Kids as teachers as marketers
I have taken a real passion for marketing in recent years since working with some of France's top marketers in Paris, way back in 2000. Teaching the Directors of Bulgari, Take2Games, Setec (who built most of La Défense) and Clark (who make green forklift trucks) how to market their products in English got me an insight into an industry that for which I have now got the bug.
I'm really glad to have found at least eight youngsters from East Lothian who, apparently, might want to share this passion. Yesterday I finally met the S6 students from Musselburgh Grammar School and Knox Academy who are going to form the official film crew for SETT The Learning Festival 2006. Much respect to Learning and Teaching Scotland, who could quite easily just have paid for a professional firm to come in and do the job in a clean sweep. Instead of the easy option, LTS have opted to support eight new film-makers and marketers in their filming of one of Europe's biggest educational conferences.
We'll be learning about the different shots, building a story, doing a good recce, making a storyboard, making pre-planned workflows, working out what opportunities might come on the fly, editing... The BBC's film resources on my del.icio.us account have been priceless, and have helped unearth a lot of the things I have only observed or been in front of during my outings on the box. Above all, they will learn how to present something to the world, something they themselves don't understand yet but will have to help thousands of people 'get' between now and next year's event.
Student turned teacher turned marketer.
The big question...
The real ambition, of course, is that this extra-curricular activity becomes part of day-to-day teaching where it would help kids make more sense of the subject or the world around them. The process involved in explaining things through film is the equivalent of making the kids 'teach' their viewers. We all know what happens when we have to teach something - we become better at it ourselves.
What's stopping this? Well, I'd like to ask you. Partners in Excellence and our own staff in East Lothian have, for years, done extra curricular film-making far more than curricular film-making. Why is that? What are the barriers that need moving in order to make this more realistic as part of the learning process?
This sounds like a truly excellent idea. All credit to LTS on this one!
Posted by: Chris | August 30, 2006 at 07:37 PM