
Buckingham Palace

Newport Junior School

Westfields Junior School
Hello again. This time from Portishead in England. A week’s gone by since the last post and so much has happened. Of course there’s never enough time to write posts and check emails but I’m trying!
We had a couple of days in London at North Islington Zone where I saw some really good interactive whiteboard ideas. The boards are very common in England and are a normal part of the daily routine in most classrooms. There’s a school here that would like to start emailing and doing some website related work with us. Lynda Maple visited our classroom in Otford earlier in the year and it was lovely to catch up with her again at Islington. Lynda and her team train and support the teachers in that part of London.
London is an incredible city. There are so many sights to see and wonderful things to do, but boy is it expensive. On Wednesday I caught a train out to Greensward College, east of London, and saw how a secondary college has created a Virtual Learning Environment to communicate with parents and kids at home. It’s fantastic what they’re doing. They’re able to see and work on any file that’s on the school fileserver from a home computer. No need for flash drives.
Then Jutta and I hired a car and it was off to Newport Junior School where they use a thumb scanner instead of a barcode reader when you borrow a book. Make sure you tell Mrs Leslie about the new system and we’ll have to get it. Newport use interactive whiteboards in really cool ways and it was great to pick up lots of good ideas about the boards and many other things as well.
Finally I visited Westfields Junior School where the similarities with Otford are enormous. They’re a much larger school but they concentrate on the same sorts of things that we do and it’s a really caring school. It was just like being at Carver Academy in LA again with Betty. One of the teachers, Simon, is keen to get some emails started between their older kids and Otford, so we’ll have even more e-pals. They have the world’s nicest looking library. Have a look in the photo.
Tomorrow I’ll be popping in on Nic at St Peter’s School in Portishead and I’ll take photos of some of the kids we started emailing months ago. I’m really looking forward to that.
There’s so much going on but that’s a snapshot of what I’ve been doing. Make sure you let me know what you’ve been doing too. Bye for now!