ENGAGEMENT

Carleton Green Primary School in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire have entirely overhauled their website with the collaboration of Blackpool-based company Schudio. This major redesign saw the addition of a modern logo, professional photos and well-presented content that is clear and accessible, both on computers and mobile devices.

I love music and regularly use it in my classroom (I have written a couple of Staff Room blogs about this). I love the impact it can have on your children and the mood of the class, want to soothe them, play some chilled classical music or Spanish guitar music, want them to get ready for learning then use Don’t Stop me Now for a wake up shake up.

 

Your website has become the first port of call for everyone interested in engaging with with your school. It is true of parents who will be looking for information that reassures them that yours is the school for their son or daughter. Your website is your best marketing tool to this audience.

My job as a Year One teacher is many things, but it is certainly never dull! I count dressing up, leaving mysterious messages and generally making a bit of a fool of myself as all in a day’s work! Luckily, my colleague is almost as crazy as me and fully on board for the ride! Faced with a lively and very enthusiastic cohort, we wanted to end the previous school year with a topic which would really engage them. Thus we began our topic ‘Do monsters live amongst us?’ by hooking pupils into Claire Freedman’s book: Monsters Love Underpants.

Education suppliers HUE have been bringing schools to life with the HUE HD Pro, a classroom camera and visualiser that is the latest addition to their range of USB cameras. The gadget can view a full A4 page and project it onto the whiteboard via PCs and projectors, and is priced at £44.95 + VAT. HUE’s terrifically-received new device even won a Best in Show award at the prestigious ISTE 2015 conference in Philadelphia.

As a mother myself, I like to know what’s going on at my children’s schools and be informed of any changes they are making ahead of when it happens. It’s important to have a positive relationship with the school; after all, it’s also beneficial for them to gain feedback that they may not have taken into consideration beforehand.

 

Up and down the country, ICT teachers are nervously preparing themselves to make the transition from into teaching a subject which is known as ‘Computer Science’. What school leaders must realise when making this change is that Computer Science is a world apart from ICT. Teachers will need time to re-examine the pedagogy they use to ensure they deliver Computer Science lessons that are factually correct – and most importantly – craft classes that engage all learners in the room.

It has been suggested that in many cases student projects are little more than busy work, which fail to promote higher level thinking skills. Increasingly, however, new ways of thinking about project-based learning (PBL) are emerging. A great resource for PBL is the Buck Institute for Education (BIE). They suggest that there are eight essential elements for PBL, for example having open-ended projects that involve in-depth, real-world problems that are more meaningful and engaging for learners, and encouraging student voice and choice in which projects to do and how to approach them.

Whether or not you subscribe to the digital native ideology or believe it’s a fallacy, on the whole our students today are more au fait with social media than ever before. Schools have become adept at limiting student access to social media and at managing their own accounts, but it’s often seen as an additional PR tool rather than a legitimate learning activity. Whilst I don’t believe that unrestricted access to Facebook in lessons is necessarily a valid form of pedagogy, I do think the concept of social media is a useful way to break down topics and help to engage students.

If students love revising, then they love learning and their progress will improve as a result. Therefore, to engage all students in revision we have been bringing it alive as a school. Here are five strategies we have used, particularly to ensure our most able students increase the depth of understanding needed as they chase their A*s.

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