Anna Foreman, Personalised Learning Consultant, reviews last year’s ICT competitions.

A review of the year so far…

This year has seen many Oxfordshire schools taking part in the competitions organised by the Oxfordshire ICT team.   Autumn term 2006 saw some fantastic entries for the Foundation stage Christmas Card Competition and the ever famous GRAFTA Awards took place with winning entries displaying a range of movie making styles and techniques.  To celebrate National Poetry Day children across schools in Oxfordshire entered their own poems inspired by the theme ‘Identity,’ a theme that we felt was challenging!  Also in the Autumn term schools took part in the annual Maths Challenge which made use of Digitalbrain.  The winners of the competition had a fantastic time touring the Heyford Hill Sainsbury’s store and then shopping for a healthy lunch to take back to share with their class. A number of primary schools were also given the opportunity to take part in a Lego league competition which was thoroughly enjoyed by all that took part (including the judges!)
To celebrate World Book Day 2007 we received many entries for the Design a Book Cover competition, which was open to KS1, 2 and 3.  After much deliberating the team were able to decide on the winning entries.

Due to a disappointing number and standard of entries in KS3, we felt that we were only able to award one overall winner and several entries as Highly Commended.

The members of the ICT Advisory Team and Cricket Road consultants have been busy collecting Tesco “Computers for Schools” vouchers in order to once again sponsor a competition, for which the prize was our entire stack of vouchers. The competition was to send a digital photograph representing “Spring in our School”. We had a great many great entries that we all enjoyed viewing.

Forthcoming Competitions

This term will see the return of the Foundation Stage Design a Postcard competition, which will run during May and June.  All the pupils need to do is to use ICT to create an illustration representing this year’s theme ‘Summer Holidays’, which could be made into a postcard.   The prize for this competition will be a Talking Photograph Album for the school.

This year’s annual GRAFTA competition, where budding future Spielberg’s can produce their own movies, will now be held in the summer term.  Prizes for this year’s winners are better than ever - one of the brand new Digitalblue Movie Cameras with the flip-out LCD screen for their school, as well as the opportunity to attend a GRAFTA award ceremony which will include the screening of the winning films.  Teachers may be interested in attending a course running this summer term on Monday 5^th June which will outline ‘How to win the GRAFTAs.’ Entries are open to all pupils in KS1-4.  Once again we look forward to viewing your entries very soon.

We will also be running a Newsday Competition which will take place on Wednesday 13 June. Pupils who participate will receive a number of e-mail messages during the morning describing an incident similar to reports which might come in to a news desk from reporters in the field. Pupils will need to use the information they receive to produce a written news report describing and explaining the incident as if it was a report in an evening newspaper.  Winning reports will be published on the ICT web site and the overall winner will receive one of the new Digitalblue Movie Cameras with the flip-out LCD screen for their school.

During the Autumn Term 2007 there will be more of the same competitions. If you have not entered before this could now be your chance to make your make your mark as an Oxfordshire ICT competition winner.  You can look forward to entering the Foundation Stage Design a Christmas Card competition for which the prizes will be a set of Christmas cards to give to your friends and family with your own design.  You could also be writing and entering your own poems to link with the annual National Poetry Day competition which takes place on Thursday 4^th October, with this year’s theme being ‘Dream.’

We also plan to run the very successful Maths Challenge and Lego Competition again.  Further details of these will be announced nearer the time.

A timetable of forthcoming events:

Once again, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Oxfordshire schools for the time and effort you have put into entering the competitions and we continue to look forward to future entries.