The first school website I thought of visiting was Sacred Heart Catholic Primary in Roehampton as we had visited this school in Year 1 to see a great example of an ICT suite. They had iPads per student, PCs and Macs, an ICT coordinator who was passionate and a very good ICT teacher. I thought that I’d find an equally impressive school website. But I was wrong. All the necessary information can be found but delving deeper revealed several areas where links didn’t work or they would link to 404 error pages or poorly maintained Google Drive sites. The design itself is very formal and with empty white space, minimal information per page, drop down lists that are too long and image links with no labels. I felt like any parent trying to navigate this would be left frustrated.

Next I ventured to the website of my former school (both as a pupil and a volunteer), Hounslow Town Primary School. I was quite blown away with the difference! The design is much more colourful with features from the actual school integrated into the background giving significant uniqueness. It caters towards children with decent animations of animals and children, yields a great deal of information clearly and without being overwhelming. It isn’t too cluttered, every link worked as expected and it is kept up to date. It’s not confusing to navigate, all the cute animations work without being distracting and is wholly more fun and playful than the previous website. Very much what I would want from a primary school. There is an obvious sense of care and attention present, the designer is clearly very capable! Part of my job as a software tester is to feedback on the design of apps and put myself in a user’s shoes pointing out any issues. Oh, wait. I’ve just found some overlapping text on one of the pages. I take back everything I said! I kid, I was left very impressed by my old school’s website.

The comparison is interesting because I would say that Sacred Heart has a considerably more advanced ICT suite than Hounslow Town. You would expect the websites to be characteristic and probably the other way round. While I would have said that you can tell a lot about a school and its focus from the website, this might not always be the case!

In Which I Found Out About Quadblogging.

We’ve established that blogging is great. See previous blogs and this old (in tech terms) video:

Having your class write a blog can be beneficial to their reading and writing skills but where they really become effective is when they have an audience. A blog without an audience is like a library without books according to David Mitchell, the creator of Quadblogging. It’s a very simple concept for connecting schools across the world. Four schools take turns being the focus school, writing blogs while the other three read and write comments on it.

Actually, while that does it explain the concept, THIS video is more fun:

The stats say it works, “connecting over 100,000 pupils from over 4000 classes in 40 countries” and the students say it works. You can see them talking with each other on the Quadblogging Twitter page.

Most often, a pupil’s school work goes as far as, maybe, their parents. Using Quadblogging, they have a guaranteed international audience where their work gets feedback from like-minded children. There are lessons to learn about how the internet works, e-safety, typing skills and other general ICT skills. So while there is significant enthusiasm for the project within a class, there is an environment that can be most productive for learning.

As an enthusiastic ICT teacher, I’m confident that I will venture towards schemes like this, new and uncharted territories for learning within ICT. I’m interested to find out what could be next. Or what is currently going on that I don’t know about. My adventure continues…

[embeddoc url=”https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/~/media/EDT/files/research/2014/r-blogging-2014.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

A thoroughly robust and substantial argument for the use of blogs in schools. I heartily agreed with all of it and will definitely use blogs in my classroom. The area I wish to magnify, however, is on assessment. I’m not so confident in this area, you see. How do you mark blogs? Is it the same as for literacy in their books? How can you tell improvement over time? Can I use a green biro on the computer monitor?

The article mentions, for a start, that teachers that utilised blogs would comment on their pupils’ posts in a very different way. Responding more positively, less criticism, no correcting of punctuation and spelling and more of a continuing of the conversation than as an assessment of their work (and no green biro on the monitor). Some teachers conducted comprehension and discussion on the carpet to further evaluate children’s blogs.

The pupil’s definitely noticed the difference and responded positively, feeling less under pressure and able to write with more freedom. The case studies in the article were conducted over a period of several months so (most) teachers were able to see improvements by comparing early and later blogs and also their book writing.

I thieved a rubric for assessing blogs off the internet (from http://edtechteacher.org/assessment/) and, although it is designed more for higher education use, it’s not so specific that it cannot be used in primary school.

[embeddoc url=”https://timhorgan.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/blogging-rubric.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Since reading this article, I’m much more confident in how blogs can be used, how they should be presented to children to be most effective and how to assess the children in order to maximise their self-esteem, further their understanding of the topic and improve their writing in all areas.

Something that stood out at me when I looked over my notes from session 2. The notion of having ‘digital leaders’ in the classroom. Pupils with exceptional ICT skills. During ICT lessons on block placement, it was immediately obvious that the children were far more enthusiastic than the teachers. And some were even more gifted technologically. Teacher’s (and even students teacher’s) apparent fear of technology is boggles me considering the amount of jobs that require the use of a computer. If you didn’t have the subject knowledge in History in order to teach about the Aztecs, you would acquire it. I’m getting off track.

