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The skill I’m going to look at developing in my class this year is collaboration. As others have mentioned, collaboration is often referred to and included in class planning but when looked at more closely is not true collaboration.
I plan to have the children do a collaborative project with each member of the group contributing an individual piece which when all put together will complete the project. The children will work together to make substantive decisions about the topic and decide what elements of the topic each of them will be responsible for. The children will decide together how they would like to present their project. Will they use IT eg. Sway or PPT or present it a different way? I think a jigsaw technique would be really useful in this situation.Whilst the skill I will be focusing on developing is collaboration, knowledge construction and self-regulation will also be important 21st century skills that will be developed when doing project work.
At present, we have shared access to a class set of iPad within a large school. There can be issues with timetabling as often people are looking to use them at the same time. We are also lucky to have 4 desktop computers at the back of the class. Last year, I had a group of students who used Nessy Reading and Spelling. This was particularly successful and I feel this, alongside daily intervention from SET helped the students using it make great progress in reading. The school also has a subscription to Raz Kids, an online levelled reading programme where children read at their assigned pre-assessed level.. Having access to the ipads during guided reading was really beneficial. One station would access Raz Kids during the session.
The examples of Statements of Practice affirmed my understanding that using programmes that are personalised for each child are viewed as highly effective practice rather than using technology to access information and present projects etc. Using the statements will be helpful in guiding the evaluation of use of technology in my class.
Establishing a Digital Learning Team would be extremely beneficial to ensure a whole school approach to the digital learning plan by ensuring that all areas of the school are represented in the plan. It would also facilitate communicating the digital learning plan to the entire staff.At the moment I am using Activ Inspire software for the interactive whiteboard because I wasn’t aware of how useful OneNote can be. My teaching content is on Activ Inspire and I store supporting PPTs, video links or documents etc. in the flipchart, or what usually happens is they are just stored in a folder on SharePoint. It is tricky to manage what content and resources are there because there is no clear layout like in OneNote. I like the way all different topics can be stored within the Class Notebook and given different chapter and page names. It is great how students can be given access to the content without being able to edit it, this gives them opportunity to access the material again if necessary or to facilitate flipped learning.
The way OneNote allows the use of many different apps to be embedded within the class notebook will cater to the various different learning styles within a class. I particularly like the feature that allows videos to be viewed without leaving the notebook. The immersive reader is fantastic. The way it can break words into syllables is extremely useful for helping students to decode as is the picture dictionary to help with comprehension.Teams is a really useful platform for collaboration and communicating amongst staff. I work in a large school with 30+ teachers and we have been using Teams for the last few years. Teams was very useful for hosting staff meetings during Covid restrictions although I found it is better for presenting information rather than having discussions. The ability to work collaboratively on documents is great. It gives people the flexibility to contribute at a time that suits them and it can also be done remotely so that if people have to leave they can work from home.
In our school, Teams is used from 3rd to 6th class and the younger classes use Seesaw. I am working with 1st class and I think that Teams might be a little tricky for the younger kids to get to grips with and orient. I think it is better suited for the senior classes in primary or secondary. I think the way information can be organised is great.Sway has huge potential for use in the classroom, not just for teacher created lessons and presentation but for the children creating their own content. Towards the end of the year in 1st class, we were doing information reports in genre writing. As part of the assignment for this module, I used Sway to create a simple information report. Whilst I need more practise to become better at formatting the digital stories, it gives an example of how the children could use Sway to present their writing and I’m sure that they would take to it a lot quicker than me! We have Microsoft 365 in school and have been using Teams, outlook, SharePoint, word etc. Without the course I wouldn’t have known about Sway and Forms.
Again, I think Forms will be very useful both for assessment and gathering information from staff and parents. Regarding gathering information, the ability to review the responses and interpret the data makes Forms an extremely useful tool to help schools in the SSE process.Hi Eoin,
Thanks for getting back to me. I’m not given any option when I go to paste my response. I’ll just type it in. It won’t take me that long. I don’t think it’s a formatting issue. It’s when I submit the post that it brings me to a warning page from Wordfence.
Sorry, when I copy over my answer from Word it brings me to a page that says “A potentially unsafe operation has been detected in your request to this site.” Is this a common error? Do I need to type my post?
Thanks
