When I was first introduced to the idea of blogging, I was unsure about how it would help me to become a 'reflective practitioner'. I was already quite used to reflecting on my experiences, and honestly, I could not really see how this blog would help me to build upon this.
Having read through my posts however, I can see a dialogue has emerged, as I reflect on the uses of ICT within the primary curriculum. I hadn't even realised this is what I had been doing! So from having not a lot to say about how ICT can impact upon the work in the classroom, I have a long, and often interesting list of my own developed thoughts and feelings toward s the subject.
This blog has been a space where I can say what I feel, I can admit to uncertainty and I can question anything. They are questions that may not be answered (as who in fact am I asking?), but they are questions that allow me to progress to the next stage in my thinking. Teachers always hark on about key questions for pupils, but to become effect practitioners surely we need to ask ourselves some key questions too? By posing questions and admitting uncertainties we are being honest, we can hold up our hands up and say, 'what is that about?' or 'I'm not sure I understand'. Again, these are things we encourage children to do in our classrooms, surely we should learn from what we teach.
Having mentioned that a blog has been a good place for me to do this, it would then suggest that it is a good way for a child to also do the same. I have mentioned in a previous blog that I wanted to use one for the children to reflect on what they learned in their practical maths lesson, sadly however, the resources were not available.
I have begun to realise how effective and instrumental ICT can be in teaching and learning. For some children, 'computer' or 'ninendo' are such bizz words, that you will command their attention immediately. If this is the case, why not use these things in your teaching. the children will instantly be interested, and they will put time and effort into the learning. Afterall, what is more engaging and exciting, 30 mintues writing the answers to maths word problems in a book, or 30 minutes maths training on the nintendo DS? Of course, there are implications on cost and resources in this example, but it needn't be as extreme. Children, as I did here, respond to ICT and we should be giving them every opportunity to do so.
And, to answer a previous question posed in a blog of mine, to blog is definately the answer.
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Tuesday 24 February 2009
Once upon a time, in a school not so far away...
The first time I visited my school, I made a judgement. I assumed that not many children would have computer access at home, and I was right. I then assumed that this would affect their computer proficiency in school. Here however, is where I was wrong.
In my first ICT with the children, they were all seemingly confident users of the computers in the designated ICT suite. It was on a serial day, so I spent the majority of the lesson observing. The children were learning how to use the Softease programme 'Branch' to create a branch database. The data involved mini beasts - a direct link with their current geography and science topics. The lesson began in the classroom. The children gathered around the IWB and the teacher modelled how to access and run the programme. She then explained how it worked, and showed an example. The children watched, and then had a go together, telling the teaching what to press and when, to make the programme work. They had taken in the step by step process that she had modelled. We then wrote a set on instructions as to how to open and run the programme - the children told me what to do, and I wrote them up on the flip chart. They had told me correctly, and so we took the instructions and class to the ICT suite. The lesson went really well and the children were extremely proficient in using the new programme. They then used Word to insert some text art, printed their final product, and saved it to a designated folder.
So, the children were confident users of ICT within school. My teacher mentor was also, incidentally, the ICT co-ordinator. I decided it was a great opportunity to get to grips within not only teaching ICT, but in using ICT to support my teaching, in other areas of the curriculum.
Initially, I did not feel as though I was incorporating much ICT into my teaching. As a start, I was planning each lesson, and series of lessons on the computer, and then saving them to the school's teacher network. this meant that every teacher in the school would have access to my plans. I also used existing plans, that were saved on the network, to inform my planning. This was a fantastic use of ICT within the school, and one that I would encourage other schools to develop and use. I know that other students did not have this facility in their schools, and it is s shame because it is an excellent space for sharing resources, ideas, and planning. It is also the place where attainment and progress levels are kept. This means that any teacher can access his information at any time, meaning that progress, learning and achievement can be tracked between and across year groups.
In addition to these plans, I was also creating Smart notebooks for each lesson I taught. I would create a notebook with key questions, concepts and interactive activities to work through with the class in the input to the lesson. I would then keep the learning objective and success criteria displayed on the IWB throughout the lesson. Children would then use this to assess how they were working at points during the lesson, and before the plenary. As I become more confident in my teaching, and as I got to know the children better I began to incorporate more interactive activities on the IWB. I would get the children up to rearrange decimal numbers in size order, to use a number grid to multiply and divide by 10, 100 and 1000 by having the numbers to the left or to the right on the grid.
