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We want to and will make it easy for schools to keep their staff, pupils, parents, partners, other stake-holders and wider community informed, updated and engaged.

Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!

It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.

We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.

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school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?

Archive page for Wednesday, 06 June 2007

 We, Jun 6, 2007
Sending links home
A pet peeve of mine is when my children come home raving about a web page they were working on at school. Usually it's from the BBC but not always.

I sigh.

I know they can't remember how it's spelled, their pronunciation is usually awkward... I know I'll have difficulty finding it in Google. We usually have an animated discourse with me leaning over the computer trying to spell strange words in different ways in Google. Or browsing fruitlessly in the huge BBC site.

I've suggested several times to their teachers that they write down the URL to take home, but no joy yet.

If only they merely hit the auto blog bookmark. A two second process—painless—for busy teachers! (If they had one of our websites.) The link would merely be a click away for us at home. Not only that, but all the other previous sites they were working on at school would be available, my children could browse over previous links and cherry pick the ones they liked working on. And I could have a bit of piece and quiet while I made their tea :-)
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 6/6/07; 9:36:08 AM to the Edu blogging dept.
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Sending links home



Different audiences
I was brain storming last night with a teacher about our series of lesson plans for writing for different audiences. One other nice way of integrating with a development plan is to have children in, say, year six write a set of instructions for 'making a cake' for year two, and for year two to reply, in comments which set of instructions was good. Peer review, if you like.

Another idea was to build a whole school resource for book reviews. A structured outline, title, author, story outline and review of each book. Then children wouldn't take so long in the book corner choosing a book [hopefully]. Over time there'd be a searchable database of book reviews, perhaps with star ratings. Other children could add to the reviews, adding if they agreed to the review or not, what they thought was best/funny/etc..

Similarly, school trips could also be reviewed. Over time the annual trip to Chester Zoo would be reviewed several times by different year fives, say. Before the next trip children could browse the previous reviews and comment on them, saying what they were looking forward to, what they would try to see differently and so on. Then, add their own reviews after the trip.

I particularly liked the linking in of ICT to the topics in the syllabus, as demonstrated in this page of news items added by a year six in Craig y Don, last year. The children worked on these items at school and at home over several sessions. The comments under each item were fantastic. Proof that children writing for children has a greater interest level than teachers writing for children.
# Posted by Steve Hooker at 6/6/07; 9:12:56 AM to the Edu blogging dept.
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Different audiences