Literacies

Typography Animation project for class

Poem by Taylor Mali (www.TaylorMali.com)

Friday's whole staff literacy training day was really fascinating. I was reminded how important listening and speaking are to the development of language and how we often neglect purposeful talk in class to focus too early on writing. I spent the morning working with Mr Hawes encouraging a group of colleagues to begin a blog and play around with lots of the Web 2.0 tools we've had fun with in recent months. Folk seemed to have a good time and quickly got going on their blogging. We had everything from a lateral thinking Maths blog to ones created to promote community cohesion and aid tutor group communication. My afternoon was spent with the Performing Arts faculty thinking about how we could develop literacy through talk. We decided to feed back our ideas using Audioboo, having generated them with a mixture of Mindmeister and Wallwisher. There was a very pleasing emphasis throughout the day on the value of the creative use of ICT for developing language, media and digital literacies.

I found the video above on Doug Belshaw's blog. I really like the way a poem, a strong sense of humour, typography and a brilliant animated design come together to communicate a clear message about the value of talk. Seemed appropriate.

Julian Sefton Green, our national School of Creativity advisor, is visiting us again on Monday. He's going to spend some time with the ARG over lunch as we get to grips with plans for the summer. I hope we can create some really exciting suggestions for ways in which the school building can become a backdrop for a series of inter-disciplinary, site specific interventions. I've had several responses to the invitations to nominees for the Josh Beasley Award for Creativity to join the new Student Commissioning Group. I'm really hoping we can get that group up and running before the Easter holiday.

See you on Monday, period 4 in Room 208.