Posts Tagged ‘opportunities’

Jason Bradbury from Channel 5’s The Gadget Show impresses Y7!

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Gadget mad Jason Bradbury!

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Four of our Year 7 English classes had a special treat yesterday. Jason Bradbury, the gadget mad presenter of The Gadget Show visited the College to promote his first book, Dot.Robot. It’s about Jackson Farley, a digital genius, who is lured by Dot.com billionaire Devlin Lear to join the top secret defence force MeX to help stop the criminial heist of the century. Are Jackson and the MeX recruits as good as Lear thinks? And how does Jackson know quite who to trust when they can never meet face-to-face? You’ll have to read the book to find out! Copies available in the library!

Jason also talked about what robots are, treated the students to demonstrations of some amazing robots he bought along, and organised a robot race. First, he set up an obstacle course using the students bags, chose 3 students who were then told they had to control one of the robots around the obstacles. The winner was the student who could do it in the fastest time. Deborah Odubade of 7C was the winner and received a free signed copy of Dot.Robot. Well done Deborah.

The winner was the student who could do it in the fastest time. Our Year 7s had a great time and Jason rounded off the visit with a reading from his book and a Question and Answer session.

More information about Jason Bradbury, The Gadget Show and his book Dot.Robot can been found on his website www.jasonbradbury.com <http://www.jasonbradbury.com>

If anyone is interested in buying a copy of Dot.Robot, please come to the library, we have some spare copies at £5.99 each.

 

 

 

 

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Education.. “either bestows a person the freedom of their culture, or deprives them of it”

Friday, April 24th, 2009
The title of this blog entry is a loose quote from Malinowski (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinowski#References), which is also used at the beginning of the Conservative Party document, “Restoring Pride in our Public Services” which sets out their likely manifesto for education appearing in a general election coming to a country near you soon. The quote means that a  good education opens doors and provides access to the rich wealth of experiences that our culture has to offer. A bad education does the reverse, it deprives a person of those experiences and limits their future opportunities. This is an extremely important point for British society as 16% of our current adult workforce is illiterate, denying them access to everything written and printed and all that written and printed media have to offer (like a job requiring the ability to read or write). 
Part of the measure of a an outstanding school is what happens to it’s students when they leave at the end of Year 11, this also indicates what future opportunities for young people have been secured.
Last year 99.5% of Bacon’s students went on to either continue education, training or to enter employment (4.5%). By way of comparison the figures for the surrounding borough were 87% continuing with their education and training, 9% going into employment and with 4% becoming unemployed. 
I am very pleased that Bacon’s college is doing so much to improve the life chances of young people from a very wide range of backgrounds, cultures and abilities. Young people leave Bacon’s College with significantly enhanced life opportunities and have as a consequence the benefit of the rich experiences that their culture has to offer.  

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