Global Citizenship

East Dunbartonshire Council have celebrated the completion of their ‘Projet Citoyen’ project, which enabled sixth form pupils to undertake activities to raise European awareness in local schools. A group of students visited Strasbourg and the European Parliament, and produced video clips and presentations about their trip. They also improved the fluency of their spoken French.

This material was then converted into an online quiz for pupils in the first year of secondary. Now there are plans to extend this material further, with background information about Strasbourg and European institutions, and move the resource onto the Glow intranet for further use by pupils and teachers.

The UN Copenhagen summit on Climate Change (COP15) in December is now just a few weeks away, and a steady flow of new websites and educational opportunities is emerging.

The Danish Ministry of Education has supported the creation of an international Teachers site (in English) on climate in education, called Teacherscop15.dk . This website assists teaching about climate issues and provides themes and ideas for learning more. Schools in Scotland can take part in educational activity with schools from Denmark and around the world, and can upload examples of their project work such as presentations, video clips, etc to put their own school on the interactive map.

Oxfam has published a new online resource to support education about climate change, its impacts, and the need for positive action.

And SCIAF, the Scottish aid and development charity, also has fresh educational resources about the injustice of climate change and the need to tackle its causes and consequences.

The UK government’s ‘Act on Copenhagen’ website provides updated international news about climate change and information about action in social and economic sectors of the UK.

A Scottish teacher has taken the second place Award in the Community category at the worldwide ‘Innovative Education Forum’ in Brazil. He was recognised for his work on Computer Games in the classroom and promoting the benefits through learning communities.  (editorial interest: Ollie Bray is currently on secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland)

Microsoft runs this international education gathering as part of its ‘Partners in Learning’ programme, which includes the Innovative Teachers network that connects teachers with an enthusiasm and talent for ICT through online communities in each country. The November edition of ‘Teaching Scotland’, the magazine of the General Teaching Council Scotland, includes an article about the programme and how Scottish teachers can get involved.

On the 1st December there is an opportunity for Scottish teachers to share experience,views and ideas with colleagues in the rest of the UK at the UK Innovative Teachers Froum in Birmingham. The Partners in Learning website has full details.

Win a Flip Camera for your school

Learning and Teaching Scotland is currently developing a new Primary Climate Change website. It will bring together a series of web-based activities which will allow pupils at First and Second Stages to explore and learn about climate change, how it will affect them and what they can do about it.

We are looking to have some demonstration clips built into the site. These will include recording weather, the water cycle, movement of warm and cold air, and adaptations to change. We are challenging Secondary school pupils to come up with innovative and creative approaches to this.

The shorts can be up to a maximum of 1 min and can be shot on anything from a camera phone to home video or professional equipment, or can be done in animation.

Contributions must be emailed in or uploaded to the GLOW SDE group by 04 December 2009. All will be exhibited on the GLOW SDE group and the most suitable, from an educational point of view, will be incorporated into the Primary Climate Change website.

Flip cameras will be awarded to those schools whose clips are used on the Climate Change website.

For more information on the experiments and activities please contact Helen Winton, H.Winton@LTScotland.org.uk

Two more examples of International Education in Scottish schools, where they engage in collaborative work with overseas partner schools to benefit the learning of their pupils:

Glaitness School in Orkney has a good blog which describes the range of activity going on; for example, a link being developed with a school high up in the Rocky Mountains of the USA, a very different environment from the home of the Orkney children.

And Meldrum Primary in Aberdeenshire is featured in a TESS article this week which focuses on their EU Comenius school partnership project with schools in Germany, Spain, Slovenia and Slovakia.

Both schools using a variety of means to expose their children to the wider world and the place of Scotland and Scots within it.

The European Day of Languages took place last week, and an article in The Scotsman reported on developments such as the Confucius Classrooms programme (supporting Mandarin), the growth of Gaelic learning, and the provision of Latin.

The European Commission’s Translation department (Directorate-General for Translation, DGT) has developed an animated game for young people to increase interest in European languages, and LinguaGo is now on the EuropaGo website at http://europa.eu/linguago/ . The aim of the game is to navigate a language maze and collect parcels. To get through the maze, players need to guess the names of the European languages and steer clear of mischievous spiders. As they progress, they will also have to play the game in languages other than their own.

 The Scottish Government has announced funding to the National Trust for Scotland, to enable more school pupils to make educational visits to historic sites at Bannockburn, Culloden and the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. These visitor attractions offer educational experiences which assist students to interpret historic events and contexts. Knowledge about about their own heritage and culture will help young Scots to understand their own country and its place in the modern world.

This kind of support enhances the legacy of the Homecoming Scotland 2009 programme, which has helped to stimulate interest among school pupils about the history of their country.

The Prince’s Rainforests Project for Schools aims to raise awareness and stimulate discussion in schools about the importance of rainforests and their role in mitigating Climate Change. The project is running two competitions for pupils which offer opportunities for creative activity.

The ‘Sony World Photography Awards / Prince’s Rainforests Project Schools’ competition invites pupils to take and submit a photograph on one of four themes, such as ‘what climate change means to you’.  The contest website has full details, and the closing date is 23rd October 2009.

And the ‘Frog competition’  offers the chance to design a ‘look’ and colour scheme for a large fibreglass sculpture Frog. Closing date is 15th October.

Here’s a great opportunity for school students (and in fact anyone) to communicate effectively about an international theme. The ‘1 minute to save the world’ competition website asks people to make a one-minute video which clearly expresses an opinion about the issue of Climate Change, and then upload the video to the website for others to view and vote on. The wide range of video already on the site, and the different approaches used by the filmmakers, makes for an illuminating way of raising public awareness and participation in Sustainable Development.

Full details are on the web, with a closing date of 30th October for submission of entries. Three finalists will be chosen to show their films at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December. Wouldn’t it be  great if a Scottish school entry was one of them?

Here’s another example of Scottish teachers blogging about educational activity undertaken in their summer vacations. Two Edinburgh primary schools are involved in work with Burmese refugees and migrants living in Thailand, and teachers have used the DfID Global Schools Partnership programme to support their work with their partner schools on the Thai/Burma border.

Forthview Primary established the first link, and every year one or two teachers exchanged and worked in each others schools to develop learning themes together. Since 2007 Pirniehall Primary, Forthview’s neighbouring school, have had a link with another school for Burmese children at Mae Sot in Thailand. The link between these Scottish and refugee schools has created international art exhibitions in which children wrote and etched about an aspect of their life, with their work exhibited in Edinburgh, Chiang Mai and Mae Sot.

The Forthview teachers blog and the Pirniehall teachers blog provide much more detail about their summer 2009 visits and about life in these refugee communities.