Last week we were fortunate to have a visit from some of our friends from Microsoft. Over the last couple of years we have been involved in several collaborations and some of it I have talked about here on previous blogs. Last week David Walddon who is Microsoft’s worldwide leader of the Partners in Learning programme from the USA and Stuart Ball who is based at Microsoft UK in Reading came by to visit taking time out for many important global meetings in London. David has wanted to visit our school for a while now following what he has heard about the school from the times we have spent together at Innovative Teachers Forums.
During the day David was shown round the school and visited our livestock area which I have mentioned before where we at the moment keep pigs and rescued battery chickens. You can see our livestock area and also the animals on pigcam & eggcam at www.saltash.net/livestock We also tried to do a live broadcast using twitcam while we were down there and we did until the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate, fortunately it was a false alarm yet David and Stuart got to experience our fire drill.
Next David and Stuart dropped into several lessons and watched the learning that was taking place and saw lots of teachers and students using technology in innovative ways in the classroom. Later in the day over 20 of our students sat down with David and Stuart for an hour, David spoke to the students about his role and how he got there and then ran a session where students brainstormed on how they could improve how they learn within the school. You can see some of the pictures below: Among many amusing things that they suggested the main thing that came out was that they all thought the one single thing that would really make a difference would be for all of them to be given a laptop/netbook or some other digital device for them to use.
We will be following this up by working with our students on a project called Next Generation Kernow where we will attempt to put action plans in place for all their requests to happen for the future of our school.