Futurelab finally meets the Chickens & Piggies face to face

It is quite a strange experience to meet people after you have been stalking them on twitter for months but on Friday it was really nice when @marthawright from Futurelabs came to visit our school as part of a case study on innovative use of technology as part of the new curriculum this was on behalf of the QCDA. As I spoke to Martha we both realised that we both new quite a lot about each other already and lots of personal things to due to our links on twitter. In fact I knew what Martha looked like but obviously she wasn’t sure what I looked like as I wasn’t wearing my chicken suit when I met her. Although it was the first time we had met it had felt we had met several times before which made things comfortable and I can’t help think that this was due to the conversations we had already had over 140 characters at a time.

So Martha to write up her case study needed to see me teach and look at some of the different ways our students were learning. We were learning about water balance and the kidney and students were asked to create their own photopeach shows with a quiz question at the end. The students then watched each others and tested their own knowledge with the quiz question and were then asked to peer assess each others shows. This is the first time I have used photopeach www.photopeach.com but I think it has awesome potential for in the classroom as a learning tool. I am going to write it up as a blog post soon. Martha enjoyed the lesson and I even gave her a notebook to look at the students videos and to post a comment about them as they completed them and posted them on their shared ning. You can see one of the shows by clicking on the link below:

The Kidneyz

Next Martha chatted to some of our students about the experiences of using technology, followed by an interview with Dave Garland our Deputy Headteacher with responsibility for ICT among other things about the challenges that schools face in using it in innovative ways. Finally Martha’s visit was completed with a ‘real’ not virtual trip to our livestock area. Martha and everyone else at Futurelabs have been known to watch a little bit of pigcam and eggcam every now and then – you can all watch our piggies or free range battery rescue hens on one of our webcams at www.saltash.net/livestock   Martha loved meeting them in the flesh or feathers and returned home very happy with some free range eggs. We are hoping that we get to see more of our friends at Futurelab in the future.