The creative use of new technologies
Tallis Mobile
We are very excited by the potential of a range of handheld and mobile technologies to transform learning. So far these have included sound recorders, still cameras and Flip video cameras. Recently we have invested in class sets of 4th generation iPod Touches and we have begun to employ them in a range of contexts to pormote creative learning. To help us research their usefulness we have asked a small group of Year students and their parents/carers to use them both in school and at home and to share their thoughts and experiences online and in regular meetings. We used them extensively during the recent Tallis Perspectives cross-curricular learning days to promote active research, photography, film-making and graphic presentations and they have been a fantastic resource in Tallis Lab lessons, allowing students to plan, shoot, edit and share movies in the space of 2 hours. This would have been impossible with any other device.
We are looking forward to using many more iPods and iPads in the new school building. |
This film was shot and edited on an iPod Touch during a 2 hour Tallis Lab lesson. Students were encouraged to reflect on their favourite places in school. |
Space2Cre8
This international social networking site connects kids in India, Norway, South Africa, Australia, the UK and the US, who share conversations about their cultures, schools, and lives as well as their digital artifacts they create in the afterschool program. In these afterschool and extra-school programmes, kids create digital artifacts that mix video, audio, and photography in creative projects that they share and collaborate on with their peers across the network. A small group of Tallis students in Year 9 represent the UK. We have been meeting weekly to create and upload media, share conversations on the Space2Cre8 social network and Skype with young people in other countries. We are excited about the potential for these conversations and collaborations to become very rich and rewarding learning experiences and we plan to continue to participate in the Space2Cre8 programme in the coming year (2011-12).
The project is supported by the University of California, Berkeley and the LSE in London. |
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Pop Up School at the Creativity World Forum 2010
In November 2010, eight students and two members of staff from Thomas Tallis School travelled to Oklahoma in the United States to present our thoughts about creative learning and the future of schools at the Creativity World Forum. Representatives from three London schools (Tallis, Stormont House and Gallions) collaborated with partner schools in Oklahoma (Howe High, Harding Fine
Arts Academy and Stanley Hupfield Academy. We began our collaboration virtually, using a variety of social networking tools to explore our shared understanding of creative learning. These tools included Tumblr blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Ning and Skype. Eventually, a suggestion emerged that we might attempt to create a pop up school at the conference in order to demonstrate some of our thoughts about creative learning in the twenty-first century. |
We established our Pop Up School in an unofficial corner of the conference hall (Booth 100 ½) and engaged delegates with a variety of tasks hosted on our #popupschool website and hashtag. We used Twitcam to broadcast live from the stage during our presentation. We made films, did research, created podcasts - mostly from our new iPod Touch devices equipped with the relevant apps - iMovie, Audioboo, Tumblr etc. The younger students (age 9-10) sang songs in the foyer (rather like a Flashmob event) or asked a series of challenging, open-ended questions. We aimed to give our learners an opportunity to engage with adults as equals, co-learners and to publish their thoughts and reflections to a real audience online. The most valuable lesson we learned was just how easy and powerful it is to connect with other learners and learning professionals (we're not very fond of the word teacher) in far off places. Tammy Parks at Howe High School was our partner in the project and has proved to be an inspirational colleague and a leading figure in our PLNs (Personal Learning Networks). We conducted several Skype conversations with her and her students in the lead up to the conference and we were inspired by her story.
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Howe is three hours from the nearest town. The school is smaller than one of our year groups at Tallis and, apart from the school building, the only other significant architectural features in Howe are the convenience store and the lumber yard. Despite this, Tammy and her husband Scott (the superintendent of the school district) have created an ICT-rich learning environment using state of the art equipment. The school uses a satellite truck to conduct virtual field trips. They have high quality video conferencing equipment and lead learning experiments across the United States. Their physical isolation has been a spur to innovation. In order to give their students access to twenty-first-century learning they have harnessed the power of the internet and the skills of broadcast journalism to connect them with the rest of the world. In January four Tallis students presented their reflections about the Creativity World Forum and our Pop Up School at the Learners Y Factor event, part of the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London. Despite some technical hitches, the team did a fantastic job of explaining the way that they had harnessed the power of social networking and new handheld devices like the iPod Touch and iPad to engage in an international creative learning collaboration. Their presentation ended with a judges’ Q&A during which Joseph Horton, one of the students from Howe High School, joined the discussion live via Skype. Our experiences at both of these conferences have given us a great deal of confidence to continue to develop awareness of the power of social networking to promote exciting, authentic, creative, international learning activities.