Without really realising, I had been incorporating ICT into my teaching. I had come naturally, I did not really see how I could have progressed so far without the use of ICT! I was e-mailing my teacher mentor on a daily basis, I was using the teacher network every day, and the children were using ICT in almost every lesson. A great start, I thought. I wanted to do more however. I think that using ICT to support teaching and learning is more than using the IWB each lesson. It is second nature to the children to use it and to learn from it. I wanted to help them consolidate their learning in new and effective ways.
As a progression on from the interactive smart board activities, I planned in games and quizzes on interactive websites. In the learning zone on the BBC, there were many activities which helped to develop the children's knowledge and understanding of the Victorians. They took part in investigating a Victorian classroom, a day in the life of a child chimney sweep, what a rich Victorian home looked like, all from their own classroom in 2009! The children were really enthusiastic during the lessons, and they said themselves that they learnt far more than they had been learning from books about the Victorians. The children applied this learning in writing diaries, letters and posters, which gave me an opportunity to see what they had taken in. The whole thing was really successful.
I did similar activities in science, where the children could test components of circuits on the computer. These activities made really useful plenaries to science lessons. During the lesson, the children would learn the science, and in the plenary I would use the interactive games and quizzes to assess their knowledge and understanding. The children enjoyed it too!
I was still very aware of the fact that my use of ICT within lessons was based around the computer, when there is in fact far more to ICT than the IWB. In a practical maths lesson my teacher asked me whether I wanted the children to write anything down in their books (I was collecting evidence for Assessing Pupils' Progress). I thought about it for a while, and decided that yes I did want some evidence of this learning. I found the cameras at the back of the classroom and gave them out to the children. They spent time taking photos of each other doing their maths tasks, and they enjoyed taking responsibility for recording the work they were doing. I then sent two children to collect the photos from the printer, and asked the children what we were going to do with all their pictures. Their first response was that they wanted to take them home. After a little prompting from me, they decided that they could write captions beneath the photos to describe what they had been doing in the lesson, and what they had learned. Ideally, here I would have liked the children to add captions to their photos on a Word programme, as they proficient in doing this, however there was no access to computers in the classroom, and the ICT suite was in use. Another activity that would have worked well here, would have been to upload the photos onto a blog, and to write about their learning experiences there.
This was the one factor I felt really limited mine and the children's use of ICT. There were a selection of laptops available to use in the classroom, however they were old and they were slow, and my mentor suggested that they were not really worth the hassle. This gave me the challenge however, as I've described above, of using ICT without computers, which can be just as, if not more useful an effective, than using computers directly.
I feel confident and ready to take what I have learnt from this placement into other school, in other placements and on into my career. I know that many other schools will have more computer access, and I feel that I now have a good grounding on which to stand, and can develop on in such a school.
Having found out my next placement school is such a school, I am anxious and excited to develop my use of ICT to help children learn.
In my first ICT with the children, they were all seemingly confident users of the computers in the designated ICT suite. It was on a serial day, so I spent the majority of the lesson observing. The children were learning how to use the Softease programme 'Branch' to create a branch database. The data involved mini beasts - a direct link with their current geography and science topics. The lesson began in the classroom. The children gathered around the IWB and the teacher modelled how to access and run the programme. She then explained how it worked, and showed an example. The children watched, and then had a go together, telling the teaching what to press and when, to make the programme work. They had taken in the step by step process that she had modelled. We then wrote a set on instructions as to how to open and run the programme - the children told me what to do, and I wrote them up on the flip chart. They had told me correctly, and so we took the instructions and class to the ICT suite. The lesson went really well and the children were extremely proficient in using the new programme. They then used Word to insert some text art, printed their final product, and saved it to a designated folder.
