August was a strange month for us. The
combination of needing a holiday and getting all the prep work done
for the new academic year kept my head
spinning.We set out with grand plans for the New A Levels and have achieved most of these. We decided that we should create a 'pathfinder' or suggested scheme of work for three exam boards: AQA, OCR and WJEC. With the help of Tina Dixon, Jeremy Orlebar and Caroiline Bagshaw we now have a year planned out for all three. We will complete our planning for A2 as soon as possible.
The purpose of publishing our 'pathfinders' is not to encourage people to follow them exclusively but to use them as a guide to adapting your own with confidence. Clearly a scheme of work should be tailored to the context in which it will be employed. Equally, examiners and moderators will not be impressed by coursework and exam responses which are repeated over and over again; this is one of the downsides to sharing schemes and approaches.
We haven't written the pathfinders in great detail. We do, however, intend to develop them, taking on board your ideas and experiences so that they get better and better.
We are delighted that Rod Munday, the author of the Video Games section on the site, has now completed a new area to help us all understand The Internet and The World Wide Web.
In conjunction with this, we have just received the final part of Sue Crawte's series of tutorials on building a website using Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver is a web design software application used widely across the industry. Sue's tutorials should allow us to experiment with web design as part of our teaching and provide further insight into the analysis of websites as we begin to understand how they are constructed.
Jeremy Orlebar has been working hard on our new Quiz Shows area. We now have some introductory copy and some exemplar video footage that you can explore with your classes. In the next few days, a mini-scheme of work will appear to help guide you through this topic.
Looking to the future, we will be developing a Film Studies area with the help of Vivienne Clark. This should be of use both to Film Studies and the Moving Image aspects of Media Studies.
With the help of Shirley Bierman, Mediaedu will begin to offer support to those teaching and studying the OCR Nationals at Level 2 and Level 3. We are still searching for some subject leaders to advise us on the BTEC qualifications. For the time being, this area of the site will be on hold.
Equally, we still have a few gaps on the site. We will be looking to complete the CD & DVD Design and Analysis areas this year. If you have a successful and engaging unit covering this aspect of production and analysis, please get in touch.
During the year we hope to begin to create some in-house pathfinders for the new GCSE courses. We may also develop a site for the Creative and Media Diploma.
There are other plans afoot too. Edusites Ltd, the company which owns Mediaedu.co.uk, will be building an English site to support staff and students. The site will be called Englishedu.co.uk and is already beginning to take shape.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting the site last year. We hope that 2009 will be an exciting one.
Kind regards,
Richard Gent - Edusites Ltd
[e] richardgent@mac.com
Updates for August 2008