Thursday July 10th saw a fantastic evening of fashion shows here at Frankley Community High School. Students had been working all week to make frocks and other clothes entirely from re-used material. Garments were fashioned from moulded paper right through to plastic sheeting and old 45 vinyl singles picked up from car boot sales.

Before the show took place Paige from the Frankley Talk podcast team set out to find out how the work had been done, what the students thought of it and what the audience could expect: (click the arrow to listen)

We learned a lots from from John Rose and we are grateful for the time he spent with us. One of the key questions we wanted to know is does it make sense for schools to recycle those thousands of plastic drink bottles we throw away. Listen to this and you will be surprised by what he has got to say and how passionate he is.

The poeple in this group were all geeks!!!

Welcome to another podcast. This time year 9 at Frankley Community High interview Martin Nangoli who visited us to tell us about life in his home village of Kikobero in Uganda. To listen just click on the arrow below or you can download the mp3 by clicking here.

We have been helping Martin send children from his village to school. As you can see from the photo we have been raising money through a non-uniform day and also a cake sale.

Earlier today Craig Stephen’s, one of the performers, was in the school helping to plan new ways to use podcasting in Frankley. He bumped into Sue Baker in the library who said hello and told him what she made of Constance Brown. Click on the grey arrow below to hear Sue’s verbal review of Constance Brown.

On Monday the rain stopped and clouds parted over Frankley, Birmingham, for precisely the two hours requested to allow the School’s Carnival to be the triumph everyone’s efforts deserved it to be.

Last year Holly Hill Infant School blazed the trail by staging a Circus Carnival that involved the whole school, costumes, chanting, actions and a band. It was magnificent. Soon there was a clamour for an expanded carnival this year with neighbouring schools; the result was even more magnificent.

There were three bands, including a full-on Samba Team, an exuberant dancing section and four giant carnival costumes, which threatened to convert into gilded paragliders in the high winds. The increase in age range gave the carnival more diversity than last year. The Seasons’ theme gave the pupils a chance to pursue their own creative ideas whilst keeping a coherence to proceedings. There was an army of Snow Fairies, a host of trees with wind rustling their leaves, thunder clouds with lightening, rain drops and rainbows, fiery Suns, a platoon of Lady Birds, Green Shooting Grass with worms and earth, clumps of flowers surrounded by butterflies and bumble bees, whilst a shoal of silver scaled fish played a slippery samba.

The large-scale combination education, artistry and logistics delivered by Ana and her small team was deeply impressive. The engagement enjoyment of pupils, teachers and other school staff and support of parent was evident. A burst of sunshine was the least everyone deserved.

Over the last two years Reaside School has been working on an extended project exploring and in some cases inventing, local mythologies. Now surely they have helped create their own mythology – the great Frankley Carnival of 07.

James

As part of the same conference where we met Soweto Kinch we also played our work to a room full of people and talked to them about the podcasting project. We showed one of them (Hugh - thank you) the basics of podcasting and he interviewed us about what we had learned. This is the end result.