coucoucircus.org - Bienvenue This site gives you access to the theme tunes and lyrics of hundreds of French TV programmes, in particular a lot of children's cartoon series.
Flash Video Big Books This is a great site for anyone interested in using story telling as a key component of their courses. Some free stuff but the books you have to buy are pretty cheap and excellent quality. Highly recommended.
Wordle - Create word clouds This is a fantastic little site for anyone wanting to be creative with Language. It creates key word diagrams on any topic in an arty way. It is a great way to introduce a topic or allow kids to create a keyword list to help them prepare for a speaking test
I love this. Creativity lies at the heart of all true learning. Discovering and developing talent can ONLY be done by releasing creativity as this is what makes learning relevant, empowering and FUN.
If you want to understand the essence of what sets us all apart from the animal world it is this. We have the God-given, God-inspired, God-imaged capacity to be a reflection of Him, gloriously, endlessly, dazzingly, majestically CREATIVE!
Most of what passes for education is actually about 'control' of a political class over its subjects for its own ends. Not nice, not pretty, stultifying, enslaving. It is born out of, generally, men's pride that they know best for others. Only God knows this, men don't, especially if they never acknowledge Him in the first place. They never ask Him for wisdom, the source of it all, yet claim to be wise.
Now there is obviously a place for those who have been there, done it, got the t-shirt, passing on wisdom to another generation when that experience helps children to benefit. But for 'benefit, read 'convenience' as the true motive for many educational systems. For example, it would be beneficial to have small class sizes and more individual mentoring. Yet it is inconvenient to truly model this in most schools as it costs too much.
It would be beneficial to build a far more integrated, cross-curricular program of study. Yet the inconvenience of having to abandon the timetabling of subjects in separate rooms with separate teachers usually precludes it. It is also inconvenient as we would have to rebuild most of our schools to allow for the more 'shared spaces' needed. 'Convenience' tends to win out over 'benefit'.
Educational systems find it hard therefore to allow for the 'space' needed for creativity to breathe. They tend to be self-serving, only wanting to perpetuate and remodel what has always been. They are rooted in inertia, in spite of the fact that politicians are ALWAYS trying to change them! This is an odd paradox so aptly coined in the French phrase 'plus ça change' meaning the more things change, the less they change.
For the Hip-Hop kids, they would have been 'educated' in a system that prepared them for jobs which the same system then denied them because the society education serves is itself fundamentally unjust and racist. No wonder we have such a frustrated, rootless, generation of learners emerging amongst the poor and disadvantaged! You cannot hope to model principles of fairness in education if the society it serves is unjust. Raising aspiration at school without allowing for it post-school is a recipe for serious trouble.
Scratch the surface of most educational systems and in spite of the protestations of political leaders who say when wanting our votes that they are all in favour of educational 'meritocracy', they are actually very unwilling in practice to so frame the system to allow for it. The pull of privilege in those who govern tends to claw back the impetus to surrender that privilege.
The greatest educators are the ones who simply serve. Their only motive is to stir and release the talents of their charges. They accept this can be 'messy'. They accept the element of adventure this entails.
Unless we find the breathing space in our educational systems that allow teachers to be like this and children to truly develop their creative thinking, then we will remain nations who are very very poor in our spirits and consequently increasingly poor in our pockets.
At least, that's what I think and as it's my blog I can say it! And you?
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