Shirley Warren School Visit

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.

After working with the Year Six's at Shirley Warren Primary School with their ICT day I feel better equipped with how I could implement an ICT lesson and use ICT resources within a variety of areas in the National Curriculum. On our day visit the lesson was a heavily ICT resourced maths lesson. I found this intriguing and beneficial to the mathematical learning that occurred within the maths lesson because the children found it fun and exciting to be using iPads within their group to create their page.

Before the lesson we participated in, the class had been focusing on how data can be represented in order to portray the data collected in the clearest format. The book in which had sparked the focus for this topic was called: 'If the World were a Village' by Citizen Kid.

Here is an image of the book:

Citizen Kid is collection of books which aim to inform children about the world to inspire them to become better global citizens. This proved to be an excellent read for the maths input to the lesson as the children seemed very excited about the prospect of the book and were genuinely amazed with some of the facts they were presented with. The data within the book has been scaled down in order to allow children to relate to the numbers proportionally.

Within the children's previous taught lessons the children were placed into mixed ability groups and their task was to create a questionnaire for parents from Shirley Warren. Each group had a different topic focus. The group in which I was working with had a focus on the languages. The aim of the lesson was to represent the data they had collected about Shirley Warren and compare it to the data collected from 'If the World were a Village'. The children had to use iPads to create a double page spread using an app called 'Book Creator'.

On arrival to the school I was extremely excited by the concept of working with the children during this day of ICT. Any ICT knowledge about using iPads within the classroom has been extremely theoretical and this experience has allowed me to put the theories into practice. Shirley Warren Primary School believe that using media within the classroom aids all speaking and learning activities for the better and I believe I witnessed that on my visit to the school. My main concern was that I thought the children would become very distracted by the iPads and would not have enough time to complete their double page spread. However, the children could not have been more motivated, they were really intrigued with the concept of creating their own double page spread to then contribute to an entire class book and within their groups they genuinely enjoyed having their own pre-planned designs which then they created technologically on the iPads. 

Through the use of frequent technology enhanced lessons I believe as teachers we are preparing children for the future and through sustained iPad use we are facilitating learning for all different styles. The day at Shirley Warren provided an excellent example for how ICT can be incorporated throughout the curriculum. I was amazed with how able the children were with using the iPads and not only did I teach them techniques to improve their abilities but they also inspired my learning with their extremely inventive ideas surrounding how many types of media we could place on our double page spread. Overall the day was very interesting and helpful for my study as a ICT specialist.

This was my groups final piece of work: