Saltash.net students storm the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust Conference 09

Next Generation Kernow Presentation

This will probably be the best blog post I have ever written. Why? Well because I haven’t written it this post has been written by a couple of my students about their experience of presenting at a national conference. You will see just what the power of student voice can really do! So please welcome Zoe and Charlotte!

On Thursday 26^th November we went with Mrs Bovey to Birmingham for the 21^st Century Schooling: The Globalised Challenge conference. On the Friday morning we got up at an unnatural hour and travelled to the ICC (international conference centre) to meet up with Mr Garland.   Here at 8am we had been booked in to deliver a 45 minute presentation to about 70 teachers, governors and other delegates from all over the country. After ironing out a few technical problems with our presentation, the delegates started to arrive and the nerves really started to kick in!

Our presentation was all about the Next Generation Kernow project, which is the base of the Big Brother Diary Room and the School Radio. We talked about the progress we had made so far in school and showed how our school has been developing these new ideas through the students and not the teachers. However, it wasn’t just slideshows – we had to field questions too!

We were relieved to finish the presentation without any major hiccups and it went down very well with all the delegates. We are very pleased that some have been communicating with Mr Roberts on twitter, telling him all about it!! We were pleasantly surprised by the interest we received about our project, one man in particular told us he would like to take our idea for a school radio station and make it happen in his own school too.

We’ve found the whole experience intriguing and confidence building and look forward to continuing the project now we have received such positive feedback from so many different people!

Zoë Vincent & Charlotte Cole

A Note from Mrs Bovey:

It was a real privilege to watch such a professional presentation delivered with such confidence.  They were informative, with a great mixture of explanation and humour.  Despite several interruptions at the beginning and a couple of technical hitches they delivered their speech unflustered and with great timing.  I was so pleased for them and so proud of being part of a school that enables students like Zoe and Charlotte to have opportunities like this to really shine!

A Note from Mr Roberts:

Zoe and Charlotte did fantastically well and this was showed from the feedback that was put out via the feeds at the conference that I was reading back here in Saltash via twitter #SSAT09. Here are a couple of the quotes:

“The students were great, one chap told me that it had been worth attending conference just for them”

“They were inspirational – great student voice from darkest Saltash – best session of day so far!”