Derbyshire Schools Birdcam Project Blog

Join BBC Radio Derby, BBC Breathing Places, WildDerby, Derby RSPB local group and friends at Derby Market Place on Saturday, 7 February 2009, for the 2009 Garden Bird Bonanza Event. This is a fun, free event for the whole family where you can learn how to encourage and feed birds in your garden and get involved in some craft workshops, too!

Further details on the BBC Derby website.

Welcome to our new batch of schools who have signed up to be part of the birdcam project during 2008/2009. This post will list dates, objectives and tasks for project meetings (new schools only). Details will be updated as the project progresses, so please keep checking back.

• Day 2 – Thursday 29th January 2009 (4-5pm)
  Feedback on bird box installations; collection of remaining kit; how to
  connect cameras to computer and upload to web site.
• Day 3 – 6th March 2009 (Full Day)
  Feedback; setting up school blogs.
• Day 4 – 4th June 2009 (4-5pm)

Just because it isn’t nesting season, doesn’t mean there won’t be any activity in your nest box. Check out the Elmsleigh and Eureka boxes. Although they didn’t have any nesting birds in the Spring, they’ve had roosting blue tits and great tits most nights since the Summer. Does your box have a nighttime visitor?

Just a few notes about using Flickr which I became aware of over the holidays. Your free Flickr account has a few limitations:

• Only 100MB of image data can be uploaded each month (you are unlikely to exceed this with birdcam images!)
• Only your most recent 200 images will be shown. This may not be a problem for you. You can access older images again if you pay $24/year for a pro account (older pictures are not actually deleted). The pro account has the advantage of allowing you to upload video and create unlimited sets of pictures.
• If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted! – apparently Flickr have never acted on this although they reserve the right to do so. In any case, just logging in to your account would count as activity.
• If your Flickr widget has disappeared from your blog sidebar you can reinstate it by clicking on the “plugins” link on the right hand side of your admin area and activating the widget pack.

In Autumn, when the breeding season is over, old nests can be removed and your boxes cleaned out. If there are unhatched eggs in the box, these may be removed legally only between August and January, and must be disposed of. Some birds may have second or third broods in the same nest, so it would probably be best to wait until the Autumn term when you are certain that the box is no longer in use.
Read the rest of this entry »

There is no strict, prescriptive proforma for our case studies only that we expect all participating schools/teachers to consider the following:

1. The Learning Journey (any form – diary, journal etc) highlighting any of the following guidelines:
   • The successes
   • The issues
   • 5 top tips
   • 5 dos
   • 5 don’ts
   • Be yourself, informal and ‘real’ – readers will feel much more at ease
   • Financial implications
   • Time implications
   • Community links (Blog, website, Flickr)
   • Curriculum links
2. We will need to have some kind of information about you and the school and the focus group (if any).

Please send the completed case studies electronically to linda.cater@derbyshire.gov.uk by Friday 12^th September. I will probably send a gentle reminder at the beginning of that week!

This quiz is being generated using MyStudiyo, a free online quiz generator. Please feel free to try the quiz and add your own questions, the only stipulation is that they must be relevant to the project! This is your chance to help create a great fun resource for the kids to use. You don’t have to register to try the quiz or add questions. However, if you want to add questions it might be worth registering with a general school username (eg strettonhandley) so that your school is acknowledged for the question.

To try the quiz please follow this link http://www.mystudiyo.com/act67441/go/. You could include this link on your school blog to access it directly. Once there are a few more questions I hope to embed the quiz on the project website.

Springwatch started last week and is screened on week day evenings on BBC Two. If you miss an episode, you can watch it again from the Springwatch website or using BBC iplayer.

The live streaming webcams are fantastic and worth watching with your kids.

Let us know if you have used the Springwatch programme in your classroom.

Peregrine Falcons first nested on Derby Cathedral in 2006 and raised three chicks there. Thousands of people watched two chicks being raised in 2007 via the project’s two new web cameras. This year Derby Museum has installed a third web-cam on the cathedral tower. Visit their project blog to find out the latest news – there is a fantastic video showing the egg actually being laid (NB won’t show in school as it is hosted on YouTube).

The Derby Peregrine Falcon project is requesting feedback about the use of their webcams in schools. If you can spare some time to fill in the questionnaire on their blog, I’m sure they would appreciate it.

This post lists dates, objectives and tasks for project meetings. Details will be updated as the project progresses, so please keep checking back. Read the rest of this entry »

A place to share your teaching and learning ideas. Please feel free to comment about any curriculum links, lesson ideas, useful web sites or any advice or pointers that could be helpful to other project teachers. The links page on the project web site lists some useful sites to get you started.