Clutch Clubs

Helping parents learn Information & Communication Technology (ICT) skills - Open University and Living Archive Awards Scheme

Set up by the Millennium Commission (this site will open in a new window), one of the National Lottery good causes, the Millennium Awards are grants to help individuals develop their interests whilst at the same time putting something back into their local community. The Open University and Living Archive Awards Scheme (this site will open in a new window) aims to encourage and to enable parents of schoolchildren to gain new skills in ICT and an understanding of their use for teaching in their children's schools. It has already involved around 300 parents with children at school in and around Milton Keynes.

The basis of the scheme is that groups of parents (normally five in a group) research a local history project of their choice. A key aim is for each group, over a period of eight months, to produce a website of their findings. In order to do this, the organisers provide training and support in research, data collection, and a range of ICT skills to enable interviews to be digitised, images and video to be captured digitally, and Web pages to be created to bring the digital assets together to illustrate their findings. The groups of parents are known as CLUTCH Clubs (Computer Literacy Understanding Through Community History).

The project, which has the novel feature of using local history as the motivating topic, illustrates the involvement of parents through ICT and has been very successful. From the Open University and Living Archive Awards Scheme (this site will open in a new window) website examples of the work completed by the first 100 parents are available here (this site will open in a new window) and resources for teachers can be accessed here (this site will open in a new window).

For further information, e-mail: clutch-help@open.ac.uk