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Crabble Mill Year 5 Writing Project

Crabble Mill Project
One hundred and thirty pupils from twenty-six Kent primary schools took part in the Crabble Mill Writing Project in October 2007. The mill is a delightful living museum in Dover which became the inspiration and source of research material for this innovative broadband communications project.

Planned and managed by Advisory Service Kent staff, Leading ICT Teachers and South-East Grid for Learning Project Officers the project involved pupils using a wide range of web based technologies to support story writing. Applications used included video conferencing, blogging, Podcasting and ?On-line? Publishing.
Prior to the project commencing all schools forwarded their pupil?s reading, speaking and listening and writing levels (September 2007) to the project team together with details about ICT applications and software used to support the teaching of Literacy. Shortly after returning the documentation the teachers together with their group of six pupils visited Crabble Corn Mill, Dover to take part in an Activity Day. During the day the children were set a range of problems to find out what happened to the two young boys who died working in the Mill and met the project author Stewart Ross.

Following the visit the pupils were set the challenge to write and publish on ?Making the News? a story about what happened to the young boys. To support planning and writing their stories the pupils used ICT to:

Videoconferencing ? FlashMeeting
  • Interview and ask Ian Coulson (ASK History Advisor) about working conditions in the Mill during the nineteenth century
  • Interview annd ask Stewart Ross (Project Author) about effective ways to start a story and provide additional information to the reader
  • Playback and review the answers and suggestions from these sessions
Project Microsite ?Blog?
  • Send questions about and share extracts from their writing with the Project Author
  • Receive feedback about their work from pupils in other schools
  • Obtain photographs and web resources to support planning and writing their stories
Podcasting using Audacity
  • Record episodes (chapters) to improve punctuation, add description and ensure events were correctly sequenced
  • Easily share their work (using an RSS feed) with pupils in other project schools

The project commenced on October 17th and concluded on November 20th 2007 when the staff together with their pupils re-visited the Mill to read and share their work with other project schools. During this four week period over 140 questions were published by the children on the project ?blog? and groups of children from all the schools took part in over fourteen hours of video conferencing with the Project Author and Ian Coulson. Resulting from these activities 140 stories have been published on the ?Making the News? web-site. A figure the Project Team confidently believe will rise to 160 once pupils work has been submitted by the remaining schools.

Philip Bracegirdle
ASK (Kent) Hands on Support Consultant
December 2007

Click here to visit the Crabble Mill microsite...Click here to visit the Crabble Mill Making the News site with over 140 entries...Report downloads

Crabble Mill video conferencingCrabble Mill Project Boys at Work

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