A visit from our School of Creativity Advisor

On Monday we had a visit from Julian Sefton-Green, our national School of Creativity Advisor. His role is to help us reflect on our progress as a SoC. He popped into 208 for a working lunch with the ARG and we took some time to collaborate on creating ideas for this year's Arts Festival. I explained that the theme was "Past, Present & Future" and that we were hoping to curate a more joined up festival so that the Tallis community had a better idea what was going on and a better opportunity to take part. We would also like to experiment with more mixed media and inter-disciplinary performances/exhibitions with a view to preparing for next year's event which would be a proper celebration of our time on the current site before we move to the new school.

The group came up with some excellent ideas which we have added to the Wallwisher. These included a fashion show of all the past school uniforms, a late night film screening using sheets draped from the link followed by a sleepover on the concourse and an episode of Doctor Who visiting Tallis Past, Present & Future. Genius!

If you're interested in reading Julian's report of his visit to the school, you can find it on the Documents page of our Creative Learning site.

Wallwisher update

I've made reference to Wallwisher in a previous post but I thought it might help to demonstrate how it works with a specific example. I decided to use Wallwisher with my sixth form photography classes. They are currently developing their Personal Investigations which require them to research, generate ideas, document the process, present them appropriately and evaluate the outcomes. Sound familiar? What I needed was:

a) a way to support them between lessons
b) a virtual notice board to post ideas
c) a resource that was available as a link on the department blog
d) a way for students to share ideas

Wallwisher has delivered all of these requirements. It's free, easy to set up and can be embedded as an interactive resource on any web page.

What I discovered today was that it's flexibility enabled students to post thoughts when they had them (at any time of day or night) and attach a relevant media file from the internet. Today, in the lesson, I asked them to refine their original thoughts, adding more precise information and defining a more specific area of study. So, for example, I had a conversation with Micah about knitting. I saw him knitting (for pleasure and relaxation) in the sixth form common room the other day. I told him that I had recently discovered a phenomenon called Guerrilla Knitting which describes radical knitters who decorate the urban environment with their work.


Fluffy graffiti! Micah did a bit more research today and found a variety of useful links online. I posted an idea to the wall for him and he responded. You can view our virtual conversation on the wall above. I hope to continue to prompt him, and others in the class, with a series of provocations over the coming weeks as they further develop their investigations.

All in all, this has proved to be a simple, elegant and free solution to a challenging problem.

Wallwisher

I've created this Wallwisher page which is designed to collect our ambitions for this year's activities as a School of Creativity. I've posted a few ideas that we've already discussed but it would be great to have a whole wall full of everyone's thoughts. You can post a sticky and link to another web resource if appropriate. Once we have posted our thoughts we can then use this as a basis for prioritising actions and delegating responsibilities.