News Story

CLUTCH as a Broadband Educational Resource launched

Colin Barrett, Tuesday 11 Dec 2001

The 2-year Computer Literacy Understanding Through Community History project (CLUTCH) funded by the UK Millennium Commission is now complete. This scheme has facilitated some 311 parents in the research and production of 59 web sites on a local history topics. CLUTCH has proved to be tremendously popular and a powerful tool for the production of top-quality content web products through empowering local schools to reach out into their community via parents.

Starting December 1st 2001 the East of England Broadband Consortium (E2B) have funded a pilot project to investigate how we might roll-out the CLUTCH concept more widely. The pilot study will hook
up a small number of schools in the Eastern region of England with the KMi team using the regional broadband network. The school will host a CLUTCH mentor who will help a group of parents form a CLUTCH group. As with the Millennium Commission-funded CLUTCH Clubs, their work will be based around a group project website in which they will gather and present multi-media assets linked closely to prescribed themes in the National Curriculum. However, this time the CLUTCH will run at-a-distance, with the central team providing training and support from its base in KMi at the Open University. As with the Millennium CLUTCH project the new work is in partnership with the Living Archive Project in Milton Keynes.

We’re calling this pilot project CABER – “CLUTCH As a Broadband Educational Resource”.