Making waves
September 2007
Kim Thomas
Sixth-formers at the Ladies’ College in Guernsey are about to have what the school’s history teacher, Bronwyn Murie, calls a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. Next month, 24 of the students will go on an 11-day trip to France and Canada, where they will visit significant locations from the Second World War, such as Juno Beach (site of the D-Day landings), and interview war veterans and witnesses.
Bronwyn won the trip for her students in a competition organised by the Imperial War Museum. It forms one element of Their Past Your Future, a UK-wide educational project organised by the museum, which aims to help young people find out more about the impact of some of the key conflicts of the 20th century. Bronwyn, along with three other teachers and staff from the museum, will accompany the students on the trip.
There’s an added bonus. The prize gives students access to
As soon as they start interviewing veterans on the trip, they will be able to put the audio files straight up onto the site. “Anyone listening to this will be able to leave their comments on what they think about it, so we’re hoping to make it quite interactive. Each girl has her own page that will include links to things she’s been involved in as part of a group, but she’ll also have her own personal
Their Past Your Future is one of many projects to make use of Radiowaves, which was created four years ago by the digital innovation company SynergyTV. It arose from a project SynergyTV carried out with Cape UK, a Leeds-based educational organisation, to find a way of engaging some of the most disaffected school pupils back into mainstream schooling. The project, which gave the students the opportunity to create radio programmes, improved motivation, says Tim Riches, Managing Director of Radiowaves: “We found anecdotally that for young people who weren’t confident in using traditional pen and paper techniques, but who were orally confident, this was a perfect way to re-engage them. They were seeing that their work was being published online. They knew that their peers were going to see it online and suddenly the whole dynamic changed and the focus of the activity changed.”
After that initial project, the SynergyTV team hit on the idea of combining the ability to make radio programmes with the ability to publish them online, and Radiowaves was born: “They [students] can publish radio, video and blogs. They have their own profiles as well. It’s a hybrid between a publishing platform and a
At the time Radiowaves was launched, social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, had not yet taken hold, so the Radiowaves idea seemed completely new to many teachers. Now social networks are so widely used, there is no difficulty explaining the concept, says Tim.
Radiowaves is a business proposition. Each school that subscribes to the site pays an annual fee: £1,000 in the case of secondary schools, £500 for primary schools. (Radiowaves is also frequently hired by museums and local authorities for larger-scale projects.) As well as getting space on the website, teachers receive training and support to help them create the programmes. About 300 schools have enrolled to date, with another 100 signed up for the latest project, Voice It!, which encourages young people to create websites, blogs and podcasts to investigate, report or campaign on issues that matter to them. (Tim will be running a workshop on Voice It! at Futurelab’s Why Don’t You…? conference in October.) These schools are located in 20 different countries, including Japan, Australia and the USA, as well as the UK.
So what has Radiowaves achieved? “The teachers almost universally say there’s a huge increase in motivation,” says Tim. “Children who are difficult to engage, they find that it’s something that really grabs their attention. Anecdotally there’s an increase in interpersonal skills, team work, and they also say it’s a real way to get them thinking about literacy as well, and their speaking and listening. It also changes their confidence to go and talk to somebody, or interview someone they wouldn’t usually approach. We’ve had students interviewing ministers, policemen and sporting stars. What’s interesting is that it’s not a set tool that has to be used for one curriculum area. It’s an approach, and you use it in a way that makes sense for you. It’s a project-based way of learning – there are some schools using it for maths even, or science. You can use it how you like.”
For Bronwyn, the fact that her students will be able to publish the work they do on the trip instantly has a particular value: “It’s so much more immediate – they’re not having to sit down and draft it. They’re going to write things as well that will be carefully edited and drafted, but to get those immediate things at the time […] you can’t capture any other way.”
And the work her students produce will reach a wider audience, she says: “There’ll be a prominent link on the Radiowaves website, pointing people to our part of the site. Other people will be able to see what we’ve done and think about those questions, to ask those questions of their own students. The timing is good because it will be coming up to Remembrance Week when we come back. Other schools can take some of those ideas and say, ‘This is what those students thought, is that what you think?’”
Radiowaves has been used by children of all ages, from 4 year-old reception pupils to 18 year-old sixth-formers, all of whom have seen their work published on the web. The key to its success, says Tim, is that it puts the student centre-stage: “What’s been at the heart of Radiowaves is creating a student-owned space as much as possible where they see their work being published. It’s not a teacher space, it’s their space.”