Hard Choices

Ysgol Coedcae

It's great to have new equipment. Today's session with Coedcae was made so much more successful by having the new laptops, which we used for the first time in our last lesson. Now the class can do the work of making the hard choices with ease, knowing we are unlikely to encounter technical problems. Willing year ten students joined in to 'buddy' each of our young people. This made progress very good indeed.

Starting with the twenty favourites, we carefully chose pictures from our four field trips and the first session, where we took the brand new cameras out into the school grounds for a practice. As a guide, four or five from each of the field trips and four from the school session were chosen. It didn't really matter if there were a few more pics in this first folder, because in the next phase, we refined the images down to the final ten. These will be the shots that are printed for the exhibition. Hard choices indeed!



Above: Coedcae kids with buddies tackle tricky choices

Everybody succeeded in compiling their ten best and by the end of the morning's classes, they also had made a list of the pictures in a text document and most had at least started writing their comments about each photo. It was a very pleasing morning.


Ysgol Maes y Morfa

Last time we met, there were problems with the computer system and class size, making it difficult to complete our tasks. Today, it was altogether a different story. The group was split into two, giving us more time with each student, despite having only a bit under an hour with each set. I think the kids also realised how important the afternoon's work was going to be and made a big effort to succeed.



Above: Maes y Morfa kids making choices about their best shots

And succeed they did. There were a few technical problems, but nothing that we couldn't solve and at the end of the afternoon, everyone had gone through the two processes of choice making, and many had started the list making. This will make our last session in front of the monitors so much easier. Of course, we also need to take all the portraits; this will take a good while.

What's very clear to me is that the exhibition is going to be full of excellent work from both schools and I look forward to it immensely.