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Mediaonics at Leasowes Community College
By Mary Ulicsak, Learning Development Manager, Futurelab |
Leasowes Community College is situated in an area that was once the heart of the UK's mechanical engineering industry; major brands and sub-suppliers of the motor industry (Rover, Landrover, Jaguar etc) were located in this region. The reduction in this industry has had an impact on employment and aspiration in the area, and much of the skilled engineering work is no longer seen as the likely employment of the school's students. So to extend the aspirations and skills of the students, the college has adapted the way the National Curriculum is taught. Students cover all the required material in four days, leaving Friday as an open day in which they can cover areas of interest to teachers and students. The timetable has been adjusted so that there are only two 2¼ hour sessions that day.
One of the courses that has been introduced is Mediaonics, which was created by an art and music teacher. During the two years of the course, each Key Stage 4 student builds a multimedia portfolio that is stored as a web page. This acts as an online CV for the students and also gives them experience of building and managing websites. The course explicitly covers:
Motion graphics
Using Photoshop, iMovie, Sound Studio, eJay and Flash, the students create animated graphics to meet a range of uses.
Interactive resources
Using mainly Flash with ActionScript, Photoshop and Logic Audio, the task here is to concieve, design and build interactive activities - generally around learning.
Mediaonics sensory experience
Using a mix of new and traditional technologies, students work in teams to create participatory environments.
Community channels
Using video recording and editing technologies, together with their other skills, the students work to commissions from local organisations to create publicity, information and education materials for live webcasting.
Martin Owen, the Director of Learning at Futurelab, went up in June 2004 to observe how this course was progressing. This year the students were required to make a game for younger students in the community. The practical nature of the task implies there is a sense of audience built into the students' activities. They were explicitly asked to go and work with younger children to discover their learning needs and then devise Macromedia Flash programs for the students.
The session observed was the creation of an abstract music soundtrack for a Macromedia Flash movie. In addition to the practical nature of identifying the learning goal and designing the game, the students were also responsible for all the multimedia aspects. For example, the teacher demonstrated a variety of ways that were available to the students to create abstract sounds - conventional instruments and percussion, a variety of 'found' items such as domestic or industrial use that can generate sounds like vacuum cleaners - and then the students learned how to capture the sounds and manipulate them. The students worked in groups with the teachers, and technicians were available to them as mentors and as technical support, visiting each group in turn and questioning them on their explorations.
Skills developed as part of Mediaonics are integrated into other Friday activities. Another observed lesson was seeing how three students in collaboration with other members of their class produced a three-minute movie depicting key aspects of the plot of Romeo and Juliet. The movie consisted of dialogue-free vignettes linked by animated text, with a contemporary music soundtrack. The students had to select and choreograph key elements of the plot, select which key elements of the text could also illustrate the story and then choose appropriate music to reflect the narrative they were portraying. Therefore they were not only required to analyse the play but reinterpret the drama in other media. Alongside this rich activity they had to engage in all the planning and collaborative activity needed for media production and use their media and ICT skills (recording, videoing, editing, making graphics, editing and digitising sound etc).
This is a complete and integrated attempt to think of a progressive and inclusive curriculum that empowers students to utilise the multimedia capabilities of modern information technologies. It is a good example of how key skill competencies can be developed through school-based activities, and is used as a case study within a project currently being carried out at Futurelab. This work, looking at digital literacies within the I-Curriculum project, is funded by the EU and has partners in Greece, Romania, Germany and Spain. In all these countries there is too often a focus on the operational skills needed to use technology, eg how to make a bulleted list in a word-processed document, add a column in a spreadsheet, or do a search on the internet. As a consequence, one of the projects goals is to develop guidelines for curricula interventions that transform the students' thinking by encouraging them to view technology as a 'taken for granted'.
Links
Leasowes Community College: www.leasowes.dudley.gov.uk
I-Curriculum Project: promitheas.iacm.forth.gr/i-curriculum
July 2004
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