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Following the success of Road Safety Week, Brake, the national road safety charity, have produced free teaching resources to help teachers run life-saving road safety lessons.

Road Safety Week was co-ordinated by Brake and supported by ASDA, Direct Line and Green Flag Motoring Assistance. Thousands of schools and colleges got involved in the Week by running road safety lessons, assemblies, displaying posters and distributing literature to pupils and parents.

The interactive PowerPoint presentations include information on the extent of road death and injury among teenagers, discussion points on risk-taking, and information on what action teenagers can take to reduce their chances of being hurt on roads – particularly as passengers and drivers. Brake’s online action pack also includes background road safety information for teachers, lesson and activity ideas, a resources catalogue, and a form to order free road safety posters.

To access the resources please follow this link.

Young People’s Climate Change Messages project - new video trailer available. The events at Millennium point (Jan 18th) and Bishops Wood (23rd) are now full but there are plenty of spaces at the Telford, Stafford and Coventry venues.

Digitalbrain are pleased to announce that the new homepage and modernised icons have been released.

Contemporary Homepage
This new page frame has been created as a companion to the new calendar and e-mail functionality and it brings the same modern look and feel of these applications to individual users’ homepages. This page contains a number of features above and beyond the current personal homepage. These are: the ability to pull-through a news feed from your school or an RSS feed from your favourite site, a customisable short cuts section and scroll bars for the calendar and discussion pull-through.

All the content you currently have in your homepage will be retained when you move over to the new homepage, so don’t worry about having to start your page from scratch.  Please see here <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/help/helpfiles/Activating%20the%20new%20homepage.pdf>  to view a guide to activating your new homepage. You may find the new features of this homepage look even better in a full width portal, you can try this out by selecting “variable width” from the “view” menu.

Modernised Icon Set
In line with the enhancements to the homepage and calendar we have released a new icon set for all pages, listings and toolbars throughout the portal. These new icons are an evolution of the ones you will be familiar with but if you want to see a like-for-like replacement list for all icons this can be found on our updates site. <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/updates/icons/index.htm>

One important change to note is the replacement of the yellow ’smiley face’, as this has been changed for accounts, homepages and group memberships. You will now find accounts and the ‘my homepage’ link represented by a yellow ‘person’. Group memberships will be represented by the same icon but in green.
We hope that you like these new additions to the site and welcome any feedback you have on them.

If you have any questions or queries regarding this release, or any other matter relating to Learning Manager, please do not hesitate to contact the Digitalbrain Customer Support Team. You can also check updates.digitalbrain.com <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/>  where regular updates are posted.

Taken from ‘Ignite’ the monthly bulletin from Promethean:

Activprimary is this month’s hot topic. Our award winning software can now be used on any make of interactive whiteboard. It is available now, with a special introductory price of £49 (SRP £249) until the end of January 2007

The following letter was sent out to all headteachers in Shropshire Secondary schools.

14-19 Functional skills event:
Launch of functional skills working groups
25 January 2007
Albrighton Hall Hotel - Course Code:  607108C

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The 2007 updates for the on-screen test should have made their way to your school by now, after installing the new tests on the network you will notice that the toolkit now contains a ‘control’ application. The applications from previous years are still there and the familiarisation test works in the same way as the 2006 did.

If you haven’t got the updates on your machines yet it would be worthwhile asking your network manager to install them when they get a chance.

Update:
I have just ran through the pupil familiarisation materials for 2007 and they are identical to the 2006 materials apart from an extra task - a control system.

I have noticed lots of Shropshire blogs now are using the Freshy theme, the theme can be customised quite a lot and has a fresh clean look and feel.  One of the advanced options allows you to select from a set of banners or enter the url of your own, the only problem is that it doesn’t tell you how big the image should be.

The admin at Barrow has just done the calculations and informs me it is 780 x 95 pixels, it would be great if that information had been included in the theme, maybe I can find a way to edit the page…

Even if you don’t have an Activ board, you can view and use flipcharts created with the Activ software by downloading the Activ flipchart viewer. It offers limited functionality, but for the times when you find the perfect resource, but in the wrong format, it could be very useful indeed!|
 http://www.mypromethean.com/uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.1582

This then gives you access to flipcharts from, for example, http://www,prometheanplanet.com

Last week I attended a very thought-provoking e-safety conference organised by WMNet. All four speakers reinforced the same messages, which I have summarised here:

• Most importantly - this is not just an ICT issue - technology is part of the children’s everyday culture and we ignore it at our peril.
• Schools have a duty of care inside schools and should not ignore children’s wellbeing outside school.
• Education is the key – we need to help children take control and manage their e-safety themselves.
• We need to understand this new culture and we need to consult with the children in order that anything we do is relevant to them and owned by them.

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o    Keynote and workshop sessions by Ewan McIntosh (Learning & Teaching Scotland)
o    Visits to “live” good practice classroom demonstrations at nearby schools
o    Case study “at our school” sessions
o    Software and content exhibition and special deals
o    Local Authority strategy update
o    Excellent venue and food

Full day price: £120 per delegate

This is a conference for primary, special and secondary colleagues including governors, about learning and teaching using ICT

Reserve this date NOW - better still, register to guarantee your place: course code 72325C via Shropshire EMS Online CPD, email cpd@shropshire-cc.gov.uk or tel 01743 254522.