It’s Pink T-Shirt Day! The GESS is focusing on the issue of bullying. A student working group has made a podcast specially for the day and is now out in the yard handing out flyers with QR codes which people can use to listen to the podcast online.

A year 6 class is at the smartboard, singing along with gusto to a current hit song with lyrics supplied by a YouTube video.

The students are working on a shared document in OneNote, visible for everyone at the front of the class via projector. Right now, ‘the board’ is no longer the teacher’s domain, but everyone’s workspace.

A year 11 class is reading about varying standards of living across the world on a Swedish NGO’s website which features photographs of various families, their homes and some of their household objects. For one moment, we have all stepped into other worlds.

Tonight parents have been invited to the GISB to watch the short films made by their children featuring performances of classic ballads.

It’s project day at the GISB. The top grades will be heading off into the Thanksgiving break after taking part in a simulation on climate change.

There’s a smell of wood and glue wafting out of the Design Technology Lab, accompanied by a soundtrack of sawing and of sanding machines. Year 10 students are busy making objects following their own designs. Among the paper, pieces of plastic and wood, and tools, I can see a few laptops, with which the students are documenting their work, searching for potential uses for their products or using design programs to create templates for laser cutting later on.

The lesson’s on water consumption, but there’s a side order of computer literacy – the students have learned how to create pie charts in Excel and paste them into other files.

Year 8 students are producing their own ‘poetry book’ using Book Creator, including pieces of writing, pictures they’ve drawn, photos sourced from the internet and audio elements they’ve recorded. The pages that emerge are wildly varied, some more creative, some less so.

It’s English class and the students are preparing to film a scene from Romeo and Juliet. They’re using OneNote to abridge the text and a phone as the camera.