9min 49sec clip - How 2 Million Children Are Fed Daily By The World’s Biggest Free School Meal Provider

11min clip - Getting Ready For School (1969)

34sec clip - How teachers expect us to exit a school during a fire

foound via boingboing

2min 12sec clip - Dr. Quentin J. Lee, Alabama principal, sings a rap song about Covid to MC #Hammer's classic hit of "Can't Touch This."

found via a boingboing email

Introducing Earth school

text from youtube "Announcing the launch of Earth School, a 30 day interactive adventure for students around the world to celebrate, explore, and connect with nature. Get started: https://bit.ly/3eHexfE

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In response to the COVID-19 crisis, an unprecedented coalition has come together to launch Earth School, which provides free, high-quality educational content to help students, parents, and teachers around the world who are currently at home. Initiated by UNEP and TED-Ed in collaboration with many incredible partners (see below), Earth School brings together a 30-day adventure through the natural world.

Collaborating Organizations:
A range of collaborating organizations have supported this initiative through content, expertise, and promotion. They include: BBC Ideas, Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Conservation International, CEE, Earth Day Network, Earth Challenge 2020, Environment Online (ENO), GeSI, International Olympic Committee, IUCN, Institute for Planetary Security, Junior Achievement, Learning in Nature, LittleScribe, Minecraft, National Geographic Society, Ocean Wise, Only One, Royal Geographic Society, SciStarter, Sitra, TAT, The Nature Conservancy, UN Convention on Biodiversity, UN SDSN / TRENDS, UN Technology Innovation Lab, UNCCD, UNDP, UNESCO, UNFCCC, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, University of Pennsylvania, Vult Labs, World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM), Wild Immersion and WWF.

Quest Curators:
Dozens of quest curation volunteers came forward from around the globe to contribute time, energy, and expertise to Earth School: Kathleen Usher, Camilla Leathisia Kemdji, Gregor Reisch, Alison Lowndes, Koko Warner, Richard Matthew, Steve Davis, Bill Tomlinson, Jason Switzer, Sai Anirudh Grandhi, Claudia ten Have, Juli Voss, Kathryn Sforcina, Reuben Sessa, Jessie Oliver, Hannah Moosa, Kate Ireland, Xi Marquez, Cecily Yip Chantal Robichaud, Carina Mutschele, Petter Malvik, Thierry Lucas, Lynsey Grosfield, Michal Nachmany, Pinja Sipari, Frank Sperling, Joanna Post, Lauren Weatherdon, Holly Griffin, Michael Weisberg, Essi Aarnio-Linnanvuori, Nik Hagelberg, Magdalena Noszczyk, Rachael Joakim, Terry Gunning, Charles Avis, Julie Duffus, Tim Christophersen, Gabriel Labatte, Musonda Mumba, Paivi Kosunen, Jessica Espey, Mika Vanhanen, Gaye Amus, Julie Kapuvari, Nicolas Cisneros, Anne Bowser, Jessie Oliver, Colin Bangay, Mary Ford, Annie Virnig, Naomi Kingston, Steven Ramage, Corrado Topi, Mikko Halonen, Paivi Kosunen, Janet Salem, Maria Cristina Bueti, Jenny Atkinson, Sadie Stephens, Kelly Ann Collins, Neha Raghav, Nikolas Hagelberg, Madhavi Joshi, Steph Pietras, and Malm Nordlund."

1min @wef clip - this is why #Finland has some of the best schools in the world

#Prayer Spaces in #Schools

10 useful links (no. 2) prayer, Lent 2015, soundbox, church leadership, xmas resources, euro stats, @c_of_e talent pool report

prayer spaces in schools website - with stories, suggestions and guidance

christmas prayer spaces, by Sharon Ross Ensor & Anna Davis found via Steve Kersys

do 40 acts together for 2015 lent - provides you with online and printable resources to guide you through a generous Lent as a community, and for 2015 there is a new student resource

a minimalist, beautiful and fun soundbox - go to the site and press different letter keys for different sounds - found via reddit user 7ang33k

