InvolverAn amusing and vitriolic article from Charlie Brooker about Brain Gym and teaching pseudoscience in schools. As he and some of the commentors point out doing some exercise and physical movement is good for breaking up lessons, increasing attention and so on, but telling kids it’s because it increases ‘electromagnetic energy’ is just irresponsible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/07/education
Massive brand new school nobody from host school knew about the last session, so there was no-one from the host school there, 15 boys and two girls from another school. Engaged enough from the demonstration but it was lacking in atmosphere, only 17 in a big hall. graffiti wall went OK. First two sessions were really buzzing. Not a lot of communication within the school. Link person wasn’t a teacher – member of admin staff and didn’t know how to get in touch with the right people. Meanwhile the teachers that did come (“only knew about it 20 minutes ago”) were saying they would really have liked to have brought the school council. Girls got into it and came up with some good ideas and went through the project planner successfully. os/mj
We did the first session. Link teacher very involved; school council teacher very keen and wanted to get the councillors down but couldn’t get them out of lessons – interested in Network membership. Wanted to take project planners back to the citizenship classes. Only had a half an hour session and anticipated 75 pupils (only around 53 in the end) so decided to set the room up cabaret style. Everything had to be set up in advance; Graffiti wall on one wall but had to stick it on one side panel of the kitchen. What was really good was that even though we were limited for time and only had three council members in the session, there was enough interest and enthusiasm from the kids that the session went quite well. The headteacher sat in with one of the groups, the contact teacher was around nearly the whole time, and a couple of other teachers were sitting in and watching, saying how useful the project planner would be in their citizenship classes and asked for lots of extras. Late morning sessions were about an hour long and we ran the graffiti wall again and we were able to go through the project planner briefly. os/mj
Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting project being piloted in Cambridge. Kids are being given cards that entitle them to £500 to spend on specified activities. It’s Government funded to the tune of £1 million. Full story
4 March 2008
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has announced the preferred bidder for the contract to deliver Teachers TV.
Education Digital 2, a consortium of Ten Alps PLC and ITN, is in final negotiations over the £50m five-year contract to provide high quality news, information and resources to people who work in schools.
Mark Link
It’s here if you want to see it:
We’re the only partner, which is good, but it would have been nice to have our logo on every page.
Asher