ANYWAY. I figure there will always be certain children in the class that show more of a passion and interest in ICT than the others and now I know that this can be used to a teacher’s advantage. Digital leaders can be trained up in after-school clubs first and foremost to develop their own skills and pique their interest further in ICT. From there, they can be used as mini-technicians to help in your own class, less set-up for teachers making lessons more efficient. They can also go into other classes to help where the teacher may be less confident in ICT or where particular children struggle. They can be paired with lower ability students, invoking Vygotsky’s theory of the More Knowledgeable Other. The lower ability pupil benefits from having someone explain things in more detail and, in explaining their knowledge, the leader reinforces their own skills. Win-win.

This article by Sal McKeown (2015) also reinforces the use of digital leaders and noting that it is a scheme that is “as much about developing children’s leadership skills as their technical competence.” Therefore, it is necessary to have “reasonable literacy skills” in order to explain effectively. It is mentioned that they can even run their own clubs if they are “…confident, responsible, reliable and good communicators.”

To me, this is a no-brainer. In my own practice, I am definitely going to pursue avenues that enable a similar scheme to be implemented. I would relish the opportunity to pass on the passion that I have for ICT to like-minded and passionate children.

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/claridgm/files/2016/10/Computers-in-Human-Behavior-pgswdp.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

The study attached showed that despite the historical differences between particular areas of Northern Ireland, an ICT programme can be used to create community cohesion among young people. In fact, it was actually secondary to the skills gained directly through the programme, “pupils gained ICT skills, successfully completed a piece of work together and gained experience that could be useful in either Higher Education or in the work place. Any improvement to community relations was a by-product of the other benefits.”

Northern Ireland is not the only place where something like this could work, less-developed countries could benefit, arguably more so. A quick web search found me at this paper on ICT communities in South Africa and this key quote, “Community centres incorporating ICTs can aid in bridging the digital divide by providing access to information and facilities to indigent community inhabitants. Such centres can bring communities together to create a knowledgeable society, strengthening the population, and improving its ability to fight poverty. (Cogburn, 2000)”

The power of ICT as a means of connecting people physically too far apart to otherwise communicate is apparent and substantial. ICT in less-developed communities can build a foundation of skills so that children and young adults can be effectively future-proofed when further developing their knowledge and even up to job-seeking. This notion can be further evidenced in this video:

The programme mentioned here actually goes one step further and takes the technology to the communities that would have no means of developing it themselves. It creates confident, ICT literate members of society that can use their new found skills to significantly improve their lives, connect to other surrounding areas and the wider world.

As a teacher, I would hope that I can inspire pupils (and some fellow student teachers…) to see the power of ICT for connecting people from all walks of life and as a means of inclusion, not just across the school or the country, but the whole world.

I read this.

Reflection:

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Not the internet. Big difference. The internet was around for about 20 years before Tim came along. It’s important to note the difference, you can send emails, for example, without using the WWW. The WWW is accessed through a browser using URLs (web addresses) to specify where you want to go.

Aspects that could be targeted to children’s learning include what problem Berners-Lee solved (multiple systems/programs unable to talk to each other), how he solved it (a unified standard system of connecting them) and the behind the scenes workings of the WWW (URLs, hypertext, HTML).

It’s interesting for children to learn how something they use all the time works especially if that thing is technology. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that children like technology. It’s fun. The ability to create their something within technology is a revelation. It’s as simple as seeing a painting and then creating their own. Just swap ‘painting’ with ‘webpage’. It takes a different set of skills but applies the same understanding and I’m excited to teach it.

Because of my job in software testing, I have a reasonable understanding of the inner workings of the WWW but I can’t code HTML (the code web pages are written in). What is interesting to me though is that children can apparently learn, understand and use HTML from as early as KS1. I’ve yet to see that in school myself and I certainly never learned that in primary school. But using basic functions of HTML, headings, bold, italic, sizes and images are a great basis for more complex features as well as providing foundations for coding principles. There are tools available such as Mozilla’s Thimble where you can see immediately what your HTML code is doing and if it works or not allowing you to debug. This is perfect to learn from even if you’re an 8 year old.

All this is relevant to many aspects of the National Curriculum for KS1 and 2 including understanding and applying the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, analysing problems and using new or unfamiliar technologies to analytically solve problems. As a teacher of ICT, I will remember that even the most seemingly complicated systems can be broken down to simple, teachable chunks with effective learning tools and taught in a fun, creative, interesting way.