Scores on the doors!

As well as thinking about their three year ambitions, staff were also asked to work in groups to identify three priority points from the fourteen points contained in the manifesto. If you click on the image above you'll be able to see the graphic and the manifesto points in a chart. I gave points for first, second and third choices and totted them up. I was really interested to see that nearly every point gets a mention. What do you think about the staff's selection of priorities? What do you think we should be prioritising?

Soren

Day 2 in the tent house!

Hi Matt here. Today we started looking in more detail into how we could use the tents but also every day objects. Here are some of my pics of the day! As you may know I am not good with computers so the pics may be scattered around.

Feedback from the staff creativity INSeT

I thought you all might like to see the feedback from the ARG's presentation to staff. You will remember that we asked staff to think of a creative ambition for Tallis to have achieved in three year's time and then a yearly plan on how we might achieve that ambition. I gathered in all the ambitions and sorted them into some groups. Although the headings are my own, the bullet points are the responses from staff. I haven't edited them and I have included all the responses from the meeting. I have put some ambitions in more than one box because they were hard to split without rewriting them, and there are a few that didn't fit easily into any of the boxes, which isn't to say that they are not important or interesting.

If you click on the image it should direct you to a PDF version. I'd be really interested in what you think. Are students' ambitions for the school the same as the teachers'? Are some of the ideas exciting or surprising? Do think there have been any misunderstandings? Mr Nicholls and I are going to be talking to leadership Team next week about how we might use this feedback and what it might reveal about attitudes and approaches to creativity, and I wouldn't like to do that without having consulted everybody first.

Soren

Creative learning conference

I received this email today from my friend Emma at Live Magazine. If any if you are interested, let me know and I'll see what I can do:

This is a free technology/youth/creativity conference on the south bank this saturday. We're taking some LIVE contributors. If you have anyone you think would like to come, send me their names and email addresses and I can register them. I think upto 20 could come from you - they just rang to say they have extra spaces available. You would also be able to go if you were bringing some young people along. Have a look at the schedule, it does look pretty interesting - mini TED I think is the look they're going for.

Have a look at our website ( http://www.2morro.org/ ) and the schedule so far (http://2morro09.sched.org/)


-- Post From My iPhone

Quotations

'Creativity may have killed a few cats, but evolution certainly eliminated many more incurious ones.'
Guy Claxton in 'Wise Up'

I came across this list of quotations recently (via Twitter) and thought I'd share the link with you. I think it's important for us to remember that the tide is turning in education and our thoughts and experiments at Tallis are supported by numerous writers and thinkers who all advocate the idea that schools should be about nurturing talent and finding as many opportunities to be creative as possible. Here are a few of those thoughts.

Pictures from today

Here are a few pictures from today, I'm about to upload the rest to Flickr.

Click here for all the images (can be downloaded from here too)

Suggestion

For the Tangled Feet residency: The picture above is the result of an online game, where the game starts as an image of a key hole - empty and plain. 4/5 artists then have added an image or something else into the key hole to make a collaborative final image. But who's to say when the image is finished? it could do on forever. I thought this game might be an idea to have an empty A3 or bigger keyhole on classroom walls where it's unlikely to be torn down. And people can add to it - even if it's just their name - anything. And can display these at the end of the week. What do you think?

Mind the Map

mind the map

Sunday 5 July 2009, 2.30pm

A crash-course in mind mapping focusing on the creative potential of diagrams used to visualise ideas. 

Hayward Gallery - Southbank FREE but have to book tickets.

If it's of interest to anyone, I just saw it and thought it related to the generating ideas topic...

CLICK HERE FOR THEIR WEBSITE

Meeting Notes

Thanks everyone for another stimulating meeting. We seem to have about 14 people so far confirmed as participants in the Tangled Feet residency next week. This includes Tom T, Matthew, Tom W and Amber from the group. We may get some more volunteers tomorrow so I'll publish the final list to staff (and you) by Thursday afternoon. We discussed several ideas for the residency including the following:

• the need to document the various aspects of the residency using a variety of techniques and media
• setting up a Tallis Talk stream so that participants and audience members/witnesses can feed back their impressions
  
• the importance of showing the process of the work created
• the potential for showing work in progress before school as people arrive, at break and lunch times and after school
  
• the possibility of making and sharing food
  
• the possibility of using sound and installation work to engage audiences in unusual ways e.g. leaving messages around the building, in teachers' pigeon holes, on white boards at the start of the day, in year bases etc?
  
• the possibility of holding a special performance of "Home" on Friday afternoon for an invited audience (including students, teachers, governors and parents?)
  

We have agreed that Tom T, Tom W, Matthew and Amber will represent the group at the Creative Agents' Conference on Wednesday 1st July. I will need slips returned ASAP.

The format of our 1 hour input will be:

9:45 Arrive at the October Galleries and set up
10:00 Ice breaker activity - Idea Generator?
10:10 JN to deliver Keynote presentation about the work of the ARG and its impact this year
10:30 Questions from the floor
10:45 Activity - design the perfect Creative Agent
11:00 End. Visit exhibition.

Let me know if I've missed anything out or if you have some other suggestions for the two lists.
JN

Creating sketchbooks by thinking laterally

Thanks to Mr Hawes for this link to a great site about making sketchbooks in the classroom.

Another Use Of Blogging... By A School

When revising for my Film Studies exam I came across this blog. The teacher uses it to upload subject specific information and the students create their own blogs to keep track of the learning in film studies.

What do you think of their Blog? Here are the links:

The Main Blog
A student who has not been updating their blog!

Quite interesting

Thanks, Tom

Creative Agents Conference Invitation

We've been invited to do a small presentation to all the London Creative Agents at a special conference on 1st July. The venue is the October Gallery (the gallery specialises in promoting the Transvanguard and is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Gérard Quenum, hence the image above).

Anyway, Judith Ackrill sent me this email today confirming some of the arrangements and suggesting a couple of themes for us to get our teeth into:

Dear Jon

Great to speak to you just now, and thank you again for getting involved with this creative agents day.

We agreed that the theme of the students presentation would be along the lines of 'how do we communicate with each other and with the school about creativity and what effect is this having?' In other words, a sort of case study for the AND creative agents to hear about.

The session could include a projected presentation from a laptop (we can provide the laptop); we are also checking whether the broadband signal is good enough to use live on-line examples, and I'll get back to you about this. You might also bring handouts.

The creative agents enjoy active sessions, and we agreed there should be time for questions and discussion.
One of the topics you would like to cover, either in the presentation or as a question back to the agents, is 'how can we promote this way of working to other schools and groups?'

If the students would like to include an activity for the agents as part of the session that would be fine too. Let me know if you need flipcharts.

We agreed you would talk to John on Monday about how/whether he would like to be involved, perhaps introducing the school or taking part in the session. Also you'll speak to John about the idea of the students leading an active warmup for the agents for 10 minutes at 10am; if they would rather not do this pls let me know and I'll find someone else.

Nuts and bolts: The session (including the 10-minute warm-up) runs from 10am to about 11. The room is upstairs and there will be about 30 people in the 'audience'. We can provide squash and coffee and biscuits after the session, and I understand there may be 6+ people in the group including yourself. Ideally you should arrive a little early, in time to check out the technology and get your bearings - say 9.45?

I'll forward information about the October Gallery next week, with the names of the creative agents and AND team and final news on the broadband question.

It would be good to know how many of you are interested in taking part in this presentation. It would be a great bit of evidence for your Arts Award portfolios and I'm sure you'd all do a great job. I'm seeing John on Monday, so if you could let me know over the weekend either by email or via a comment on this post, I'd much appreciate it.