Primary Strategy Day

The learning and teaching with ICT network met late last December. So, this is a very overdue Blog entry! It was another good day, though I was hoping we could have had access to the hotel wireless Internet, so as to blog live, but it was not to be.

I'll try to highlight some of the salient point that relate to ICT, many of which were covered in the recent ICT subject leaders meeting, which was far too crammed as it was!

Foundation Stage ICT and assessment documenting

From this presentation from teachers and consultant in this pilot, we learned about how some schools were using photographs, tablet PCs and talk in learning. Many foundation stage teachers take photographs for recording purposes, but this project hit upon how to best use these as a teaching/assessing/talking tool.

What happens is that the foundation stage teacher would take an image of the children involved in a child initiated activity (or indeed any activity) and he would then insert this onto a PowerPoint page on his tablet PC. Having this shot in front of him he could then talk to the children about what they had been doing, while annotating the image with their comments. This form of assessment/discussion goes against the tick box grain and is very real and immediate.

The images were all saved and used in a number of ways:

• A rolling slide show was shown just next to the parents entrance, in order for parents to see what had been going on- this really helped with parental links


• The images were stored in each child's folder for viewing between practitioners, sencos etc


• The images were used again later in the year as a discussion/ reflection tool with the children- we listened to one example of this where children looked back on a picture taken in autumn, but during the spring term.

There were comments such as

"Why is it dark?"

"Because it is night"

"It can't be night, we are in school'

"Maybe it was our night walk that we had"

"Who is that on the slide?"

These comments and questions, show how an image can be used, even with small children to develop reasoning and questioning skills.

Those involved in the project also found that they soon moved beyond the regular posed shots of children and into more reportage work, though they had not explored the children using the cameras as much.

The BECTA Self Review Grid

Many coordinators that have looked at the BECTA self review grid (srf), have felt daunted by the standard needed to reach ICT Mark status. That is, if you look at every area of the grid and compare where you are and where you could be, but the grid can be a very powerful tool for developing vision and action planning. It needn't be just for those schools that want an ICT mark.

The network recommended using the teaching and learning strand, as a tool to assess where a school might be at with their integration of ICT across the curriculum. This they said, would be helpful when auditing and action planning for the implementation of the new frameworks fro Literacy and Numeracy. If you haven't looked at the SRF yet, then I recommend you go to the BECTA site and register your school. This and Keys to Learning are two very useful tools to help your school move forward with ICT in the new frameworks for Literacy and Numeracy.

Keys to Learning

What is it?

This is what TeacherNet says:

What is it? a DVD and booklet package that supports teachers in making links between their own use of ICT to support teaching and children's use of ICT to support their learning. Keys to Learning covers 7 areas of Literacy and Mathematics:
Early reading
Calculation
Reading on screen
Problem solving
Shape and space
Writing Key Stage 1
Writing Key Stage 2
It offers a wide variety of resources, including:
Professional development meeting outlines, supported by video clips of classroom practice and all of the resources needed to deliver them
Spreadsheet workbooks, interactive whiteboard files and interactive teaching programmes
Reading and writing kits including teaching sequences, interactive and multimodal texts, templates, digital images, sounds and videos
Lesson outlines for mathematics
Support for using ICT to develop early reading
How can it help? It can be used by leadership teams to support professional development, or individual teachers looking to develop their use of ICT, and that of their learners.