So, the children were confident users of ICT within school. My teacher mentor was also, incidentally, the ICT co-ordinator. I decided it was a great opportunity to get to grips within not only teaching ICT, but in using ICT to support my teaching, in other areas of the curriculum.Initially, I did not feel as though I was incorporating much ICT into my teaching. As a start, I was planning each lesson, and series of lessons on the computer, and then saving them to the school's teacher network. this meant that every teacher in the school would have access to my plans. I also used existing plans, that were saved on the network, to inform my planning. This was a fantastic use of ICT within the school, and one that I would encourage other schools to develop and use. I know that other students did not have this facility in their schools, and it is s shame because it is an excellent space for sharing resources, ideas, and planning. It is also the place where attainment and progress levels are kept. This means that any teacher can access his information at any time, meaning that progress, learning and achievement can be tracked between and across year groups.
In addition to these plans, I was also creating Smart notebooks for each lesson I taught. I would create a notebook with key questions, concepts and interactive activities to work through with the class in the input to the lesson. I would then keep the learning objective and success criteria displayed on the IWB throughout the lesson. Children would then use this to assess how they were working at points during the lesson, and before the plenary. As I become more confident in my teaching, and as I got to know the children better I began to incorporate more interactive activities on the IWB. I would get the children up to rearrange decimal numbers in size order, to use a number grid to multiply and divide by 10, 100 and 1000 by having the numbers to the left or to the right on the grid.
Without really realising, I had been incorporating ICT into my teaching. I had come naturally, I did not really see how I could have progressed so far without the use of ICT! I was e-mailing my teacher mentor on a daily basis, I was using the teacher network every day, and the children were using ICT in almost every lesson. A great start, I thought. I wanted to do more however. I think that using ICT to support teaching and learning is more than using the IWB each lesson. It is second nature to the children to use it and to learn from it. I wanted to help them consolidate their learning in new and effective ways.
As a progression on from the interactive smart board activities, I planned in games and quizzes on interactive websites. In the learning zone on the BBC, there were many activities which helped to develop the children's knowledge and understanding of the Victorians. They took part in investigating a Victorian classroom, a day in the life of a child chimney sweep, what a rich Victorian home looked like, all from their own classroom in 2009! The children were really enthusiastic during the lessons, and they said themselves that they learnt far more than they had been learning from books about the Victorians. The children applied this learning in writing diaries, letters and posters, which gave me an opportunity to see what they had taken in. The whole thing was really successful.I did similar activities in science, where the children could test components of circuits on the computer. These activities made really useful plenaries to science lessons. During the lesson, the children would learn the science, and in the plenary I would use the interactive games and quizzes to assess their knowledge and understanding. The children enjoyed it too!
I was still very aware of the fact that my use of ICT within lessons was based around the computer, when there is in fact far more to ICT than the IWB. In a practical maths lesson my teacher asked me whether I wanted the children to write anything down in their books (I was collecting evidence for Assessing Pupils' Progress). I thought about it for a while, and decided that yes I did want some evidence of this learning. I found the cameras at the back of the classroom and gave them out to the children. They spent time taking photos of each other doing their maths tasks, and they enjoyed taking responsibility for recording the work they were doing. I then sent two children to collect the photos from the printer, and asked the children what we were going to do with all their pictures. Their first response was that they wanted to take them home. After a little prompting from me, they decided that they could write captions beneath the photos to describe what they had been doing in the lesson, and what they had learned. Ideally, here I would have liked the children to add captions to their photos on a Word programme, as they proficient in doing this, however there was no access to computers in the classroom, and the ICT suite was in use. Another activity that would have worked well here, would have been to upload the photos onto a blog, and to write about their learning experiences there.
This was the one factor I felt really limited mine and the children's use of ICT. There were a selection of laptops available to use in the classroom, however they were old and they were slow, and my mentor suggested that they were not really worth the hassle. This gave me the challenge however, as I've described above, of using ICT without computers, which can be just as, if not more useful an effective, than using computers directly.
I feel confident and ready to take what I have learnt from this placement into other school, in other placements and on into my career. I know that many other schools will have more computer access, and I feel that I now have a good grounding on which to stand, and can develop on in such a school.
Having found out my next placement school is such a school, I am anxious and excited to develop my use of ICT to help children learn.
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