Until my Enquiry Placement I had seen very little evidence of assistive technology being used for SEND purposes in the classroom, but on that placement I saw a wonderful use of iPads to assist a child that was visually impaired. The iPad was used to link up to the interactive whiteboard, mirroring the screen that every other child in the class could see, but on an iPad that was mounted on his desk. This allowed him to access the work that everyone else was doing. During Guided Reading, the teacher also ensured that she downloaded a large text e-copy of the book for him to read along with the class.
I have read about other ways creating an inclusive classroom using technology. One such way is use of microphones to assist children with hearing difficulties. One of my fellow trainees used this in the classroom, and expressed that it made a huge difference in terms of that child’s attainment. I will briefly, as part of this pick and mix unit, mention technology as an assessment tool. I mentioned, during my time on GPP, how the PE passport iPad app and the “Learning Ladders” program can make the job of assessing children much easier, as it collates the information you input and can generate useful reports to easily track progress (or lack thereof) across each child and throughout each year. There are other useful online assessment resources too, which I would love the opportunity to explore in greater depth on FPP, including the use of testing (summative assessment) through multiple choice Google forms to elicit information, which will immediately generate a picture of where each child/the class as a whole is in terms of that subject. Voting systems, as mentioned in a previous blog post, are another useful way of assessing children’s understanding. They can be used as a more immediate alternative to Google Forms.
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This pick and mix module is separated into several parts. I shall cover them all in order.
1. Learning through games Learning through interactive games is considered by many teachers to be a positive activity that can engage children in fun, competitive and exciting ways. Websites such as Espresso, which I had experience using during my time as a teaching assistant on iPads, allow children to play various games across the whole curriculum. It’s also quite handy for any special days throughout the year, such as remembrance day, mother’s day, Eid, Diwali etc… as it often updates with relevant activities to those times of year. Espresso and Education City both work in similar ways. They are packed with units of work for children to complete which include games. Children can work through these individually on iPads, or collaboratively during carpet time. 2. Handheld devices In some schools the ratio of equipment (often laptops or iPads) is 1:1. Sometimes however this isn’t the case. On iPads I can recommend the following apps: Garageband, Audacity and one of several stop motion animation applications. Fancy apps aren’t always necessary, though. Simple recording of video and audio can also be of great value to a class and can help teachers provide evidence when it comes to formative assessment. On laptops, I would thoroughly recommend Scratch and Scratch Jr. I will be blogging about this in the next few days. 3. Behaviour reward systems When I worked in the infants of a school in South Manchester, we used Class Dojos. This is a system whereby children can be rewarded with points (recorded on an animated avatar) for good behaviours. The programme has the capacity to also take away points for negative behaviour, but we opted not to use that function, so children consider the technology to be a positive force. In many ways this is a technological version of Skinner’s operant conditioning. 4. Harnessing YouTube Safely As many schools ban Youtube from being used in the classroom, it is worth planning ahead, downloading videos using a Youtube converter, and playing them without the adverts (which could show potentially inappropriate and uncontrolled material). 5. Classroom Voting SystemsI do not have any experience with classroom voting systems. That said, I have researched them and I am very excited at the prospect of using them in my classroom. They appear to be fantastic in terms of generating discussion, eliciting information that children do or do not know, and engaging children using technology. The advantages are numerous: they gather information very quickly and efficiently, pinging them to an associated app (program); they retain anonymity of children (great in terms of eliciting without causing potential embarrassment); they are a great formative assessment tool, which can direct teachers to what the next stage in teaching should be. One disadvantage though, of course, is the cost associated with a) the purchase and b) the upkeep of the technology. The most commonly used Classroom voting systems are called Socrative and Activote. 