| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

Environmentally aware

I was at the university yesterday for a talk about e-commerce as part of the business studies course, delivered by a local web design company, Internova.

They showed me some educational content that they had created for the Woodland Trusts 'Wild about Woods' website.

If only there had been this kind of activity around when I was at school, rather than the old text book showing pictures of what you might find in a wood!

Save our Wood is a Flash based activity that asks you to explore a wood and find three of the characters that live in the wood (ie badger, squirrel, the ancient tree) and ask their opinion on the importance of the wood so that you can write a letter (on screen) to the local council to prevent a road being built through the wood.

Concrete poetry is a little like a magnetic poetry game, although you get to choose, or design, the outline shape that your poem will fit into.

A Trees Memory is a timeline based activity that makes you realise just how long trees live.

Once the site is live, it will be well worth a visit.

Bullying

Last week was designated as a week to focus on how bullying affects children in school. There were a great many celebrities talking about how they were bullied at school, and how they tried to deal with it (sometimes without success).

However, in the very same week there came the news report about a girl at a secondary school who was surrounded by what can be described as nothing more than a 'mob', or a 'gang' of around 40 other girls who then [alledgedly] threatened to kill her. Fortunately for the girl this was all caught on CCTV by the school and the head (in my opinion) rightly suspended all involved.

That was a week ago, but bullying is still in the news today with the report of a brave girl who after returning to school following years of illness and chemotherapy, had her recently regrown hair set alight by a boy (what on earth could prompt a child to treat another in such a cruel and disrespectful way?). In this case the boy has been arrested and bailed by police while they continue their enquiries. And the girl? She is in shock obviously and asking why anyone would do that to her. Full report here