Wolverhampton City Learning Centre (CLC)

During the Autumn Term, the CLC has worked with students from 6 Secondary schools from around the city. Here is a description of the projects that secondary schools have been involved in:

The King’s CE School

Students from Year 10 at the King’s School participated in a digital photography and film-making project. They learned about the principles of composition and using aperture and shutter priority modes to create images with shallow depth of field (blurred backgrounds) or intentional motion blur.

Students worked extensively in Photoshop, learning basic skills - cropping, editing brightness, contrast or curves - and more sophisticated techniques, including the use of adjustment layers, masks and feathered selections to target edits at specific regions of images.

Finally, the students combined their photos with Creative Commons images to create short films showcasing their imaging work.

What the teacher said:

Excellent, as always. Thank you.

Colton Hills Community School

Year 7 students from Colton Hills visited the CLC to create theme-based podcasts (radio programmes) based around either The Black Death or the life of Rosa Parks.

Students used online video, simulations, mindmapping and blogging tools to collect together their ideas, then scripted and recorded their podcasts using GarageBand on the iMacs in the Learning Studio. Finished podcasts were published to bespoke websites created for the projects.

What the teachers said:

Interesting, pacy and with full student involvement.

The pupils were completely engaged and enjoyed the experience. They all demonstrated excellent teamwork skills and use of vocabulary.

A unique insight into creative media.

Wednesfield High Specialist Engineering College

Groups of Year 10 and Year 12 students from Wednesfield High visited the CLC to participate in a series or workshops focussed around the use of the iLife Suite on the Apple iMacs (iMovie, GarageBand and iPhoto) and Adobe Photoshop. Through a series of short, focussed activities, enhanced with the use of online planning and collaboration tools, students learned skills they could take back to school for usage in the school’s new media suite.

What the teachers said:

Clear structure. Excellent mix of activities. Good feedback and advice to all students. All students go away with essential skills.

Smestow Specialist Sports College and The Northicote School

Year 7 students from both Smestow and Northicote visited the CLC to participate in one-day eSafety workshops. Based around films from CEOP and other agencies, the day challenged students to think about their behaviour and privacy when utilising the latest web tools - social networking, online gaming and internet chat.

What the teachers said:

Very insightful, with a wide range of different activities

Excellent use of time, well planned activities. Ade of student think about their internet activity.

South Wolverhampton and Bilston Academy

As part of their OCR Level 2 / 3 courses, groups of Year 10 students from South Wolverhampton and Bilston Academy learned how to use Windows Movie Maker and Audacity to combine together video footage and audio to create short adverts for gadgets.

What the teacher said:

Enjoyed by all pupils and excellent progress made in use of software. Excellent tuition and facilities