Spotlight on an online project

Musselburgh Grammar goes online

mgsOnline, the website of Musselburgh Grammar School, worked first of all as an advertising post for the school, helping create over 20 links with foreign schools in a short period of time. The international goals of the school were set out so as to tempt teachers abroad to strike up cooperative projects, many of them in modern languages. The site soon became a communication tool itself between MGS and the world. 

Some of the strongest projects followed a citizenship line, but foreign languages were central to these, too. Pupils wrote and prepared audio material in French during school trips to Normandy and Paris, blogging it to 7000 readers over one week (as shown in the example, left). The whole community was hooked on the adventures of the Musselburgh bloggers.

Auschwitz visit

A harrowing trip to Auschwitz led to the collaboration with schools in the USA and Poland, resulting in theatre productions, essays and online blog journals being maintained and swapped over six months.

geoBlogs

Blogs also featured in geoBlogs, a collaborative project about living in Europe, where Polish pupils struck up discussions on their local area and talked about their feelings on living in a 'borderless' Europe. They also produced the first schools podcast in Europe with their Musselburgh counterparts.

But traditional means of communication struck up some of the most exciting moments in French and German classes – over 1600 hand-written and word-processed letters, e-mails and blog posts were exchanged over the last school year with Canada, France, Tunisia, Poland, Germany and the USA. Although it’s the technology that grabs the headlines, sometimes it’s the old-fashioned ways of doing things that work best.

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