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Thurs 20th Jan 2011

First 'teach-meet' style showcase session.

All school staff that were unable to attend were invited to join virtually through the new Chat facility. Though we received lots of interest, these were outweighted by staff with other commitments, therefore Linda's running text commentary has been kept as a record of the session.

Winhills	EYFS	Enhancing Parental Engagement. Introduced in a controlled way with log-in details shared during attendedance at an intro session. Teachers are not uploading images to the shared gallery but pass ownership to parents. Opportunities for sharing school information including newsletters, 'achiever of the week' etc.
Alconbury	Predominantly KS2 with some KS1 use	Addressing E-Safety through guided use and the realtive annonymity of emailing between teacher and pupil. Virtual accounts are used for book characters, pupils are engaged through role play. Less confident writers are enthusiastic about writing emails to give advice and are more willing to take spelling risks. Benefits of pupils taking ownership including 'Show & Tell' opportunities. KS1 are using email through use of the teacher accounts with 'Katy Morag'. Extending the classroom work, drawing maps and recording narrative descriptions of how to get from Alconbury to the island.
The Starz Team	All Years, County wide	The Starz Activities 'Discuss It' environment including moderated forums where current affairs topics were initially posted by the team to engage pupil activity. Within 6 minutes of the first topic going live, a reply was received. Since developed to pupils taking ownership in creating their own topics, including branching collaborative stories and topical issues. Within the first 5 months, over 1,000 postings have been made including most recently, messages to Santa and cases where the school have shocked to learn of individual pupil engagement and level of writing.
St.Albans	All Years	Using Starz to enhance all areas of the curriculum. Recent actvitiy includes developing knowledge and understanding of other religions through link school in Israel. With an outside audience in mind, pupils watched 'Hector's World', discussed e-safety issues, chose appropriate nicknames and received email from link school to class account. Email was forwarded to each of the pupil accounts who were tasked to write a reply. Next step is for pupils to email 1:1. Pupils learned lots of similarities and differences, while emailing to pupils that they didn't know was more purposeful than emailing within school.
Queen Edith	Predominantly KS2	Having a purposeful use rather than being seen as a 'bolt on' directs pupil activity. Use of the Task tool in particular, to set and mark work has given focused direction and reduced workload. Using virtual characters to problem solve is enhancing 'fairytales' work.
Great Gidding	Predominantly KS2	Initiated by group of boys that expressed an interest in being computer programmers. A shared Scratch community was created to enable the boys to share and comment on their project work while discussion forums were used for problem solving and self-help. Initially discussed and agreed to rules for keeping the forum unmoderated. Boys submitted their agreement to abide, by email.
Swaffham Bulbeck	Small Y5 Group of Boys	Example also given from Great Gidding Primary of KS2 pupils having purposeful direction of using the Blog tool included examples of recording the setting up and evaluation of science project tasks.