It’s been a while since I posted anything significant to the blog. Apologies for that, but life at the CLC has been busy, as usual! I thought I’d take the opportunity to bring visitors up to date with some of the projects and activities that have been happening / are going to happen at the City Learning Centre. Be sure to have a look at our latest newsletter too for a further taste of what we’re up to.

Theme and tailored days

Our programme of theme days (the "menu" of activities that we offer to allocated schools each term) has continued to evolve. New for the Spring Term 2006 is Flash Animation (for Secondary Students only) and Space Day (for older Primary students and Secondary).

We’ve also modified our video days to create two separate activities - Film Editing and Film Making. The first school to participate in these sessions was St. Peter’s: the film editing day used a piece of prose as inspiration for sequences constructed from preprepared footage and digital stills selected by the students from the fantastic image resource www.morguefile.com. The finished results were often visually stunning and were enhanced by GarageBand soundtracks. In contrast, the film making sessions saw students storyboarding, shooting and editing famous endings of EastEnders episodes ("Dum-Dum moments") for submission to the BBC’s current East Endings competition. Apologies to anyone who was wandering past the CLC on Monday and heard one Year 10 student shouting "You’re not my mother!" at another! I will try to post some of the completed films to the CLC showcase in the not-too-distant future.

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There has been a good deal in the media of late about poor behaviour in our schools; we hear that the government is sitting down with a group of respected headteachers and behavioural experts to look at the problem. Sometimes, it’s all too easy to forget that the majority of students in our schools do care about their learning and do behave well.

During this week (the first week of the summer holiday) I have been delighted to work with two groups of young learners who really care about their education. On Tuesday, a group of Y6/Y7/Y8 students from Deansfield High school and feeder Primaries visited the centre as part of a space-themed G&T week organised by Mrs. Argyle at Deansfield. We spent a day working on a video project in which students had to create a futuristic Holiday TV programme based around interplanetary tourism.

On Wednesday, I dropped in on the same group working with Anu Ojha (from ISSET) as they participated in a fantastic day of rocket-building and learning about the enormous challenges of space exploration. The attitude of the learners was fantastic on both days.

On Thursday, we worked with a group of students from Penn Hall Special School, which supports children with physical disabilities. We edited video footage from their playscheme week into short documentary films using iMovie, then added in music created in GarageBand. The finished films are a testament to their endeavour and creativity. Well done to both groups! (who are, remember, using their summer holidays to participate in these programmes!)