A version of this article was published in the NSEAD magazine, May 2011 (see below). |
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The school website
As a specialist arts college, Leading Edge school and School of Creativity, it's really important that what visitors encounter when they connect with us online is visually engaging, interactive and symbolic of our ethos. Over the last few years we have developed a very productive creative partnership with Tak! Design in Birmingham. The Homepage Blogging Gallery forms part of a suite of applications that greet visitors to our site that also include Tallis Talk (our message board) and Tallis Shorts (our media gallery). The Gallery is kept up to date with exhibitions of student art work and images from a variety of activities. Photographs can be uploaded via the site, sent as email attachments or picture messages. This means that we have been able to create galleries of school journeys to foreign countries that are updated live on location. The design of the site features retro polaroid frames that appear to have been scattered on the desktop. Clicking on individual images zooms in on them and hovering over pictures reveals additional text. Tallis Talk has proved to be an incredibly popular forum for discussions about school life and other important issues. Students and parents can "talk" directly to the headteacher using the "Mr Thomas is listening" topic stream and discussions can be tracked over time. Again, it was important to us that the look and feel of the site was unique. Tallis Talk was nominated for the Official Honoree catagory of prizes at the 2007 international Webby Awards.
Science Club on YouTube
The Science Club at Tallis, run by Andrew Wardell, has its very own YouTube channel so that it can share its experiments with a wide audience. They have been busy experimenting with recording various phenomena using a high speed camera that produces fantastic slow motion footage. This is how they introduce themselves and their experiments on the site:
Evidence, Evaluations, Proof, and things of wonder may all be found here. We will stop at nothing to rigorously test theories through experimentation and evidence. This process sometimes involves destruction, explosion, damage to personal property, and occasionally teacher humiliation. You'd better believe it! |
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Living Cinema
In March 2009, the school hosted an unusual evening of entertainment involving live video projections, a three course meal, a performance from the Bollywood Brass Band and discussion about the role that creativity might play in the regeneration of the local area. The evening was the culmination of a collaboration with Netribution, the Technology Strategy Board and Eelyn Lee Productions. Members of the Creative Tallis Action Research Group assisted backstage and helped to make the evening a great success. It was fascinating to watch the Vusicians struggling with the mountains of equipment and problem-solving as they prepared for the performance. Students don't often get to witness professionals behind the scenes facing challenges and working together to solve them.
The most exciting aspect of the event was the way the team of artists, staff members, students and parents worked collaboratively to create an unusual and stimulating experience for our visitors.
The feedback from the evaluations completed on the night suggests that there is definitely an appetite for this form of entertainment, at least in our corner of South East London.
The most exciting aspect of the event was the way the team of artists, staff members, students and parents worked collaboratively to create an unusual and stimulating experience for our visitors.
The feedback from the evaluations completed on the night suggests that there is definitely an appetite for this form of entertainment, at least in our corner of South East London.
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A Portrait of Tallis
The Year 10 Media BTEC class have been responding to a photography brief entitled "Portrait of Tallis". Their task has been to capture the essence of the school, its ethos and atmosphere, through a series of photographs. We decided to use the excellent Vuvox application to create slideshows of our work. The more adventurous amongst also created musical accompaniment using Garageband. This example is by one of our deaf students, Richard Achiampong. Richard is an excellent example of a student who is often, to use Sir Ken Robinson's expression, in "his element" when working with digital media. Richard has not always found school easy but he has made fantastic progress on the media course and we are very proud of him. We hope you like his "Portrait of Tallis".
"Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking." Sir Ken Robinson The Element |
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GoAnimate.com: media models 2 by SamanthaHodges
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun! |
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Web 2.0 tools in Media
One of the units on the BTEC Media course requires students to produce ePortfolio websites in order to learn about web authoring. We chose to use Weebly, an excellent online web authoring application (the same one we've used to create this site) so that students could work on their designs in and outside school.
Here are a couple of links to ePortfolios created by the students in Year 11: Seb's ePortfolio Raihan's ePortfolio Richard's ePortfolio |
We have also been experimenting with a variety of tools to help with the evaluation process. We have created podcasts using Audioboo, virtual tours using a variety of screencasting tools like Screenr and even animated evaluations like the onbe above, using sites like Xtranormal. Not only is this a lot of fun to do, it also engages the student in some sophisticated higher order thinking skills - evaluation, synthesis and creativity.
Tom Tom
Tom Tom is the name of our school magazine, produced by students interested in all the elements of journalism. They write the copy, do the editing and sub-editing, take the photographs and assist in the design and layout before it's sent to be printed and uploaded to the internet. In July 2008, the Prime Minister and Ed Balls visited to Tallis to talk to the students involved in the creation of Tom Tom about their experiences. Here you can see that the visit created quite a prominent centre piece for the following edition!
We have taken the decision to print fewer physical copies of the magazine, partly because of the environmental impact but also because we recognise that more people are now accessing their news online. We are using the excellent Issuu to publish the magazine on the WWW. This means that we can make the full colour version of Tom Tom available to the whole world and celebrate the talents of our young journalists with a huge audience.
We have taken the decision to print fewer physical copies of the magazine, partly because of the environmental impact but also because we recognise that more people are now accessing their news online. We are using the excellent Issuu to publish the magazine on the WWW. This means that we can make the full colour version of Tom Tom available to the whole world and celebrate the talents of our young journalists with a huge audience.