Geographical Association

Stanchester Community School is an 11-16 rural comprehensive in South Somerset. On roll there are currently 1070 students. The Geography team consists of: Melissa Gardner (Head of Department), Sally Heppenstall (Head of Year) and Sarah Todd (Advanced Skills Teacher and Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator).

The Department aims are to motivate and enthuse all students in Geography. Developing successful learners is our most important mission; we achieve this by all being a little bit eccentric; innovative devotees of Geography; staying human; keen to adopt, adapt and embed ICT (including digital cameras; video; music; interactive whiteboard; virtual fieldtrips; all supported by a range software); whilst relishing the opportunities the learning to learn strategies have given us to produce creative and fun lessons. Consequently at Stanchester ‘Geography is fun’ and has a very high profile within the school.

We are a forward thinking Department and have embraced recent national strategies including: Assessment for Learning; Thinking Skills; Learning to Learn (through the University of the First Age), Literacy and Numeracy.

Being an innovative and collaborative Department, by 2004 we had produced a vast quantity of digital teaching resources. However, although shared, these resources were randomly filed due to the rapid and organic development of these materials, our ideas and government strategies. So that was our problem... we hoped the intranet would be the solution.

The philosophy of our department is beyond that of the whole school regarding ICT. Prior to this project we had already tried to launch a website and were blocked by the lack of technical support and a multitude of constraints including no vision to develop a Virtual Learning Environment. We were left wondering how we could host the website and what was the best software to design it. We chose FrontPage as it was already available on the school network, and the staff were already familiar with Microsoft Office Products.

Added to this was the problem that many of the digital resources we had created such as PowerPoint slideshows had numerous images, which were not all sourced and copyright free. Therefore launching our site onto an extranet and allowing access to students and parents was going to be an ethical and legal issue.

Time, as always was a threat to our intranet project, augmented by the lack of a department technician to upload, categorise and update the many resources we had accumulated.

Due to the dynamic nature of the department, categorising and refining our resources has led to the enhancement, review and creation of more innovative learning experiences and teaching materials. However despite this positive outcome it was a highly time consuming activity that will need to be eternally reviewed.

At Stanchester we split our delivered curriculum between KS3 and KS4. Each key stage is then broken down into years, and then into half termly, specifically focused, teaching units (modules of work). We call this our ‘overview’, and from this we develop all our schemes of work and resources.

Our primary aim was to collate and manipulate these resources so they could be loaded onto the intranet, and available on a central area making them easily accessible to all the team. This would lead to continuity and consistency across the department, whatever its personnel.

Additionally we needed to include department policies and procedures (handbook), the department development plan, level descriptors, assessment criteria and exam analysis. This would ensure the administration of the department would be effective, consistent and permanently maintained to an exceptional standard.

Bearing all of this in mind, we drafted the first outline of our intranet:

Our first steps to planning links and pages - it is a dynamic and developing resource

Our intranet homepage

The main line page within our intranet

We still have not got a Virtual Learning Environment at Stanchester School. This makes the accessibility for students, and parents at this time limited. Our hope is that independent and personalised learning projects for students will be electronically available for students 24/7 on an extranet. However, the issue of where to host it remains unresolved, and so the project cannot currently progress to this next, and desired stage.

This does not prevent the development of this idea, and we have set ourselves the target of all Year 7 homework being project based and digitally produced so it can be uploaded at a future time when the opportunity arrives.

We would like to thank Peter Elmy, our Curriculum Deputy Head, for his support and encouragement throughout this project. Without the DfES and the GA funding we would not be in the comfortable position of having the Department resources and documentation in such good order.

Melissa Gardner, Sally Heppenstall and Sarah Todd
July 2005