Suklaa Media & Education » Kristian

Startup Weekend EDU

Kristian — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:27:31 +0000

I was very pleased to be asked to come and mentor at this past weekends Startup Weekend London EDU. Backed by NESTA, Virgin and StartUp Britain, this 54-hour event saw experts collaborate and develop innovative web and mobile apps focusing on education.

In the event, hosted by the games-based learning start-up Education Games Network, participants began by giving a 1 minute pitch of their idea and then they teamed up with others to take forward the most popular concepts.

I joined them on Saturday afternoon to help mentor and steer the groups. I was especially excited to about Now I Know It and a CV builder for teens that let’s them connect to local businesses and volunteer groups for work experience.

On Sunday night, after developing a prototype and detailed business plan, each team delivered a nerve-racking pitch to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ panel of judges including Pearson’s Stephen Fahey, NESTA’s Jon Kingsbury and Promethean’s Ian Curtis.

The winner was the excellent Night Zookeeper which is a creative environment for kids to share art and literacy. Well done to them!

These kinds of events are excellent for educators and developers to come up with new and exciting ideas together and also make them happen. I’m really looking forward to seeing which of the products make it further than this prototype stage!

TEDx London Education Revolution Photographs

Kristian — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:06:43 +0000

Below is a gallery of photographs I took during the event. They’re all released under Creative Commons license. See details in the bottom. Larger versions of images are available upon request.

Girly Girls and Macho Men at Billericay School

Kristian — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:47:16 +0000

Film about the Girly Girls and Macho Men project with Billericay School. continue...

Anti Bullying Videos by Pupils in West Essex CSS

Kristian — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:06:59 +0000

We’ve worked with West Essex CSS (Children Support Services) in Harlow, Essex for the past two, three years. Often with photography and video based projects we’re limited to what we can share online (due to child protection issues) but these animations are perfect for sharing. Although we were limited with the time we had to work with the pupils, they were able to produce some high quality animation work. The theme was bullying and these mix media animations are the pupils take on the subject. Hope you enjoy they them and leave a comment as an encouragement to the kids!

Social Network – Cyber Bullying

Robot Bully

Armadillo

Coming Soon: TEDx Education Revolution

Kristian — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:33:05 +0000

Suklaa are very excited to be working with TEDx London to create an ‘Education Revolution’ which will be held at the Roundhouse in London on Saturday 17th September. Sir Ken Robinson’s latest TED talk was the inspiration for the event and he is contributing live from LA. We have an amazing line up of speakers and entertainment. Darina is working, alongside Claudia Barwell, as an education advisor. The last few tickets are available here: www.tedxlondon.com

If you’d like to keep up to date on the event and other projects we’re working on, please signup to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iO6m

Girly Girls and Macho Men

Kristian — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:29:29 +0000

Project Title: ‘Girly Girls and Macho Men’
School: The Billericay School, Essex
Funding/Organisation: Royal Opera House Creative Partnerships
 Suklaa Role: Project Manager/ Creative Practitioner/ Documentation
Description:  This gender intervention project was designed as creative approach to tackling a real issue within the school. Staff noticed that certain groups of both boys and girls were not achieving what they were capable of. When interviewed the groups of girls told us they found it difficult to think of people they are inspired by. This sent alarm bells ringing! We must find inspirational women for the young people to engage with! This project is completely collaborative and is co-designed by young people, staff and creative practitioners who are unpicking gender stereotypes and issues of masculinity and femininity. The girls project was launched when the girls were picked up in limos and driven to a country house to look at how women are portrayed in the media and explore their intelligences. The boys launched in West Ham United Football Club where they toured the stadium and found out about the multiple roles men play within the business. This aspirational project will link with various businesses and professionals from multiple industries. We don’t know quite what the outcomes will be but hope the girls who design, organise and host a conference full of talks by inspirational women and the boys will go on to write, produce and star in a piece of theatre that explores what it means to be a man. Watch this space for updates!

Briary Primary Podcasts

Kristian — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:49:24 +0000

The following videos were made by teachers and teaching assistants at Briary Primary School in Kent, UK. They were made in under an hour in an attempt to learn how to plan, film and edit videos quickly. Most of the participants had never edited videos before. We think the results are great- and they told us they’d be very happy making podcasts with their students now!

This project was part of the Future Creative managed Creative Partnerships Change School Programme.

How to use Kodak Zi8 cameras.

Click here to watch: http://suklaa.s3.amazonaws.com/perm/how-to-use-kodak-zi8.m4v.

