Posted by Adrian Cooper on 31 January 2012 | 0 Comments
Many of you will know that Dakota Blue Richards was a pupil
at Newlands until she completed her GCSEs last summer
(gaining 12 passes, mostly A*s, As and Bs) We deliberately
kept very quiet about Dakota’s parallel film and
television career and many of you will have seen the film
version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (published
as Northern Lights in the UK) without realising that Dakota
was playing Lyra, the lead character. Dakota dealt with all the attention and publicity in a very
sensible way and she was able to switch back into being a
normal member of the Newlands community with apparent
ease. I will always remember hearing one conversation
where several girls were discussing what they had done at
the weekend.
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Posted by Adrian Cooper on 11 May 2011 | 1 Comments
Last month I went to the Education show at the NEC in
Birmingham. With the school’s focus on creativity and
its continuing investment in Digital technology in mind, I
was keen to see what new developments there are in software
and hardware to enhance teaching and learning. What I found was very disappointing.
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Posted by Adrian Cooper on 9 March 2011 | 0 Comments
*Does Brain Training Really Work?*
You may have seen the adverts – Helen Mirren playing on
the Wii or Julie Walters having a go at the Nintendo. The
latest buzz about video gaming is that it can help users
protect against memory loss in later life.
These fun and relatively simple to use games - involve
players doing mental arithmetic tasks as well as language
tests and memory puzzles.
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Posted by Adrian Cooper on 11 February 2011 | 1 Comments
One of the main areas of investment at Newlands has been in
‘Industry Standard’ software. It is an important
element of our students’ preparations for their future
lives that they are familiar with the software that they
will encounter in their careers. All our students from
Year 7 upwards are taught how to use Adobe Photoshop for
image manipulation, principally for use in their Art and ICT
work, but often for other subjects too.
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Posted by Adrian Cooper on 11 February 2011 | 1 Comments
The “natural born artist” is a myth. Even the best of
them needed the motivation and desire as well as the
training and time. And even non-visual thinkers can, with
perceptual training techniques, vastly improve their visual
mental skills as well as their hand-eye or digital
abilities.
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Posted by Adrian Cooper on 1 February 2011 | 0 Comments
Can anyone learn how to draw? (and why should they)
The “natural born artist” is a myth. Even the best of
them needed the motivation and desire as well as the
training and time. And even non-visual thinkers can, with
perceptual training techniques, vastly improve their visual
mental skills as well as their hand-eye or digital
abilities.
| Read the full post