a7eleven

Bath and North East Somerset hold a dance festival every year, aimed primarily at schools, though there are also some dance clubs taking part.  This year’s event happened on Wednesday evening this week.  As a chair of governors I get invited along and I always try to make it.  It’s a fun evening, even if my own kids haven’t taken part for some years.

If nothing else, the excitement and enthusiasm of the children taking part is amazing.

This year’s best dances, IMHO, were Widcombe Infants and both the Newbridge Primary offerings (though I guess I’m biased in choosing the latter).  Whatever, the Newbridge upper-school dance looked to me to be one of the most well rehearsed and together dances of the night.

Well done to all concerned.

Sara and I went out for a meal afterwards to Yak Yeti Yak, a Nepalese restaurant in Bath.  Lovely food and not bad prices either.  The dahl and watercress and spinach curry were both especially good.

Some readers will know that I’m currently chair of governors at my local primary school in the UK - Newbridge Primary School - and that I helped construct the school’s Web site using bits and pieces of Web 2.0 technology. One of the things we do is use Blogger to maintain a set of blogs for the school. These are pulled in dynamically and displayed as though they were locally held content.

Gina, the fairly new ICT coordinator at the school, ran an INSET day session yesterday afternoon, trying to encourage all teachers to write for their class blog. The long term aim is to get the children to do this as well… but we need to take baby steps and nothing is going to happen until the staff feel comfortable writing for their blogs.

I think the session went pretty well. People seemed impressed by how easy it was to add content to their class blog using the Blogger editor. We’ll see how it goes. There’s not going to be a short term miracle… but I’m confident we’ll get there in time.

As part of the session Gina played a couple of videos - Shift Happens and CommonCraft’s Blogs in Plain English. This kind of material is pretty much the norm now in higher education but I was impressed with the background work Gina had done in preparing for the session. Good stuff. She has big plans for the school’s use of ICT, including getting teachers and pupils podcasting.

At some point we’ll need to run other training days looking at the use of Flickr and del.icio.us - both of which are used to hold content for the Web site. But yesterday was a good first step and I’m quite excited about where we can take this stuff.