In this blog entry I shall be discussing the visit to Rutherford House School and the feedback gathered for Sian and I from the class teacher who was the school’s English Coordinator.
In preparation for this meeting, Sian and I worked first on creating the basics of the Google Classroom, like naming it and adding an appropriate photo header. Google Classroom allows for limit customisation so changing the colour scheme and more importantly adding folders for ease of navigation of the classroom. To add these folders on Google Classroom, they are called topics and means children/parents can find which week’s work instead of scrolling through all the posts. A parent’s area was included to inform to parents/carers how they can support their children through the phonics work at home. We then added the basic lesson resources from the plan we created to show to the school what Google Classroom would look like when posts/homework/this week’s work are shown.
At the school we went through each week and explained what each week included and how/why we came up with each idea. The teacher asked questions throughout to fully understand our thinking and see how it could work in practice. She seemed intrigued how homework tasks could be set with a due date and how she could then mark the work online, therefore saving paperwork being carried home. The advantage of having all the resources online would be very beneficial to her class as the number of worksheets that were printed out every week were very high and costly to the school. Social constructivism was a focus for her classroom so encouraging the children to work collaboratively on homework tasks and sharing work would be something the teacher said she would be striving for. The teacher stated how for some families one parent is working, so keeping in touch with work online was a great tool to keep both parents in the loop.
Overall she liked how our Google Classroom worked and how VLE’s in general could be used in the classroom. More colour, images and videos could be added to make it more child-friendly when reading which Sian and I both agreed would be beneficial. Another suggested improvement is the explanation of each of the tasks as children are learning to read and need to have the video to support them in fully understanding the task. Ideally, parents/carers are going to be there to support their children with using such a resource and a clear explanation like a video would benefit them too. Finally, the need to add a resource to explain correct pronunciation of all GPCs would be very beneficial to parents/carers as well as the children so the learning of these GPCs are consistent at school and home. Personally, I know from my younger sibling how consistency is vital for good progress. My family are constantly asking me how phonemes are said correctly!