Using the blog to contribute to badges

I was thinking about our HMD programme and how we can notch it up against some badge or other. The beauty is, we can! Well, YOU can. This blog is the medium to do it! 

Ok, so you may not be as excited as me, but when you think that just writing a swift blog counts towards the Promise Challenge badge, then I'm sure your are leaping from your sofa to the keyboard! 

Reviewing an event or activity and deciding how it may be done better (or just praising is fine), counts towards The Promise Challenge badge (Area 4, a). 

Lets do it! - Be the first group in the world to use a blog towards a badge! How cool is that?

The Promise Challenge

HMD09: Stand Up To Hatred

This is the morning after.

I had my worries about the theme and content of last night's programme. It's hard to fit everything you want to say about the Holocaust into 45 minutes. It's also hard to find your level of delivery when you have an age range of 5 years. I was also worried about keeping the tone right with the Scouts; all too often when you want to talk to a room of more than 30 Scouts you can find it hard to make yourself heard. It's more case of enthusiasm than any kind of mischief in most cases.

The compliments start here. Props to everyone who volunteered to read an excerpt from the presentation. There were some pretty brave attempts at pronouncing the trickier Polish names (Marsolkowska Street anyone?) and some readings that showed a true understanding of the subject matter. The responses to the short questionnaire were honest, funny and inciteful and showed a greater maturity in some areas than I would reasonably expect; not that I am saying anyone is immature, but the exercise deliberately left the door open to a bit of mucking about. I was also impressed at the quetions we were asked towards the end - it proved to me that the Holocaust remains a truly mind-boggling thing to fit into your head.

So we'll shelf the serious stuff for the next couple of weeks and turn our attention towards the Gang Show and Winter Camp.

Thanks everyone. Tonight made me proud.

Stand Up To Hatred

This is my first blog ever, so please bear with me and my incoherent ramblings.

I wanted to explain how we came to run such a programme, a bold choice perhaps? How do we deliver such a topic covering genocide and the Holocaust in less than 90 minutes? Can we make it interesting and thought provoking? I think I'll let you decide!
There is certainly a rising of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred in our midst, not I hope within our small scouting community you understand, but world wide, it is happening in the 21st century, in OUR world, OUR time!
I hope by remembering what went in the past, reminds us all what NOT to do in the future. You might not think it is relevant to you, but if we all stand up to hatred, look at how we talk, act and treat one another, we can change attitudes from hatred to tolerance.

The materials and inspiration from tonight's programme are from Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the museum at Auschwitz and photographs from when Gavin and I visited Auschwitz Birkenau.

Comments on what you thought please, should this be part of the programme or leave it to the school curriculum?

Tweet

Sometimes when you  have an idea you just have to go with it.  20 minutes ago I mentioned the idea of sticking the Scouts on Twitter.  So I have done just that.  You can follow it here.

If the whole world of Twitter is a bridge too far for you, then this is a good explanation if what it is all about.  Better still, you could get yourself along to Twitter's own site, sign up and follow us.  That way you can proudly say to the world that you are embracing Web 2.0.  You have to admit you've always wanted to say that haven't you.  Go on.  Say it.

So This Is Blogging

So I had this idea.  I had this idea that a blog would be a good idea to keep the Scouts updated on what we had planned.  I had this idea that I could review how each troop night went and ask for feedback from the Scouts.  I had this idea that they could become members of the blog and write their own reviews of the things we do at Scouts.  Well, I've gone and done it.  The blog is live.  

When I say live I mean that it is technically published and available on the internet if you know the right place to look, but there is no link to it so the chances of you having stumbled across this are a little bit remote.

I think that makes this the electronic equivalent of babbling to yourself in a mirror.

I hope that over the coming weeks and months that this place starts to fill up with the thoughts of the Scouts and leaders and becomes a resource to help us find out what we are doing right and wrong and gives us a chance to give feedback in a way that will stick in the mind a bit more than a few spoken words at the end of a night.

Enough from me for tonight - I'm babbling.  It's some kind of blog blindness I'm sure.

Now.  Should I set us up on Twitter or is that going too far?