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. Today I was in the privileged position to witness, via the medium of Skype video conferencing, the teacher of a Year Four class in Cornwall leading a cross-curricular science lesson on 'Sound'. Before I discuss the pedagogy, behaviour management techniques and (crucially) the children's reactions, I'd like to first explore the technology - what should be celebrated and what was flawed, what worked and what did not. Skype is a free application available on PC, Mac and across handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets, as well as through some connected televisions. It allows two (or more) users to interact with each other face-to-face, using a front mounted camera, over the Internet (handheld devices may use 4G connections if their data plans allow it). It can also be used as a 'free' substitute for a telephone in audio only mode, and is often used in the business world. I'll get into practical applications of Skype in the Primary School classroom a little later in this blog. Our intention was to join the class at 10:30 am for the start of the lesson, but we encountered various technological issues that threatened us with the possibility of having to change our plans. Both we, in our seminar room in Manchester, and they, in their classroom in Cornwall, were online and connected to Skype (our icons told us so), but we could not get our video call started (we each could see that 'our end' worked, which meant that the issue was not with the front mounted camera, but we could not make a connection). We called and we called, and regularly saw images such as these: Our Science course leader used a system of trial and error to attempt to solve the problem he was faced with. He knew that simply calling and re-calling and re-calling was getting us nowhere so he attempted a number of fixes. The first fix was rebooting Skype, a simple case of restarting the program. Once it had reloaded he hit the 'call' icon once more to test whether it had worked, but it had not, and we were faced with a repeat of the photographs above. The next thing he tried was a cold reboot. This is tech-speak for turning the machine off and back on again. Again, after a restart, we encountered the same problems. He considered a third option, using another platform, FaceTime, but we quickly ascertained that, as the Cornish school were using a PC, their technology was incompatible with that application. The successful fix came when the course leader changed the hardware from a Mac laptop to an iPad. By 10:45 we were rolling! The video call itself was patchy in places. It suffered a little in the way of audio drop-out and pixilation, but for our purposes it was perfectly fine.
The lesson cleverly linked the Science National Curriculum learning outcomes with relation to 'sound' with the class' current topic of the Vikings. The teacher, Mr W, set the context for the lesson by explaining that a fictional viking had written to the class demanding a new instrument (to replace the horn) that fit a set of criteria - it must be able to rise and fall in amplitude and in pitch. He then re-capped the previous day's learning by asking a number of multiple choice questions of the class. The class each held up a card with (what looked like) a QR code on it. Mr W held his iPad up to the card and recorded their answers. We were later told that the app was called Plickers (I shall look into this at a later date) Mr W had already set up a "carousel" with a different musical instrument on each table. On one table there was a guitar, on another bells, on a third a boom whacker, on a fourth, a tambourine and fifthly, a drum. He split his pupils, by table, into different roles, each with a distinct purpose - one was a tester, another a scribe and another a reporter. This technique gave the children a focus during the experiment. The carousel turned at the sound of the teacher's gong, roughly every three minutes, which was enough time to test each instrument for amplitude and pitch, and record findings. Mr W allowed children to record their findings in any way they saw fit - this included drawing, using iPad technology, or writing a detailed account - this open and creative brief seemed to maximise engagement in the activity and led to a more qualitative and lively discussion when they fed back as a class. A note about behaviour management techniques. The teacher did not once raise his voice. He used a varying degree of pitch and volume, and a lot of non-verbal prompts, such as a look or a hand gesture. At one point he said "you have this many minutes" and held up three digits - this ensured that every child's eyes were on him, concentrating on the instructions. It was inspiring and I'll definitely consider using something similar myself when on placement. Finally, before I sign off (it's pushing midnight here and I need my beauty sleep) I'd like to conclude that yes, the technology is temperamental, but when it finally did work it provided my class and I with a window to good teaching practice, a window that without the technology could not have been opened without traveling 330 miles. Skype isn't perfect, it glitches all the time, but it certainly has its upsides, and it could be applied in a number of school situations - parents evenings could be achieved remotely, if parents can't attend; interscholastic training events could be held using skype as a conduit; and children could use it for class projects - such as buddying up with another class from another school in another country. There are so many possibilities, and today we merely scratched the surface. * Photographs taken and uploaded with the full permission of the school * |
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