Early Years Practice

I have mentioned Film Street before, which is a great online resource for children and teachers. They are currently running a competition supporting the National Year of Reading, in which children, through their primary schools, can submit animated trailers for their favourite books. A great idea, and I look forward to seeing the entries. I hope that they receive many entries from Foundation Stage children. I am sure the very talented teacher Lynn Scott, at Childwall Valley Primary School, will be submitting such entries - to see the animations produced by children in that school, visit the site here. Lynn also talked about her work in the publication 'Nursery World' and you can read that report here. I featured Lynn's work in my chapter on 'Media Literacy' for the new edition of Desirable Literacies, if you are interested in reading further. It is very important to highlight excellent work in the early years field in this way because, as this BECTA report suggests, there is still a long way to go in terms of extending practice.

Reframing Literacy

I am busy at the moment preparing for this exciting conference which is a liaison between UKLA and the BFI. Oscar Stringer is one of the speakers and his blog contains a number of 'tips and tricks' for teachers interested in animation. Tim Rylands is another speaker, on his work with computer games. If you are interested in attending then I would urge you to apply soon as numbers are limited on each of the days.

Digital Radiohead

As a Radiohead fan, I like to hear about the band's engagement with all things digital, such as their support of the Aniboom competition in which people created animated music videos of Radiohead songs. The Aniboom community identified a shortlist and then the band chose the winner. Actually they chose 4 winners in the end, details here. My own favourite to win was Reckoner. There is also a fabulous video in which you can interact with a digital image of Thom Yorke's head, which is fun, although a little distracting in relation to listening to the song itself! Its production involved some fancy technology which is explained here - you can access the video itself from this page.

Tuning up

I was at this conference today, where I enjoyed presenting alongside Lynn Scott, a very talented teacher at Childwall Valley Primary School, Liverpool, on young children's digital literacy practices. Lynn amazed the audience with the high quality of digital animation work produced by the 3 and 4 year-old children in her foundation stage setting. You can see some of the films produced by children in other classes in the school on their website, here. The children in the foundation stage also created their own soundtracks for their films using GarageBand - it took me two sessions today before I got the hang of the software, but of course the children were much quicker than that! (And I have to confess...produced much better tunes than I did!)