School Experience

Having been in school, share your observations and reflections in terms of the use of technology/ new literacies. What surprises you? What were the challenges and how might you overcome these? What questions arise for you? What have you learnt? Make links to any relevant readings.

On the 14^th of September, we were provided with the opportunity to visit a school in order to work with children in Year 6 on a project involving the use of new literacies.

Within the year, they had been focusing on the text ‘If the World Were A Village’ by David J. Smith, which compares a variety of different statistics taken from all over the world, such as religion and food in different continents. I firstly felt that this book was very engaging as children seemed to share a genuine interest in the book and the facts that came with it due to the fact that it related to the real world. As part of their task they were therefore asked to create their own multi-modal book based on their own school community which would eventually be made available to the rest of the school. The promise that this would be shared with the rest of the school as well as with parents with the school’s continuously updated online blog appeared to spark a real motivation with the children as this gave them a sense of ownership and pride over their work in a way a controlled piece of writing that only their teacher would see would not.

As I have not yet been in a school where technology is used heavily in areas outside of ICT, it was especially intriguing to observe a school where there is such a large focus on the use of technology throughout all subject areas. This meant that children were fluent in using all apps and all forms of technology presented to them, allowing them to carry out the task with ease as they rarely came across any glitches or misconceptions in regards to the iPads themselves. It was clear that there extensive experience in using the apps meant that they were able to make creative ideas in how they can represent their data which allowed them to get on with the task in hand.

With the children’s wide experience, I felt that one particular challenge that I came across was a fear that has concerned me in the past- that children are more fluent in what they are doing than I am as the educator. However I can now see that this is not necessarily a drawback. Although I feel it is still necessary that I become more familiar with apps that can aid education within the classroom, if children are able to perhaps do more than I can this rarely produces any problems for myself as the teacher and this can provide an opportunity for me to learn from children which is not necessarily a bad thing.

One aspect of the task the children had been set that I felt was particularly effective was the focus on collaborative work. At first I was slightly apprehensive as the typical scene that I envisioned was children all attempting to use one iPad to get one task done, which would inevitably lead to more confident children taking the lead and those less confident perhaps drifting into the background meaning that they would not necessarily benefit from the situation. However the way in which the session was structured, and the use of technology, such as being able to ‘drop’ pieces that others had created onto other members of their group’s iPads in order to create a larger collaborative piece, helped to demonstrate to me that this is not the case.

Overall I feel that this experience has equipped me to understand and appreciate the uses that new technologies such as iPads and their accompanying apps can have in schools and the ease in which they can be used to support a wide variety of topics.