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ICT

Polam Hall Junior School wins first prize for ICT

We are delighted to announce that a group of our Year 6 girls were first nominated and then went on to win 1st prize for their multimedia presentation about Darlington in the Northern Grid ICT in Education Primary Awards 2010.

The girls’ entry entitled ‘The Living Wall’ was the judges’ favourite in the category for ‘Promotion of the Region’.

Well done to the girls who have also won digital equipment and software for our school too.

This is a wonderful achievement and we are all very proud of them!

Let's tell you about how we did it!

Firstly, all the girls in Years 5 and 6 took part in a local arts competition entitled ‘Our Heritage Matters’.

An exhibition to celebrate the occasion was held at Polam Hall School. The children discussed how the title could include so manydifferent things; the immediate local area, Darlington itself, County Durham and beyond! They chose to spotlight their town of Darlington and particularly the importance of their Quaker heritage.

The children talked about many other things that they had seen or knew about Darlington and that had influenced and benefitted others too.

Of course, train transport and the birth and rapid spread of the railways fascinated them and they could only guess how much this had opened up a wealth of sights and sounds and ‘other worlds’ for people, who had perhaps, spent the greater part of their lives in just one place!

They realized early on in their research that this famous legacy might not have had the opportunity to flourish if it hadn’t been for some very far-seeing, creative and inventive people from the past who were able to find the means to realize their dreams.

Multimedia presentations are an integral part of our Year 6 scheme of work and effectively challenge the children to develop their ICT skills even further, as they explore a wide range of ideas and options in order to enable them to envisage and produce their own projects, to an increasingly high standard.

The children have made a special multimedia presentation about how they created their art project – a large sculpture using wire and bricks about Darlington’s heritage with the title ‘The Living Wall’.

ICT was used profusely to construct and facilitate creative responses; written thoughts from pupils in Year 5 and Year 6 were adapted by a team of children to generate the script, as well as enabling them to produce a record of the processes they had embarked on that reflected the theme.

The children composed the lively musical soundtrack on the computer using eJay DJ Mix Station software. They began taking short basic samples of individual sounds and then built them up and layered them into full and complex multi-track formats to enhance the visuals on screen.

The girls produced all the different elements of sound and vision that were put together to make this film and they used a range of ICT skills and resources to compile, select and edit the final completed version.

It has been wonderful opportunity to find out more about our local region and enabled children to see that they can use ICT in an enjoyable and educationally constructive way to promote the message that ‘Our Heritage Matters’, especially as it is their responsibility to be the guardians of this important and vital legacy in the future!