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GoldStarCafe Latest News
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GoldStarCafe GEMS Awards Launched
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The Gem Awards in GoldStarCafe is a highly motivating and engaging online awards scheme designed to develop pupils’ understanding and skills.
GoldStarCafe is a safe social learning network designed for secondary school children. It involves pupils in a rigorously validated and proactively mediated UK-wide online community. Pupils can communicate and collaborate on learning projects, engage peers in their interests and work online with teachers to pursue educational projects at school and at home.
GoldStarCafe Gems Award Scheme
The Gem Awards develop children’s understanding and skills a range of curriculum areas by involving them in active learning tasks. With successful completion of each task, children earn a separate facet of the Gem, which can be earned in any order over time. Tasks vary in difficulty and involve creation of homepages and webrings, writing articles, leading forums, sending emails, completing quizzes, uploading images and contributing actively to others in the online community.
- The Gem Bar - Pupils can see their progress through the Gems Awards scheme on the Gem Bar on their homepages.
- Ruby Gem - Editor - Literacy skills: research, writing in styles fit for purpose and audience. Embedded ICT skills including graphics, presentation and organization
- Emerald Gem - Lifestyle (PSHE) - Understanding lifestyle issues and gaining PSHE skills.
- Sapphire Gem - Citizenship - Understanding human and society issues and learning e-citizenship through active participation.
- Amethyst Gem - Key Skills - Based on the 6 Key Skills and focusing on curriculum areas: Geography, Maths, RE, MFL, DT, Science.
- Zircon Gem - Cafe Crew - Leadership, peer-mentoring, community participation and skills.
Visit GoldStarCafe
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GoldStarCafe Pilot success
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After pilot testing for over a year with thousands of pupils, we're delighted to announce that GoldStarCafe was launched to all UK schools on 31 July 2007.
GoldStarCafe is the first UK-owned and UK-wide Protected Social Learning Network specifically designed for secondary school pupils. It evolved from Intuitive Media’s success with the DCSF-backed SuperClubsPLUS primary community.
Designed for Safety
GoldStarCafe gives secondary schools a safer alternative to the consumer social networks:- Only registered school pupils and their teachers can join.
- Teachers see everything your pupils do and check their progress.
- Highly trained Mediators protect the children from bullying and abuse.
Designed for Learning
GoldStarCafe is certainly a lot of fun, but serious curriculum-related learning underpins everything your pupils do:- Cross Curriculum Skills - Literacy, Citizenship, PSHE, ICT - through GEM Awards, projects and competitions
- Inspiration Hot Seat Forums - with authors, and experts in all fields - journalism, science, conservation etc.
- Communication & Collaboration - your pupils can communicate with protected email, forums and instant messenger and work together on Home Pages, Project Pages and School Pages.
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Intuitive Media were delighted to be invited by the DfES to showcase GoldStarCafe at the recent Games Developers Conference Europe, held at London's Café Royal at the end of August.
Recent studies show that computer games can have a positive impact on children and that their use in the classroom is to be encouraged. In attending the conference, the DfES aimed to explore the opportunities for collaboration between the educational supply and games sectors.
Intuitive Media was one of 13 UK ICT education companies in invited by the DfES to showcase their projects at the event.
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GoldStar Times home page
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Membership of GoldStarCafe is hotting up and children are already demonstrating outstanding creativity and enthusiasm to contribute quality content.
A group of children have created their own online newspaper, The GoldStar Times in which they have published items on animal cruelty, most embarrassing moments, poetry, jokes and competitions. They have assigned themselves roles as Editor and Journalists, and are inviting other members to submit articles and columns for publication. They even have a Jobs section where they are seeking to recruit a sports reporter, agony aunt and photographers.
GoldStarCafe mediator, Jane Weston says, "The children started creating the newspaper on their own home pages. They asked if they could have a separate area for the paper, so we set up a dedicated "Zine" area within GoldStarCafe just for the newspaper. This project has been entirely created by the children themselves and shows great innovation, motivation and organization on their part."
Pupil, Katherine said (in response to the news that Mediators had created a dedicated Zine for the newspaper)I know!!! It's great isn't it. i think we should have our own forum for ideas for the newspaper as well."
A Zine - as in "magazine" - is a special interest area to which GoldStar Cafe members can submit articles for publication. All submitted articles are checked by Mediators who select the best ones for publication on the site. Children are awarded credits for writing articles and further credits for those published. Credits can be exchanged for additional home pages, programming codes and other privelages on the site.
Emails have been flying thick and fast between the children involved, until one child suggested creating a dedicated live discussion forum (know as a Zone), for the newspaper. This was set up by the Gold Star Cafe Mediators and now the children can use this as a mechanism to discuss the development of the newspaper. "thanks for making this forum merv we all aprecaite it so much!" - Ryan R - sports writer, speaking to a Mediator in the new GoldStar Times Forum
The level of excitement about this self-generated collaborative project is tangible, and its all done in children's own time, from home in their summer holidays!
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Intuitive Media's GoldStarCafe, the new international community for secondary school children launches Summer 2005, and is already attracting praise from the world's leading expert in new technology in learning:"Building seductive, engaging, delightful, effective on-line communities is quite frighteningly complex. Many try, very few succeed. Intuitive Media are amongst the very, very few who know how to do this really well and who combine that with proper care about student safety and security.
I am really excited about the launch of GoldStarCafe because it builds on so much experience to offer a wonderful, secure, learning-based on-line environment. But as if that was not enough, it also offers a unique global dimension too, it recognizes the importance of family and it's wonderful fun to be an active part of.
It all shows that for this kind of work there is no substitute for a couple of decades of experience building large scale projects at the cutting edge!". - Professor Stephen Heppell
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The GoldStarCafe online community is designed to be Somewhere Safer online, focussed on Taking Learning Home. It will encourage informal learning - the learning that happens in the family, in the community - when kids visit a museum or art gallery, take a school journey or holiday with their parents, meet people from other countries, take part in a village concert or attend the karate or drama club.
Children will be able to communicate with other children around the world with moderated in-community discussion forums, email and instant messaging. They will create their own multimedia home pages and contribute to "Zines" on a range of subjects. They will also be able to win GoldStar Credits as they evidence their learning and positive contribution to the community.
Forum discussions will focus around children's interests and hot issues such as: online safety, transition to secondary school, dealing with bullying, healthy nutrition, and bigger issues like environmental sustainability or genetic engineering. We will also invite public bodies, museums, art galleries and charities to sponsor Focus Areas based on their interests.
Children will be protected by our evolved and sophisticated automatic tools for moderation of inappropriate language and behaviour, supported by human mediation during live communication sessions. The community aims to be a "halfway house" where children can transition from highly protected environments like SuperClubsPLUS and SchoolNet Global to a "sheltered" environment where they can take more responsibility for their own safety (for example, getting involved in peer mediation) in preparation for their survival in the wide open spaces of the unprotected Internet.
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