ASUS Reveal Classroom Innovation Award Winners
Classroom Innovation, education Guardian’s ICT hub for schools supported by ASUS, is delighted to announce the winners of the Classroom Innovation Awards where one primary and one secondary school have won £7,500 worth of ASUS ICT equipment for their school.
The Classroom Innovation Awards finalists’ videos have all been showcased on the ASUS stand during last week’s BETT Show, 12-15 January 2011 and six short-listed schools have been in attendance at the stand to talk about how they have used technology to excite and encourage pupils in new and innovative ways of learning.
During the show visitors to the ASUS stand have been asked to select a primary and a secondary winner from the entries on display. The six schools present at the show were:
Primary School category:
St Mary’s Catholic
St Thomas RC
West Dean CE
Secondary School category:
King Edward VI
Croesyceiliog
Clevedon School
Over 1000 votes were recorded during the show and individual schools worked very hard to drive and encourage voting. All the votes have been counted and the winners are:
In the Primary Sector: West Dean Church of England Primary School
And for the Secondary Sector: Croesyceilog School
Richard Doughty, Classroom Innovation Editor, commented on the Awards that they “have not only clearly demonstrated the excellent and creative use of technology in the classroom, but the level of engagement and participation at the BETT Show has been first-rate. Congratulations to the two winning schools.”
John Swatton, Marketing Manager at ASUS agreed and further advised “ASUS have enjoyed a very successful BETT Show and have been delighted to host the Classroom Innovation Awards. We look forward to sustaining our dialogue with practitioners in the world of education in the future and specifically we look forward to working closely with the winning schools.”
Gill Moss, head teacher for West Dean has expressed her “absolute delight with this result! West Dean CE Primary School is only a small school but we have a talented and dedicated team of staff, children, parents and governors, as well as plenty of friends in the community, who help us to achieve great things for our children.
Winning this national competition will help us to make a difference to children in our school and in other communities too, and will strengthen our international links. My thanks go to everyone who voted for our entry, to the team of people who attended the event and to Andy Dobson who led this bid and masterminded a way to enhance our exciting project with Las Posas by means of new technological skills”.
Alessio Bernardelli, Deputy Team Leader of Science for Croesyceiliog School said: “Winning the Guardian Classroom Innovation Awards is simply amazing, because we know we were up against other fantastic projects. We would like to thank all the people who supported and believed in our project and especially ASUS for their overwhelming generosity, which will allow us to continue to engage even more regularly in projects like this one!”
West Dean CE Primary School have added some background information to their award bid as
“We are a small village school. With only 4 classes, we have had to think creatively about how we use ICT to enrich our curriculum and give our pupils a wider experience of the world.
Armed with some laptops, a digital camera, a blank Moodle, and the support of West Dean college, we have begun to make links with schools in the Mexican jungle to share our connection with the poet and patron of the arts, Edward James.
Pupils set up a collaborative website to share work they had produced, including a 15 minute documentary. They used forums to ask questions and updated and uploaded materials and resources. Year 5 and 6 pupils even ran training sessions for our staff.”
Alessio Bernardelli has explained some of the background and the impact to their submission.
“My Year 10 students put together a really creative programme of resources that we used to broadcast live as our “EM Spectrum Show!” on the 17th December 2009. The original plan was to broadcast from the school, but unfortunately our school network filtered the stream from our classroom, so my students and I decided to record their work and broadcast the show live from my house. In many ways this turned out to be a very valuable alternative, because it meant the world to our children to be able to watch the show from their houses and know that leading Educators like, Les Foltos (Director of edLAB Puget Sound Centre for Teaching), from across the globe were watching and praising the educational value of their work. Also, the students’ parents could watch the show with their children and become involved and engaged with their learning on a completely new level.
What I like most about this project is that our children chose to use free software for the majority of their work, but still produced a really engaging, creative, rich and fun programme that still contained a wealth of really good Science in it! We used mainly free Microsoft software like Photo Story 3, SongSmith, Movie Maker and Community Clips, and we created our very own online TV Channel with Livestream (http://www.livestream.com/croesyphysics). Some people might have the impression that to create really innovative and engaging activities for our children they need state of the art equipment and spend large sums of money, but I believe this project proves just the opposite. In fact, all our students had was a laptop between two, or three, and a headset with microphone and still got involved in true active learning!”
To see both winners videos and other submissions to the Classroom Innovation Awards visit www.guardian.co.uk/classroom-innovation