SIMPLE IDEAS TO GET TEACHER'S AND CHILDREN COMMUNICATING ONLINE - LET YOUR GENIE OUT OF THE LAMP...!!!

Just wanted to report on a fantastic day we have spent with some Year 6 children - looking at bringing children and thier teaching staff closer together through E-MAIL.

Lots of Schools across the UK now have LEARNING PLATFORMS, whereby taching staff and students can start to use this online resources as a great way to engage and communicate in more personalised way.

How well is this working in your child's school??? - I think we would all have a very varied response here.- Do you even know waht a  LEARNING PLATFORM IS??, AND WHAT IT CAN DO??

Anyway, a great sarting point to break down the "fear of change" factor for many adults/teachers is to simply get your pipils to think about a really exciting and creative question, (such as "Why do Manchester United play at Old Trafford??"), - and then get the child concerned to think of which member of staff would be best equipped to answer this "ENQURING MINDS" STYLE OF QUESTION.

Next, get the child to E-Mail if off through your Learning Platform, and tell them there will be a reply from teaching staff concerned. Staff now feel obliged to answer the mail, and in doing so it srts to get even to most rsistant teacher's involved.

The children will love getting thier E-Mail answers back - believe you me.

ALL YOU TEACHER'S OUT THERE - TRY IT BEFORE CHRISTMAS - IT WILL GET A REALLY, REALLY POSITIVE RESPONSE FROM ALL INVOLVED.

REMOVING BARRIERS THROUGH MUSIC TECHNOLGY

The CUTE MEMORY TEAM have been away for the last couple of weeks in the NORTH of ENGLAND - working with a range of secondary schools bringing in the latest MUSIC TECHNOLOGY ideas and hardware into their everyday MUSIC CURRICULUM.

One of our greatest successes was the introduction of MIGHTY POCKET PUNCHED SIZED KORG KAOSSILATOR - This was a massive hit with both the STUDENTS AND TEACHING STAFF ALIKE:

Here is some of the the positive feedback from ONE of the new SCHOOL ACADEMIES we now work directly alongside:

"Your KORG KAOSSILATOR system would be a really useful tool in school as the results are virtually instant. The majority of student in KS3 and 4 do not play musical instruments as this is often an expense that many families in the area cannot afford. We often therefore end up with students who are keen to learn about music, compose, create, DJ etc but without any kind of formal music training. For these students the Korg would be REALLY useful as they can access music creation with a simple interface which allows them to create and record without any prior musical training or without having to learn more complex software such as CUBASE or REASON before they can start recording - even then they would normally require keyboard skills or have to enter musical data with a mouse by hand which is very slow and therefore not an engaging and creative method of working. The Korg allows hand on instant musical gratification. It also allows groups or individuals to work in other spaces around the department or in cross curricular projects with other departs e.g. media, art, ict drama"