Today, I’m working with Year 9 students from The Northicote School on the first day of a two-day project focusing around Space and Space Travel. During our first day we are looking at the following topics:

• What is space? How far away is space? How big is space?
• The distance of the Earth to the Moon
• Making a Scale model of the Solar System
• How do rockets work? Newton’s Third Law.
• “There is no gravity in space”
• Building air-powered rockets. Why do some travel further than others?
• The history of space travel
• Devising questions for a Skype call with Dr. Matt Kenworthy at the University of Arizona during Day 2.

Here are some links that my prove useful:
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One of my favourite applications for Mac OS X, Comic Life, has just been released for Windows XP / Vista. Comic Life allows students to create comics, how-tos or picture albums by combining together digital photos with speech and thought bubbles, text, and authentic comic-style layouts and fonts. It’s great fun and almost impossibly easy to use.

Pricing is US$24.95 (about £12.50) for the “Standard” version and $29.95 for a “Deluxe” version with more fonts, templates and styles. There’s a free 30-day trial available for download, so you can test drive it for yourself.

• Comic Life for Windows

Updated - pricing for education is better still:

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Yesterday, Year 3 children from Springvale Primary School visited the CLC to create Christmas Cards ready for the festive season. Working with the CLC’s Artist in Residence, Doreen, the young learners looked at the history of the Christmas Card, then modelled and created characters and sets to form a Christmas scene.

The students then learned how to take digital photos of their sets from different angles and positions, before selecting their favourite images and importing them into Publisher to create a Christmas Card.

Finally, the students worked together as a group to create a PhotoStory using their photos, and added spoken Christmas greetings to complete a film.

Over the coming weeks, more primary schools will be visiting to create cards. We will select our favourites, and these will become the CLC’s official Christmas cards for 2007!

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On Monday, students from Green Park School visited the CLC to take part in a Fire Safety Day. In the morning, members of the education team from Wolverhampton Fire Service gave demonstrations and advice for fire safety in the home. They showed students how to deal with a fire, how to react if they are caught in a smoky room and showed how they use hoses to extinguish fires.

In the afternoon, the students worked together in Comic Life and iMovie to create a film explaining what they had seen and learned in the morning.

An article on the CLC Blog has received a mention in a recent edition of the Guardian. In the “Critics’ Choice” section of the Education Guardian on September 18th, Jim Merrett highlighted information on the web related to podcasting in schools. He picked out our article “Tips for a successful school podcast” for providing “advice on the pace of the process and much on the content, with useful audio clips and examples of school podcasts”.

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