit. Here are just a few that I’ve visited recently that Netsweeper who through LGFL provide filtering for most London schools would categorise as blogs that many schools then choose to block en masse:

By blocking these sites not only is that valuable information lost to the people who would find it most useful, but, more importantly, an opportunity to educate students on how to use the web intelligently and safely is lost.

Rather than simply blocking these sites, the same filtering systems could be used to offer advice and tools in an overlay or sidebar.

When a blog is blocked, students get frustrated, use a proxy to access the site, or access it on their mobile phone.

When a site is blocked, these are the three things a student can do in school. None of them offer the school the chance to educate or supervise the student.

A far better alternative would be to allow access but to provide warnings about the risk of trusting certain types of sites, information and guidance on how to work out what is trustworthy and give people the chance to report problematic sites and content:

How a browser might look with a clear warning about the risk of blogs (or other types of sites) without blocking the site itself.
How a browser might look with a clear warning about the risk of blogs (or other types of sites) without blocking the site itself.

Schools could create their own warning and guidance or use default ones provided by the same people who currently do the web filtering.  This would teach safe and sensible use of the web, which young people need as they will be using it unsupervised at home , work or (increasingly) in the palm of their hand.

Categories
involver blog

Amazing student voice case study: Little Heath, Reading

Little Heath School in Reading is a school that we’ve worked with for a while now. We were really pleased to be invited to their annual student voice conference a few weeks back.

Little Heath is a great example of the benefits that can be gained when young people are given trust and responsibility to influence core areas of their education. The school has six student voice groups, each of which have a special job in the school. These are:

  • The Building group (looking at school environment)
  • What makes a good lesson group (teaching and learning)
  • The Independent Learning group (trying to define independent learning)
  • Safe to learn group (Anti-bullying)
  • STARS project (students as researchers)

The school council’s job is to coordinate these groups, with the help of the Student Voice Leaders. The Student Voice Leaders led the whole day from start to finish, and the school’s commitment by taking around 150 students (from the various groups) out of school, to a conference venue was great. They were able to get a lot done in a short space of time. Very impressive!

The secret to Little Heath’s success in getting so many young people involved stems from three things, I think.

  • Firstly, culture and ethos in the school – it’s clear from the style of relationships that teachers genuinely want to hear what students think, will take it seriously, and want to set up ways to encourage this more formally. Staff are willing to run with their ideas, and recognise that good school democracy/citizenship is often a bit of a step into the unknown. They also understand that trusting young people is not losing power – it’s helping everyone to work together in the same direction.
  • Secondly, with so many different groups, a school council, and student voice leaders, they are able to get a wide range of young people involved because there is a wide range of ways to be involved – pretty simple really!
  • Thirdly, the priority given to student voice is more than just words; it’s a member of staff’s job to support and facilitate it. Jon Linz, the very talented and passionate student voice coordinator, has dedicated time in his week to support this work.

Anyway, enough from me – here’s more from the students themselves: