Transforming Teaching and Learning

[divide margin_top=”10″ margin_bottom=”10″ color=”#a0a0a0″]

Abstract

ICT has fundamentally changed the way we live our everyday lives and conduct our business, yet it is easy for teachers to exist in a time-warp of outdated ideas of education. In this school the staff have been concentrating on using technology to transform learning. The teachers see independent learning and paying more attention to the childrens’ learning needs as a fundamental issue in democratic citizenship.

Author: John Cuthell

Publication Date: 2003

[s2If !is_user_logged_in()]More… To see the complete Case Study, please Login or Join.[/s2If]

[divide margin_top=”10″ margin_bottom=”10″ color=”#a0a0a0″]

[s2If is_user_logged_in()]

Technology

The UnITy web resources

The Internet for source materials

Promethean Interactive whiteboards with a range of reading software

Jolly phonics software

Key players

Early years reading specialist

Learners

Early years readers

Methodology

Action research supported by the MirandaNet team

Analysis of the key issues

The aim of this project was to enrich reading skills through the use of ICT with the youngest children in school. By the end of KS 1 the children should have the following skills, and should be able to:

Gather information from a variety of sources;

Enter and retrieve information in a variety of forms;

Retrieve information that has been stored;

Use text, tables, images and sound to develop ideas;

Select from and add to information that has been retrieved for particular purposes;

Try things out and explore what happens in real and imaginary situations.

Technology was employed to provide a contemporary context where children were exposed not only to conventional literacy challenges, but also to the demands of multimedia communication.

Conclusions

ICT enables children to access information from a number of different sources in a visual way that makes information clear to children whose knowledge, understanding or experience of the world is still developing. When trying to make sense of the world about you, one picture is worth a thousand words. The facility for cutting and pasting teaches the skills of ordering and organising information. It allows the child to take down information, delete what is not relevant and reorder and group information into categories.

These skills used to be boring to learn and difficult to teach in the artificial context of a comprehension passage. How much more essential, relevant and fun when ICT is used to organise information to pass onto a third party, to be published on the web and seen by others, perhaps even in other countries? No one else reads a pupil’s work in an exercise book, but they will see the relevance and the importance of producing their best work if there is the potential, if not the reality, of the work being seen by a world-wide audience. Being acknowledged by others has far more motivational power than being awarded a gold star.

The teachers in this project are now convinced that using ICT in the classroom is more than teaching a set of skills, it is teaching twenty-first century ways of thinking. Good and relevant use of ICT increases the engagement and motivation of our pupils and improves their behaviour because they are actively involved in learning. If it is taught correctly – not as a subject but as a vehicle for retrieving, analysing and sharing information with a real audience – it develops the children’s analytical skills in an exciting and relevant way and makes them active, critical and self-confident learners.

[divide margin_top=”10″ margin_bottom=”10″ color=”#a0a0a0″]