I'm sitting in work (I know that it is supposed to be a holiday), listening to Radio 4 as I scan in the Science Department's assignments and I have just listened to a programme about Minecraft.  I was struck by the evangelical way that people feel about it; the mother with a home-schooled Autistic son who feels that it is allowing him to develop life skills and be less isolated; the medic who is concerned about addiction and displacement and the Danish (Were they Danish?) cartographers who created a country only to find it was impossible to police.  It is well worth a listen if you have five minutes. Should parents ever worry about Minecraft?  Mincraft - More than a Game
I have to admit, I still don't get it, but......

Liz 

Update from St. Cenydd

Well the camera club is finally up and running.  Using a grant from the National Lottery we purchased some Digital SLRs with a variety of lenses, lighting equipment and books.  The club is for year 10 pupils at the moment because most there are already clubs for lower school pupils and year 11, 12 and 13 are examination classes.

The club was advertised in the school's newsletter and I was initially expecting it to attract less academic pupils and pupils with a stronger interest in more vocational studies.  What has surprised me is that it has actually attracted the top achievers in the year group and just one boy.

Our blog can be found at http://stcenyddcameraclub.blogspot.co.uk/ although the only page that we are making any good use of is http://stcenyddcameraclub.blogspot.co.uk/p/blog-page.html which is a series of links to YouTube videos to help teach some important fundamentals of photography along with some projects that are quite fun.  It's already in need of an overhaul as the page on famous photographers is of no interest to the group and will probably need to go.  We're currently discussing the possibility of setting up our own YouTube channel and replacing the short videos with our own.

While the digital camera club is my main project we just started teaching Scratch programming to our year 7 and 8 classes.  It has proved so popular that our ICT suites are now full at lunchtime !!  This was completely unexpected but really pleasing to see how engaged the pupils are, they're really keeping us on our toes but they are keen to teach each other so I can see us making use of a lot of flip learning.

Finally our HWB+ project looks likely to start this summer.  We know how important and how useful the platform will be for us, we're just waiting for our new Head Teacher to attend a strategic briefing on it.