Mr Miles' Blog - A Gateway to digital creation

This time of year is always an exciting one for teachers. We see our students flourish and experiment with tools and skills learnt across the Autumn term. Digital skills are certainly put to the test here as we have had a focus on creativity over the last half term.

Our Year 5 and 6’s are studying French cinematography. They will be replicating their own mini-films that focus on something off-centre, using technology as a way to capture and analyse their own thoughts. They have also thrown themselves into many different projects for our Take One Picture initiative including Stop Motion, photo collages and green screening, but I won’t spoil anymore - you will have to see it for yourselves. Year 4 have been creating their own wonderful coded imagery using Scratch. Watch out Elon! Similarly, Year 4 have planned their own light show extravaganza for Take One Picture - and that’s all you will receive from me on that!

Lower School have been creating all kinds of interesting imagery in their Computing lessons. Year 3 have been experimenting with Google drawings and Google slides to create their own Greek temples and turn themselves into Greek warriors. As if they weren’t fearsome enough!

Other classes had some Year 3 experts in to support them in creating their own tigers on Google drawings. We were already seeing budding digital artists.

Furthermore, all of our staff have been sharing tips and tricks to smart working using technology. Ctrl + D is the bookmarking shortcut on chromebooks. This is a small function with a huge impact. It allows everyone to personalise their own working system. We can pull up registers, lessons or assessment tools at the push of a button. It allows us to personalise our Chrome accounts to work the way that we organise ourselves and it’s well worth taking time to become more efficient so our energy can be better used in our children’s education directly. This is one simple focus that has started to trickle down quite naturally to our children’s way of working. Bookmarked working documents are already making an appearance on students’ profiles, alongside favoured tools for use in the classroom.

These digital artistic skills are so important to foster and develop as we live in such a world of vibrant media, that there is a huge demand for quality work. Our Gateway children are a talented bunch, and it gives our staff great pleasure in the joy simple artistic outputs can bring.

Mr Miles

Head of Digital, Head of Lower Prep, Year 3 Class Teacher