Silverstone Study Centre

The picture below was created from the brilliant new Wordle application. Enter any text and it’ll create a ‘cloud’ of your words with more prominence given to those that occur more frequently. It gives a useful view of the ‘big picture’ of a piece of writing. I can’t wait to start using this with students.

I entered the copy for Silverstone’s entry in this year’s Study Centres Annual Review. The results do actually reflect the flavour of what we are aiming for (and hopefully achieving) at Silverstone. This might form a handout for my meeting on Tuesday. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and in this case it’s true! Click on the picture for a larger view.

One of the projects I worked on before coming to Silverstone was at the European Centre of Modern Languages (ECML) in Graz in Austria. Between 2004 - 2007 a project team explored how teachers across Europe might use blogs or online journals to improve their students’ foreign language skills. The project’s findings were published a little while back.

My chapter is entitled ‘Reflections on the effective use of blogs in the classroom’ and deals with some of the techniques that proved relevant to building online learning communities. You can click on the book cover to be transported to the online version of the book. The project website also contains a few other bits and pieces including a French translation!

Why am I posting this here? Firstly, it may be useful to schools and teachers thinking about using online communities to enhance their students’ learning. Secondly it allows me the opportunity to show our student authors that I try to practise what I preach about writing and publishing for a real audience. Michael Morpurgo I am not but it still feels good to be published somewhere. Every student should experience that feeling

It has also inspired a task in the upcoming SSC Decathlon…

I often encourage student-teachers to listen and interact with each other’s ideas and explanations not primarily out of a respect for me or their peers - although that is important. It is simply a very effective way to learn and be inspired. Here’s an effective student-teacher in action.