Senior Church Leadership A Resource for Reflection - found via Thinking Anglicans 

more than a manger - Christian Aid downloadable resource explores how Jesus’ miraculous birth challenged people’s expectations

european statistics - and the help page - found via @EU_Eurostat

milton jones (uk 1 liner comedian) on christmas - I rather like this

CofE's talent pool report - go here to see my summary

All I Want For Christmas Is You - Christmas Charity Single - Mariah Carey - Out of the Blue - found via @His_Grace





10 Useful Links posts 

No.'s 1, 2

10 tips for a new approach to school and education

taken and summarised from Geetha Narayanan (2007): A Dangerous but Powerful Idea on Project Vision in India 

1)  the first component is Community Learning Centres in slums (often not much more than a room) where learning can be integrated into the life and needs of a community and whose key goal is transformation through developing capacity to transform oneself and one’s life;

2) the second component is hubs or Idea-Media Centres for leaning which is specialised and which have facilities and resources that can be shared with many slum communities and which can serve several purposes in different ways - as people use the resources to think, create, design and invent 

3) the 3rd component is having opportunities for people to go on an Expedition - to seek and work through physically challenging and emotionally satisfying challenges away from the slum

4) the 4th component is networking that integrates the Community members with each other and with the outside world

5) with all of these 4 components take an approach where learning is design and project based and where the projects are not fixed but emerge from dialogue and constant negotiation with the community and students

6) also embrace the core value of slowness through 3 layers – 1) looking and listening, 2) exploring and thinking, 3) making and being (the layers are not discrete, linear or sequential)

7) embrace unity and equality within the learning community using large blocks of time and grouping learners in collaborative, vertical hetrogeneous teams

8) have centre facilitators who can help learners frame their learning plan, research the topic and make decisions on which medium can demonstrate and showcase their learning

9) make learning materials using local content that can be re-used and produced within the community at low cost

10) focus learning on transformation of the self and awakening of the mind rather than on the transfer of knowledge and the acquisition of skills

do schools kill creativity - sir ken robinson - TED talk

in summary ....

by way of introduction

- the themes running through the conference have been variety and range of human creativity and that that means we don't know how the future may play out

- everybody has an interest in education partly because its meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.  and how do we educate people who are at school now who will retire in 60 or so years (especially given we can barely successfully predict what the world will look like in 5 years)

- all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly - so lets talk about education and creativity and how creativity is now as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status. 

so .....

 - kids will take a chance, if they don't know they will have a go because they are not frightened of being wrong.  if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. 

- yet that is how we run our companies, and national education systems like this - we stigmatize mistakes - and so the result is we're educating people out of their creative capacities.  

- we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it. 

- every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects - at the top is mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Within the arts normally art and music have a higher status than drama and dance.   So nobody on the plant teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. 

- why not? Of course maths is important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. As children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. 

- looking at education as an alien you'd conclude from the output that the whole purpose of public education is to produce university professors - our education systems are predicated on the idea of academic ability - because public systems of education came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

- the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: 1) that the most useful subjects for work are at the top (don’t do art, you’re not going to be an artist); 2) academic ability - because education is a protracted process of university entrance. 

 - the consequence of all this? - many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. 

- and as more and more people get degrees suddenly now you need an MA or a PHD to get a job - academic inflation

what do we know about intelligence?

1) it’s diverse, we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. 

2) it's dynamic, creativity, (the process of having original ideas that have value) often comes through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things

3) it’s distinct. 

it comes to this ....

- our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. 

- we have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. 

- we have to see our creative capacities for the richness they are, and see our children for the hope that they are. 

- our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face the future we may not see but they will - and our job is to help them make something of it.

school portrait

looking back on - advice to yourself then? - looking forward 20 years?
via laughing squid

200 years of church schools

some useful powerpoint and word resources for assemblies plus a bit of the history are on the st edmundsbury & ipswich site

assemblies resources

resources at cowo.culham.ac.uk from the culham institute