Updates and further progress made

Hi all,

Its been a while since I've blogged but just to update everyone on what Blackwood has been up to in its quest to raise awareness of digital literacy/citizenship within the school.

First off all we have a PLC 'digital literacy' group, whereby a member of staff from most departments within the school attend a meeting every 6 weeks to discuss ways of moving digital literacy forward within their own department. Some staff have chosen to use 'Hwb' and have created blogs, collaboration projects etc with students. Other departments have chosen to use Ipads within their subject and the use of apps to raise pupils skills within the subject and digital literacy skills. Other staff have chosen to use Chrome Books, this is becoming  increasingly popular in school, with Google classrooms being set up and pupils collaborating on projects. An example is recently when, for an ICT project pupils task was to create a virtual tour of a country of their choice and act as a tour guide, a group decided to do theirs collaboratively using Google Docs, not something they had learnt to do in ICT but in another subject, which shows that pupils are transferring their digital skills learnt from other subjects.  This is all good progress, but the difficultly is getting consistency through all departments, although this could be achieved with the new framework due out in September.

We have also recently sent a group of Year 8 pupils to 'Digital 16', a conference held in the Celtic manor. Pupils enjoyed their time there and took part in some great activities and hopefully would have inspired them for the future.

A group of year 10 pupils also took part in the Young Enterprise Welsh finals last week. They created a defence video and used social media to advertise their business. A great way for pupils to see a different use of social media, unfortunately they didn't manage to win, but a great achievement nonetheless.

Two classes (one year 9 and one year 10) also took part in a three week research project with Oxford University regrading pupils online habits in gaming etc. Only two schools in the UK took part in the research, and it was very pleasing that Blackwood was one of them! I look forward to hearing the outcome of the research as its a great insight to how the pupils use the internet socially.

I am sure there is more but I cant think of anything off the top of my head. I shall re-post if I think of anything.