I have now completed the mandatory Internet safety module on the University’s Blackboard page.
One thing that drew my eye was the key stage 1 friendly (and I suppose early ks2) Think U Know videos which help to enhance the digital literacy of 5-7 year olds. One of them, “Lee and Kim’s Adventure”, explored the dangers of giving too much information to people that you do not know personally offline. By showing how they can be tricked when playing a game by somebody pretending to be a child, it was exploring a heavy message that was delivered sensitively. The featuring of a wise superhero character who sang a song at the end was a good move as it prevented the piece from causing upset and anguish to its young audience. In order to take this e-safety module further in the classroom, Blackboard suggested turning the videos into short mini-dramas. Having recently explored drama in the classroom, I’d also suggest that this is an area that conscience-alley or freeze framing could work well in.
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In my GPP school, there is a real impetus in terms of creating a paperless environment wherever possible. Obviously, children still have workbooks and will work from worksheets that will be stuck into them, but the teachers are working hard to counterbalance this with their own efforts to be paperless.
Firstly, the teachers share planning across each classroom in the three-form entry school on Microsoft Word, using a grid system. They work together to input the subject they are responsible for into the shared grid, and then they all work from a master copy which is attached to an email so that it can be viewed at home on their school-issued iPad. Secondly, the school showed pupil progress by subscribing to a system called “Learning Ladders”, which the separate Infants School also subscribed to. Each subject for each year was broken down into every conceivable target (eg: for Maths, “I know my number bonds to 10” or for English “I can identify an adjective”) and each child in each class in each year would be ticked off when they could achieve that target. The learning ladders were useful because they could generate data for teachers to show which children are below, meeting and exceeding expectations. When talking to my mentor about paperless systems, she said that it took some getting used to, but ultimately it made sense for A) saving the planet, and B) efficiency – automatically generated data saves them a lot of time. Due to a little thing called Christmas (no, I’ve never heard of it either) most computing lessons that were timetabled during my GPP were cancelled to make way for activities, assemblies, and rehearsals. This clearly left a dearth in the amount of the ICT curriculum covered. This, owing to a lack of internet signal for parts of the placement, was quite tricky to amend.
I decided, as part of the children’s history topic (Ancient Greece), to model an unplugged ICT lesson. The children were supposed to be learning about “The War of the Gods”, a significant part of Greek Mythology. As a prelude to that lesson I provided children with a list of questions that we could use to find facts in a search engine. I deliberately designed these questions to be too vague for a search engine to feedback with decent results (for example: “Who won the war?” and “Who was the king?”). We spoke about them and then I asked the children, in Kagan pairs, to rewrite the questions so that (on another day) a search engine would give us a better quality of information. The lesson was a success in that every child achieved the learning objective and could tell me A) what a search engine was and B) how to create a question in a search engine to give you the best results (be specific). Unfortunately, the internet was still down a few days later, so instead of allowing them to research using their questions on the iPads, I provided them with an information pack that I created from their questions. At my GPP school, reading for pleasure was a huge focus. There was a system in place called “Around the world in 80 books”, which asked children to attempt to read 80 books in the eight(ish) months of term-time. For each twelve books (approximately) the children could move their names from one continent to the next on a world map, to indicate progress.
To facilitate this unplugged system, the school employed an online library system, which certain children (Librarians) were given the responsibility to use. Each book was scanned (using a shop-like USB scanner provided by the company) into the library system (using the book’s barcode to automatically download information about the title) and attributed to a unique barcode for the system which was stuck in the inside front cover of the book. Each child in the school was also given a unique barcode so books could be scanned in an out. Aside from the technical glitch of the internet in the school going down for two-weeks (as mentioned in my previous blog), this system was extremely popular. It is a prime example of technology enriching the school lives of children, in this case by giving them a taste of responsibility. It is also a useful system that ensures that there is accountability for all books which, in theory, prevents the loss of school stock. GPP has ended and I am half way through my PGCE year (sort of). Hurrah! Over the next few posts I will reflect on the nine-week placement and discuss the technology I have seen (and not seen) in action. Today, I will focus on the Interactive Whiteboard and its associated software. In my classroom, we were in transition. The board we had, centralised in the middle of the wall at the front of the room, was a six-year-old Smartboard (from Smart Technologies) which worked with a large stylus type pen, but could be controlled by the PC attached. Although the board was on its last legs in terms of usability and it was slow to respond (although, this could have been the computer it was installed on), there were no immediate plans to replace it. Instead, the software attached to it was upgraded. No longer were lessons to be planned on “Notebook” (Smartboard’s own software), instead Promethean’s more up to date software “Activinspire” was to be used across the school. I downloaded my own trial copy from the Promethean website (available here) to help me to plan lessons at home more effectively. Unfortunately, we encountered a few problems with Promethean. Firstly, even though in many respects Activinspire is like Notebook, there was a significant proportion of the staff who did not know how to use it, and at that point training in the new software had yet to be given. Secondly, due to a licensing error, our copy did not work and would not go past the loading screen without putting in a key-code. This caused problems for one of my maths lessons, which had been prepared at home on Activinspire and therefore did not work, which led to a certain amount of consternation, followed by adaptation and reorganisation to deliver my lesson. From that point on, as the Notebook software was still installed on the school PC, my mentor and I took the executive decision to revert to that, a software that we knew would work. At home, I downloaded Notebook’s trial software (available here) and began to use that to plan. I enjoyed the notebook software and tended to design lesson accompaniments that were brightly coloured and involved interactive problems that the children could solve (particularly useful when covering division 2-step word problems in maths).
A further issue arose which impacted on our use of the IWB. For two-weeks, the internet (both WiFi and wired) went down. This meant that all planning had to be done at home, audio-visual resources had to be pre-downloaded, and interactive games that required the internet could not be used. This lack of internet also affected the printers (which were on a wireless system) which meant paper resources such as worksheets had to be created and printed at home, and photocopied at school (if the photocopier worked, which was also temperamental!) These experiences showed the sheer importance of having a seamless and robust ICT system in place, and being resilient enough to change your plans with not a moment’s notice. |
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