Christmas is Coming!

Now that December is here and we can officially turn our thoughts to Christmas, why not take this opportunity to add some festive entries to the new SWGfL Media Gallery. Get you pupils creating their own festive images using collage and scanners, digital cameras or graphics software and upload them to the Festivals and Celebrations area of the gallery. Not onle could you win a Digital Movie Creator (DCM3) for your school, but your images could be added to the SWGfL Postroom to be sent as e-cards.

Full Competition Details here.

Artisancam and Stitch It Up!

If your looking for some fun activities and inspiring ways to develop the use of ICT in Art, you can’t miss Artisancam. Developed by one of our sister Regional Broadband consortia, CLEO ( Cumbria and Lancashire online) it is a comprehensive online arts resource. All of the activities support the national curriculum in specific areas at Key Stage 2 and 3 and are linked from the SWGfL learning Grid section of the website

It provides an insight into the lives of contemporary artists. Using a mixture of video and interactive activities, it introduces children to the world of contemporary visual art before encouraging them to have a go themselves in fun and exciting ways. The website is divided into the Artists Zone, which contains classroom-based activities and the Activity Zone, which is full of games and fun interactive activities, designed to encourage children to continue their learning at home. For example, children can fire their own ‘virtual’ ceramic pot, or design their own piece of jewellery online.

In addition, CLEO are launching a national competition, Stitch IT Up, inviting pupils to design their own duvet online (there’s even a virtual sewing machine!). The competition opened on 15^th October and will close on 14^th December (nice Christmas project?). There will be regional and then national winners.

For more information, and to enter, please visit the Stich it up site: 

Primary D and T

I was reminded just how good the Nuffield Primary Design and Technology website is when I visited it today. It contains examples of pupils work, resources and free to download classroom materials. Each of the units of work are broken down into well structured and manageable pupil activities.

Topic Box

Regular visitors to the Coxhoe Durham or Snaith Primary websites will appreciate just how useful it is to have all those online educational resources in one place. I have just read about a new one called Topic Box on the Little Miss Teacher blog and have been to have a look around. The brightly coloured and easy to navigate website aims to electronically replace those dusty old plastic storage boxes which look promising but generally fail to deliver. Already there are 2131 resources in 174 different topics which can be rated by anyone who downloads them. Tell your friends and let me know if you come across any other similar sites.