A Visit To The Highline Park

Such a lovely day in nature today and witnessing the pure joy of my friends' four year olds who wanted me to take photos of all the flowers and plants we passed! They spent ages being 'keepers of the ponds' and more along with very keen ten year old. In my books nature always wins for children and I appreciate time with children as it helps me take the time to appreciate nature too :)

A days work

So today I have mostly been spending the whole day writing emails to people about community trails they have made and also a call out for contributors to my audio trail!! All steps but also need to do some reading... :)

‘Bear Shadow’ Teaching in Vienna Primary School as a Native Speaker Teacher... Drawing where the shadow falls and making our own individual and group shadow pictures using overhead projectors :) Sure we sung a couple of bear songs too :)

Oral History Consent Forms, recording equipment etc

I meant to add this a few days ago. I thought it might be helpful for people to know where I found some resources for making consent forms and making sure I was not infringing on copyright etc, as well as some info about choosing recording equipment:

Advice on recording equipment from GEM:

 http://www.gem.org.uk/soyh/toolkit/mini/mini-toolkit-4.php

Advice on recording equipment from East Midlands Oral History Archive:

http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/training/no3.pdf

Info about copyright from East Midlands Oral History Archive::

http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/training/no4.pdf

Oral history interview guidelines and techniques from GEM:

http://www.gem.org.uk/res/howto/ball/res_inter.php

Oral History Ethics from the Oral History Society:

http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/ethics.php

Oral History practical advice for getting started from the Oral History Society:

http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/practical-advice.php

This has a great guide to all things digital, including equipment by JISC:

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

And this great link from a friend which compares main digital recording equipment:

http://transom.org/?page_id=7514

and finally, this was the video from the same friend -that helped me choose which audio equipment to get:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmwuS9QOlvs

Fingers crossed it was right :)

As I have said before I was very grateful for the advice I received from the GEM (Group for Education in Museums) discussion mailing list as well as he MCG (Museums Computer Group) mailing list for a lot of this advice. Good luck if you are embarking on the same process....

Reminiscence session as part of the overground festival... Heard some interesting snippets of stories related to the park that I would like to hear more of... Tried out a bit of recording with my friends daughter... Now at the spoken word event of the festival... It's all about crystal palace, the park and spoken word for me at the moment!

Last week looking at perspective to tie in with the kids learning about castles with their class teacher… love it when I get to do an art lesson as part of being an English native speaker teacher :) (3rd year primary) lesson plan from @accessart.org.uk #inspiredby https://www.instagram.com/p/CaF4lPYMWWU/?utm_medium=tumblr

Behind the mask activity…. We worked up to this by learning describing words and writing words about each other. Then the kids could choose what they wrote about themselves…

I liked this from #brooklynmuseum too

Inspired by the Subway Project and more...

I've been quiet of recent… slowed down blogging upon completion of the written element of my dissertation. I have still been editing the interviews as you can see from previous posts - and have much more to do!

I quite often post links that I find useful to my course's Facebook page and was thinking that I could post some of those links here as well in case anyone is interested. Will also try and tie together some of my interests here.

As well as my museum and freelance work, I have been volunteering for the 'Inspired by the Subway' HLF project, which is a project that is collecting oral history and archive material related to the hidden subway in Crystal Palace Park. The finds will be gathered together to create a resource that will lead to an exhibition of work by local young people . Take a look at what we have been up to so far here: 

http://www.inspiredbythesubway.org.uk 

I've also been looking and applying for more work in the museum/heritage education field, which as you can imagine is quite a task! A hugely popular area to work in. However, I love what I do and feel that 2013 has been a great year for me in terms of gaining more experience and work so far! Fingers crossed for further work in 2014!

I hope 2013 has been a good year for you all and look forward to more adventures in 2014!