Review of our experiences in out ICT Twilights.

Click here to watch: http://suklaa.s3.amazonaws.com/perm/teachers-experiences-of-ict-training.m4v.

Learn connective words *AND* how to wash your hands!

Click here to watch: Connective words plus how to wash your hands.

How to tie your shoe laces

Click here to watch: How to tie your shoe laces.

Simple Multiplication

Click here to watch: Simple Multiplication.

Quick intro to speed stacking

Click here to watch: Speed Stacking

How to use a badge maker

Click here to watch: How To Make Badges

Use clay, make a thumb pot.

Click here to watch: Thumb Pot Video

More coming later this week!

Performance Photographs of Jia-Yu Corti

Kristian — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:21:08 +0000

Photographs of dancer Jia-Yu Corti’s performance for use in promotional material.

Chalkwell Hall Get Digital!

Kristian — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:16:15 +0000

We had a fantastic beginning for the school year in Chalkwell Hall Junior school in Southend, Essex. We were asked to plan and deliver an INSET day for all of the 28 teachers in the school. The day was a mix of talking about some Internet based tools that teachers can use to engage kids as well hands-on learning about taking better photographs and producing their own podcasts.

Our main premise for the day was that anything we’d do, the teachers could take to their classroom and use with the pupils straight away. With the podcasts we asked them to introduce a subject to the pupils that would be new to them this year. Although we only had fairly little time for this, 3 hours or so, all the groups of teachers were able to write their scripts, plan their shoots, film and edit by the time the day was over. Great success.

Here’s some of the web 2.0 tools I recommended for the teachers to have a look at:

Flockdraw.com. Collaborative drawing space where many students can get involved at the same time. I see this working like the game where you ask a class of pupils to form a a shape in the hall and no one can say a word. In the same way you could ask the kids to illustrate things together as a group without being able to talk to each other.

quietube.com is a simple website where you input the address of a YouTube video and it then shows you that video on a very plain back ground, without all the comments that you might not want to show a room full of 8 year-olds. Unfortunately, it still requires you school to have access to YouTube but I think it’s just a matter of time when that possible in most schools.

buildyourwildself.com. Here you can make an avatar of yourself using parts of different animals. This could work nicely as a starting point for story writing in English lessons.

wallwisher.com is kind of a collaborative noticeboard. It allows you to create your own noticeboard where the kids can then post links, embed videos and photo and write notes. Could be used for collecting research results from kids or giving out homework. Very versatile.

Similar to above is spaaze.com which I found out about after our session at Chalkwell Hall. It’s similar but first of all isn’t Flash so it works on an iPad but also has a lot nicer design. You should check them out, too!

xtranormal.com again this would be fantastic for, say, an English lesson. What’s better than bringing your stories alive with animated characters? This simple to use tool allows you to do just that. All you need is your script and you’ve got an animation ready in less than 5 minutes.

To find out more about the INSET days we can deliver, check out our CPD section!

Here’s a few photos from the day:

Leadership Training Day

Kristian — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:19:36 +0000

Project Title: Leadership and Creative Collaboration
School: Gable Hall Performing Arts College
Funding/Organisation: Gable Hall School
 Suklaa Role: Darina from Suklaa collaborated with Claudia Barwell to design and deliver this work.
Description:  Claudia Barwell and myself were briefed by Corinne Franceschi, Deputy Head Teacher at Gable Hall School to design a day for the newly appointed Student Executive to help them become good leaders. During the packed day we considered each team member’s individual skills and talents; we ran activities that explored multiple intelligences; we looked at making change happen; we worked with ideas generation and how to host successful meetings; we helped the students pitch ideas to senior staff members. We hope this day is the start of a longer relationship with this core team of students- where we help them make change happen within their school community and beyond.

Some quotes from the participants:

I think it was good how we got to learn everyone’s strengths and weaknesses so that we can now give people tasks to work to their advantages and have people to help with their problems. It was a great day.

I’ve learnt actual life skills that I can apply in real life situations. I learnt how to handle a meeting situation and learnt a lot about myself.

We’ve discovered who we are and our strengths and weaknesses. I feel empowered to make change and don’t feel like I’m being babied anymore. I feel like my ideas are accepted and respected. Thank you so much.

If we did what we did today in year 7, we would have been a much closer group of people so much earlier on. Boundaries have been broken down, judgements of people and judgements of ourselves. Definitely an exercise everyone should have the opportunity to take part in.

If you can change 26 attitudes in a day; then if we did this with everyone, you can change everything – drastically. Everyone should do it.