The John Davitt Day
Thank you to John for agreeing to do this interview, and thanks to Nic form Nightingale who use the Ibook to video the whole thing.
(note be patient with this clip- i had difficulty uploading the compressed version)
So what can we take from our Literacy and ICT day??
Well I am going to paste the notes that John made and add my own- this may or may not make sense to you- but I hope that together with Rebecca and Helen we will have a Literacy and ICT mini site quite soon.
Visual plenary
John passed on the idea of taking shots of our compositions ( objects, art works even pieces of writing ) and these were then slotted into Microsoft Photos Story- a free download - music and voice could then be added quickly before viewing and reflecting.
ICT as scaffolding tool
In the new framework ICT is a tool for the teacher, allowing him/her to stimulate thinking/discussing and ultimately writing but also as a tool to help scaffold writing. This point was made first by Rebecca but illustrated by John when he said :
I don't know what I think until I write it - the computer can work as a tool or a medium for that writing.
12 strands
Though the two big strands for Literacy and ICT are 9 and 12- there is no doubt that ICT can be used throughout the whole framework- though ultimately we can not do it all through ICT - the pencil is still very much with us - and the framework calls for other skills two ( vital ones at that ) such as group discussion and drama
Word recognition word structure and spelling
We spent some time looking at Word root, software that was developed by John that highlights the parts of words e.g. anticlockwise (anti- against the direction of the clock)
We layed out a selection of paper words on the floor and were asked to domino or walk from one word to another by looking for sword parts that were the same. I stepped from automobile to autocrat and over onto automatic . This was a good way of demonstrating by kinesthetic means) the links between word and offered a good tool for helping children to decode by recognizing common parts-@ I know what auto means so what might an autocrat be...hmm
Getting the screen to team ratio right.
What we did in the above exercise- journeying about the room, mapping , lining or whatever you want to call it! Is an excellent means of setting out ideas. Children could for example place picture onto the floor and step from one to another and describe each one, as a mean of planning out a story. This would be the team aspect- they could then return to their PCs and plan out their stories- this is the screen part-
The screen to team ratio remind us that children should not be sat at their seats like a 50s typing pool- they like us need break out space. It remind me of the ICT suite I saw last week with the huge bold Comic sans sign, proclaiming:
STAY IN YOUR SEATS-----WHY?
Year 5 film narrative unit…..
Online contact with author
Collab produced help files
Sharing the recipe
PhotoStory
Presentation
Brings movement to images
Easy to sequence add sound and music
The we looked at delicious
Delicious is a way of sharing bookmarks and could be described as a sort of online favorites store. it become truly powerful when people start to share their tags and bookmarks
John asked:
Why not a redbridge literacy delicious site that others could become fans of
To visit delicious go to (do be careful!! use the link below- do not just Google delicious )
Visit my bookmarks by following the link at the top of the page.
For multilayered texts
Add annotation
Strikethrough
Hyperlinks
Add wave file in insert object
Ad a music file from iTunes
Hyperlink to any type of file
In strand 9 - there is mention of creating multi-layered texts- this can initially look quite daunting but John showed us this can simply be a word file containing hyperlinks or sound objects- Dead easy to create and to share for peer evaluation
However my mind loves 2create as a tool for creating multilayered texts
The voice project
Helen ( she and Rebecca are the Literacy consultants, don't you know!) talked to us about the Voice project, which was developed in the borough over the last few years.
It's aim were to provide children with a voice to write through a range of stimuli, this could be film, image or art work. The work that came out of this was fantastic and showed how using such stimuli could spark the imagination in young minds. We saw some work from Churchfields, where the teacher had showed a BFI animation, the children had then created their own short films using digi blue and then finally put pen to paper. It was hard to believe we were seeing work from an Infant school.
What else?
Well I didn't even talk about the afternoon where we made Flash animations and E-books or Podcasting with audacity.
What now?
The role of the leading teachers is surely to now translate and to some degree dilute the content of the day for the Mrs Jones in Y5, the teachers who will be turned off by the inclusion of ICT in literacy. The skilled ICT coordinator will not hog resources or skills but will gently coach and lead others into effective use of ICT as a tool for writing and the teaching of writing. Notice I said effective use, by that I mean appropriate use and not overuse
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