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. |
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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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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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 |