Silverstone Study Centre

PfS students from Bracken Leas Primary were incredibly fortunate to take a look around the McLaren pit garage at Silverstone today. The driving rain and gale force winds meant that the McLaren team could not get out on the track but when they saw us on our track tour, they kindly invited us see what they were getting up to. It was easily one of my highlights of my time at Silverstone and the students were mightily impressed as well. The McLaren is simply beautiful but we were also given an insight into how much skilled manpower, technology and  effort it takes to translate that beauty into raw speed.

Paul Di Resta was the driver on hand to test the McLaren today and it must have been quite frustrating for him not to be able to drive the racer’s ultimate dream machine. In fact I know it was frustrating because he has written about it on his website here. I hope he gets his chance tomorrow!

Between meetings today, I’ve been putting the Driver Lounge area back together with some new and improved features.

One of the few advantages of having to rebuild the study centre each year is that it encourages me to recreate areas around the centre in different ways. Sometimes this is forced upon me by over-zealous wall-stripping or wall-demolishing during my absence. At other times it is due to the fact that I cannot really remember where stuff is meant to go

Anyway - here is my attempt at a redesign of the centre’s Pit Stop area, an altogether edgier learning zone this year, complete with pit board and the smell of the real pits courtesy of a load of tyres from the workshop. Notice too the brilliant spotlight tool on the whiteboard that comes with the latest version of Smart’s Notebook software. I am beginning to feel like a teacher again and less like a Pickfords removal operative.

I’ve just returned to what is left of Silverstone Study Centre.

I like the new quiz maker from MyStudiyo as it is very simple to create and embed in the website. There is a version which can allow students to add their own (moderated) questions which would be great for collaborative work. Here’s my first attempt below.

Q. What do these website addresses all have in common?

• sliverstonestudycentre.org
• silverstonecentre.org
• silverstonestudycenter.org

A. Typing in the above addresses will not bring you to the Silverstone Study Centre website.

If you are reading this post then you have probably written the address correctly - or used the desktop shortcut